Get out but don’t fall down: verb-particle constructions in child language

Much has been discussed about the challenges posed by Multiword Expressions (MWEs) given their idiosyncratic, flexible and heterogeneous nature. Nonetheless, children successfully learn to use them and eventually acquire a number of Multiword Expressions comparable to that of simplex words. In this paper we report a wide-coverage investigation of a particular type of MWE: verb-particle constructions (VPCs) in English and their usage in child-produced and child-directed sentences. Given their potentially higher complexity in relation to simplex verbs, we examine whether they appear less prominently in child-produced than in childdirected speech, and whether the VPCs that children produce are more conservative than adults, displaying proportionally reduced lexical repertoire of VPCs or of verbs in these combinations. The results obtained indicate that regardless of any additional complexity VPCs feature widely in children data following closely adult usage. Studies like these can inform the development of computational models for language acquisition.