Author: Lee, Hanjung

Date: Mar 30 1999

Title: Discourse Competing with Syntax:  Prominence and "Misplaced"
   QUE in Child French

Email: hanjung@csli.stanford.edu

Institution: Stanford University

Abstract:

It has been observed that subordinate clauses introduced by the
complementizer que provide children acquiring French with a number of
difficulties. For example, as noted by Labelle (1993), French-speaking
children of 5 or 6 years old occasionally produce non-adult
subordinate clauses containing so-called "misplaced" que in which the
complementizer que follows a left-detached subject NP as in (a)
instead of preceding it as in (b).
 				   
	a.  J'attends mon p�re qu'il arrive.
        b.  J'attends que mon p�re (il) arrive.  
	    'I'm waiting for my father to come'. 

It is widely accepted in the literature on language acquisition within
transformational frameworks that children's errors in sentence
structure result from their imperfect mastery of functional categories
like IP or CP, and Case and Agreement system. However, syntactic
accounts fail to relate the appearance of "misplaced" que to the
nature of language input to which children are exposed and to the
independently existent features peculiar to colloquial spoken French
where word order and sentence structure are highly sensitive to the
pragmatic constraints imposed by discourse. Moreover, the structural
markedness of "misplaced" que constructions poses another problem for
such approaches relying solely on principles which govern a single
component of grammar: without recourse to unnatural assumptions about
structure it remains unexplained why it is the marked structure with
apparent CP recursion that emerges later in child language and is
eliminated from the child's ultimate grammar. This paper presents an
alternative OT-LFG account of "misplaced" que in French child
language. Based on analysis of children's spontaneous speech, I
propose that children's use of "misplaced" que reflects a strategy for
foregrounding a discourse referent. It arises from the interaction
between the two syntactic constraints and the two discourse-pragmatic
constraints. Under this view the "misplaced" que construction is a
necessary violation of the syntactic constraints that govern the
canonical phrase structure configuration of a clause, incurred to
satisfy the discourse-pragmatic constraints that favor the alignment
of a structurally prominent position with a discourse prominent
element. The disappearance of "misplaced" que is also explained by
reranking the constraints. This marked structure which is absent in
adult language is avoided in the child's ultimate grammar too, since
the syntactic constraints end up ranked higher than the
discourse-pragmatic constraints.




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