Early Acquisition of Verb Grammar and Lexical Development: Evidence from Periphrastic Constructions in French and Austrian German

This paper takes a functionalist approach to the acquisition of verb morphology in French and Austrian German. The development of periphrastic constructions using auxiliaries and modal verbs (compound past, modal constructions and analytic future) was examined in two French and two Austrian children’s spontaneous speech samples from the onset of production until 3;0. Crosslinguistic comparisons showed both similarities and differences in the development of periphrastic constructions (e.g., compound past was the first structure to emerge in French but not in Austrian German, analytic future was the last in both languages), suggesting an interplay between general cognitive and language-specific factors. In the four children, developmental analyses showed precursors, such as bare infinitives and past participles and preverbal fillers, which denote a gradual and continuous acquisition process. They also showed temporal relations between grammaticization and lexical production of verbs, which is an argument for the ‘critical lexical mass’ hypothesis and for interdependencies between lexical and grammatical developments. These analyses support a constructivist and interactive view of language acquisition.