Der Erwerb (nicht)restriktiver Relativsätze im Deutschen

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Petra Schulz
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2011 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 202630811

The objective of the project ERW is to characterize the acquisition of relative clauses in German by investigating core properties of form and function. Acquisition research has to date focused on syntactic properties and, regarding the acquisition of German, on language production. In a series of comprehension and production experiments ERW studies the factors verb order (verb-second, V2 vs. verb-final, VF) and function (restrictive vs. appositive) and their interaction.The results of two production experiments in the first phase indicate that children between the ages of 3 and 5 - contrary to some assumptions in the literature - prefer the verb-final verb order in relative clauses, while verb-second relative clauses are rarely produced. The age at which children acquire the restrictions for integrated V2-formats (iV2) in relative clauses has not yet been determined. The data of a comprehension experiment provides novel evidence that language learners between the ages of 4 and 6, like the adults tested, exhibit a strong preference for the restrictive interpretation of relative clauses. A restrictive reading seems to be favored independent of the prosodic marking as restrictive or appositive. However, this result leaves open whether children's preference for restrictive readings represents a general interpretation strategy holding across different discourse and sentential contexts.Regarding functional properties, in the second phase ERW will address the following questions: Is the restrictive function of relative clauses acquired before the appositive function in general? At what age are children able to use unambiguous markers of appositivity such as discourse particles? Which semantic representation do language learners assign to appositive relative clauses (propositional or predicational) and which semantic status do they assign to the relative pronoun? Regarding the formal properties, in phase 2 ERW will investigate children's acquisition stages on their way to mastering the representation of iV2- and VF-relative clause structures and the structural assumptions underlying children's intermediate grammars. In addition, it will be examined at what age children acquire the specific restrictions on iV2-relative clauses with regard to head noun, matrix predicate, and the relative clause position within the matrix clause.Addressing the interaction of form and function, in phase 2 ERW will examine which function language learners assign to iV2- and VF-relative clauses, respectively, and whether children show a default interpretation independent of the verb order. In that case the question arises at what age iV2 and VF-relative clauses are distinguished according to their functional range.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 1783: Relative Clauses