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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 1386

Part of Session 188: Relating the Productions of Multilingual Children and Adolescents in their Languages (Other abstracts in this session)

Receptive and productive bilingualism: The employent of subordinating morphemes by Turkish-German bilingual children

Authors: Herkenrath, Annette
Submitted by: Herkenrath, Annette (Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany)

This paper studies the employment subordinative devices involved in the realisation of complement clauses, some of whose communicative functions have been described in connection with a discussion concerning ‘matrix constructions’ (e.g. Rehbein 2007). The complementisers under investigation are deictic elements such as dass ‘that’ in German and nominalising morphological devices such as the factive nominalisers –DIK and –(y)AcAK and the actional nominaliser –mA in Turkish, all of which are combined with further suffixes (marking phoric relationships, deictic reference, and case relations).

The data, a corpus of over 200,000 transcribed utterances, or over 750,000 words, are longitudinally elicited narratives and other conversations involving Turkish-German bilingual children and their families. The informants live in a big city and attend monolingual German schools with at most little mother tongue support through the school system.

In a quantitative perspective, searches of the corpus have shown that the employment of the said complementisers in Turkish tends to stagnate after school start, while their use continues to develop in German. In some children, the use of individual devices, such as –DIK, has been shown to become restricted to a receptive one, with adult family members’ frequency of use remaining similar to the monolingual situation in Turkey (Herkenrath 2012).

The present study aims at comparing several children from the corpus that developmentally differ in their employment of the said constructions and it takes a closer qualitative look at the communicative contexts in which they can be shown to either receptively understand or productively use them.

References:

Herkenrath, Annette (2012). Receptive multilingualism in an immigrant constellation: examples from Turkish-German child language. In: ten Thije, Jan D.; Rehbein, Jochen & Verschik, Anna (eds.) Receptive Multilingualism. Special issue of the International Journal of Bilingualism.

Rehbein, Jochen (2007). Matrix constructions. In: Rehbein, Jochen; Hohenstein, Christiane  & Pietsch, Lukas  (eds.) Connectivity in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins (Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism 5), 419-447.