Structure Building and the Acquisition of Dislocations in Child French

Publication Summary

Dislocations are very frequent in adult French across diale cts, and can affect not only subjects, but any sentence constituent. In the speech o f children, dislocations appear very early on, and they are frequent from the start (se e (3)-(5)). The rationale behind this investigation is that the pervasi ve nature of early dislocations must reflect a relative syntactic simplicity: at any one time in development, dislocations cannot outweigh in (syntactic) co mplexity the other constructions present in the child’s speech. On the basis of thi s assumption, I will show that dislocations in (early) child French are not deriv ed by movement to the specifier of a functional projection (as has recently bee n claimed by Rizzi (1997)). Rather, they are adjoined to a maximal projection, n the leftor the right-periphery of the sentence. The paper is organised as follows: after a presentation of th e data, I propose the existence of three stages in the development of dislocat ions before 2;6. Following a Structure Building approach to language acquisiti on, the development is shown to be directly linked to the amount of syntactic stru cture the child can implement at each stage. I than argue that dislocations are a djoined to a (top) maximal projection at all times; the absence of certain type s of dislocation is due to the non-projection of some of the structure.