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

本研究旨在探讨句法因素对幼儿英语状语从句习得的影响。虽然许多研究都探讨了语义因素的作用，但对句法因素的研究却很少。我将对4-5岁的单语英语儿童（8-10岁）进行理解任务，研究状语从句之间的三种句法差异的影响。这些句法差异在英语习得中都没有被研究过，其中两个在任何语言中都没有被研究过。由于这些句法上的区别之一从未被正式分析过，我将对此进行分析（这可能对状语从句的类型学有影响）。我还将利用我的研究结果来阐明，英语中状语从句的历时变化是否可能是由儿童推动的。为了做到这一点，我将比较我研究中孩子们觉得最难的状语从句的类型和状语从句在英语中经历的变化（使用语料库，如约克-多伦多-赫尔辛基古英语散文解析语料库（Taylor etal））。2003)和宾夕法尼亚大学历史英语分析语料库（Kroch 2020）)。这个项目将包括收集原始数据，这将提高我们对状语从句习得的理解，以及我们对语法对后期现象习得的影响的认识。

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.