6 - Patterns of Formulaicity in Child Language

Summary

Introduction

In first language acquisition research, it has long been recognized that quite lengthy strings, which would correspond to several adult words, can be treated as a single unit by the young child (e.g., Bolinger 1975:100; Crystal 1997:244; Plunkett 1993:44). In this chapter and the next, an attempt will be made to reconcile a number of observations made over the last three decades or more about these strings, and to accommodate them within a model of the child's language use and linguistic development. Peters (1983) characterizes the child's encounter with spoken language as follows:

It is not a dictionary of morphemes that the child is exposed to, but rather an intermittent stream of speech sounds containing chunks, often longer than a single word, that recur with varying frequency. It is out of this stream of unknown meaning and structure that the child must attempt to capture some pieces in order to determine their meaning and to preserve them for future use.

(p. 5)

It is that process of ‘capturing pieces’ that lies at the heart of understanding the role of formulaic sequences in first language acquisition. That children do store and use complex strings before mastering their internal makeup is generally agreed. However, researchers have varied in their views about how significant they are. Brown (1973) acknowledges that strings like What's that in the very young child are not a product of a grammar, but, rather, “must be generated by some simpler mechanism either as fixed routines or as simple frames in which a set of words could rotate” (p. 181).