Acquisition of Adversative Discourse Relations - but in German, Bulgarian and English L1-Acquisition

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Dagmar Bittner
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: from 2012 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 213874862

The aim of this crosslinguistic study is to develop a model of the acquisition of adversative discourse relations by focusing on the prototypical adversative marker but. Semantic, syntactic and discourse-pragmatic features of but in child grammar will be included in the model.Previous studies on the acquisition of but either focused on the discourse or the sentence level. Therefore, semantic properties of but have only been investigated in interaction with discourse-pragmatic or syntactic acquisition factors, but not both. This has led to diverging assumptions about the acquisition path of adversative markers (like but) and the way it is affected by different types of linguistic knowledge. The project investigates the interaction of these types of linguistic knowledge as well as the developmental stages in the acquisition of different levels of linguistic knowledge. Backgrounds to our investigations are hypotheses about cumulative cognitive complexity in the acquisition of connectives (Spooren & Sanders 2008) and place of syntactic conjunction (Lebeaux 2000). In order to account for language specific differences in the acquisition process, three languages showing tyologically different specification of the adversative domain (English, German, Bulgarian) will be investigated. In the requested second research period, we plan to investigate the language specific discrimination of the additive-adversative spectrum and the later stages of acquisition.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: United Kingdom, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Theodoros Marinis; Professor Dr. Thomas William Roeper