Madeleine

Théophile

Léonard

Au cours de leur développement langagier, les enfants construisent des systèmes temporaires transitoires avec leur cohérence propre. Ce phénomène peut être analysé à tous les niveaux linguistiques mais l'assemblage progressif des constructions verbales présente un intérêt particulier pour théoriser le processus d'acquisition.

Dans cette étude, les constructions verbales de trois enfants âgés de 1;6 à 3;6 sont analysées en interaction naturelle. Six verbes différents sont analysés en fonction du nombre d'arguments que présentent leurs constructions.

In the course of their development, children make their way along successive transitory systems with their own internal coherence. This phenomenon can be observed at all levels of linguistic analysis but the gradual assembling of verbal constructions in language development is of particular interest for linguistic theory.

In this study, the development of verb constructions in young French speaking children is analyzed by focusing on spontaneous language data from three children (Leonard, Madeleine, Théophile) age 1;06 up to 3;06. The focus of the work is on six specific verbs which are quite frequent in young child speech (all children produced these verbs) and which clearly present different patterns of verbal constructions.

Frequent

Less frequent

VERB FRAME 1

attendre (to wait)

tenir (to hold)

VERB FRAME 2

mettre (to put)

enlever (to take off)

VERB FRAME 3

dire (to tell/say)

donner (to give)