Structural and interactional aspects of adverbial sentences in English mother-child interactions: an analysis of two dense corpora

2021/01/22 by Laura de Ruiter, Laura E. DE RUITER, Heather C. P. Lemen +7
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · #Language Development and Disorders #Reading and Literacy Development #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0305000920000641

openalex publication_date 2021/01/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04

Abstract

We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the effects of frequency, cognitive complexity and pragmatics in explaining the course of acquisition of adverbial sentences. We also compare these usage patterns to stimuli used in a range of experimental studies and show how differences may account for some of the difficulties that children have shown in experiments. In addition, we report descriptive data on various aspects of adverbial sentences that have not yet been studied as a resource for future investigations.

Citations

• PRAGMATIC CONDITIONALS IN ENGLISH
• Iconicity of sequence: A corpus-based analysis of the positioning of temporal adverbial clauses in English
• A Coefficient of Agreement for Nominal Scales

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