Complex sentences: acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantic relations they encode.

The acquisition of connective forms and the meaning relations between connected clauses in the development of complex sentences is described for four children from two to three years of age. The major results of the study include the developmental interactions between syntactic connectives and meaning relations, and between these interactions and the discourse environments in which they occurred. The first syntactic connective the children learned, and, was the most general: semantically, and was used to encode conjunction with all of the different conjunction meaning relations in the order Additive < Temporal < Causal < Adversative. Other connectives were semantically more specific, and were learned subsequently with different syntactic structures in the order Conjunction < Complementation < Relativization. These results are discussed in terms of FORM, relative linguistic complexity; CONTENT, the intersection of form with conceptual and semantic factors affecting acquisition; and USE, discourse cohesion. Children begin to combine simple sentences to form complex sentences in the period from 2 to 3 years of age, and development of complex sentences involves learning aspects of form (syntactic connectives and syntactic structures); content (semantic relations between propositions); and use (discourse cohesion). The focus of the study reported here was on the acquisition of connective forms in complex sentences that theoretically combine the structures that underlie two simple sentences.2 Previous studies of the development of complex sentences have dealt most often with the forms of complex sentences (e.g., Limber, 1973; Menyuk, 1969). Few studies (e.g., Clancy, Jacobsen, & Silva, 1976; Clark, 1970) have dealt with the intersection of linguistic form with semantic content, and none has considered the intersection of linguistic form with content and use in discourse. Further, most studies have described the language of children older than 3 years of age, who already have considerable knowledge of complex sentences (e.g., Bates, 1976; Clark, 1970, 1973; Ferreiro & Sinclair, 1971; and Lust, 1976). The present study is concerned with the developmental interactions between connective forms and meaning relations and between these form-content interactions and the discourse environments in which they occurred. 1 This study was supported by Research Grant HD 03828 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development; Fellowship F1-MH-30,001 from the National Institute of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service; and Research Grant Soc 74–28126 from the National Science Foundation to Lois Bloom. The study was published originally in Journal of Child Language, 7, 235-261.; reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three, New York: Cambridge University, pp. 261-288; and reformatted for this digital version with slight changes in organization and minor text editing. 2 Because the focus of this paper was on the acquisition of syntactic connectives and the meaning relations they encode, complex sentences without connectives (e.g., “That’s the bed Mommy bought me”) and complementation (e.g., “Watch me draw a circle”) were not included in this study but were examined in two separate studies of complementation. In addition, because the connective to has special status by virtue of its relation to verb stems in their nonfinite forms (Jespersen, 1961, vol. 5), to complements were also examined in a separate study.