A system approach to the emergence of grammaticalization : the case of two French-acquiring children

This paper argues that in order to evaluate the grammaticalness of children's language at the early times of acquisition, as well as to understand how progress is accomplished, we need to endorse a system approach in which the evolution of several characteristics of the child's language production are considered together. Indeed, aspects like free and bound morphology, word classes and syntactic rules governing word combination, are linked in the system of the language, and this inner relationships should be an essential criterion for evaluating acquisition. Accordingly, it is when different strands show coherently converging characteristics that the grammaticality of single features finds its intrinsic justification.However, the emergence of grammaticalization of the child's language production has mostly been studied with a focus on one or another of its aspects.This paper addresses this issue by performing fine-grained analyses of the longitudinal data of two French-acquiring children observed and videorecorded at fortnight intervals from the time children produced only single-word utterances to the time combinations became the dominant way of expression. The study focuses on the emergence of free morphology in French and will show that the grammatical significance of fillers - forms that are phonologically under-determined in relation to target adult words - can be determined by analyzing the pattern of their occurrence relatively to the concomitant appreciation of bound morphology (verbal morphology for French). Moreover, developments in these features are also related to development in word combination. Results show that fillers appear in children's production with first multiword utterances. However, it is only when combinatorial speech is well-established that the grammatical functions of determiner, pronoun and auxiliairy start to emerge, word categories begin to show formal differences, and some verbs present contrastive bound verbal morphology. The discussion will argue that developmental relations between these different aspects of language seem consistent with a constructivist model of the « spiral » type, according to which a step taken in one domain promotes a new step in another related domain, the latter favouring in turn further progress in the former