Chapter published in:
Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 91–118

Chapter 4
Early development of compounds in two French children’s corpora

| | University of Lausanne
This chapter deals with early development of compounds in French, which is known to be a poor-compounding language. It compares the development of strict compounds and loose compounds, i.e. multilexical units that are lexicalized sequences of words corresponding to syntactic phrases, in two longitudinal corpora of Swiss-French-speaking children between 1;6 and 3;0. Results indicate that loose compounds largely prevail in the French data. Among them, multilexical units having a preposition are differentiated in terms of development and display selective errors suggesting a role of morphosyntactic complexity. The data also reveal unexpected cues of early productivity of a (strict) compounding pattern specific to CDS and CS.
Keywords: French, strict compounds, loose compounds/multilexical units, errors, productivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.French compounding
  • 3.The data
  • 4.Method of analysis
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1. Emergence of compounding: overall picture
    • 5.2Strict compounds
    • 5.3Multilexical units
    • 5.4Errors
  • 6.Lexical typology
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.05kil
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