The acquisition of adverbial clauses by children acquiring English: the effect of syntax

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The goal of this project is to investigate the effect of syntactic factors on children's acquisition of adverbial clauses inEnglish. Whereas many studies have explored the role of semantic factors, syntactic factors have been much lessexplored. I will conduct comprehension tasks with monolingual English children in years 4-5 (ages 8-10) to investigatethe effect of three syntactic distinctions between adverbial clauses. None of these syntactic distinctions have beeninvestigated in relation to acquisition in English and two have not been investigated in any language. Since one of thesesyntactic distinctions has never been formally analysed, I will provide an analysis for it (which may have implications forthe typology of adverbial clauses). I will also use my results to shed light on whether the diachronic changes thatadverbial clauses have undergone in English could have plausibly been driven by children. To do this, I will compare thetypes of adverbial clauses that the children in my study find most difficult to the changes adverbial clauses haveundergone in English (using corpora, such as the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor etal. 2003) and the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (Kroch 2020)). This project will involve the collection oforiginal data which will improve our understanding of the acquisition of adverbial clauses and our knowledge of the effectof syntax on the acquisition of late phenomena generally.