The Acquisition of Complex Sentences [Paperback]

This book provides a comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences.This new and pathbreaking study provides the first comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences. Holger Diessel investigates spontaneous speech in English-speaking children aged between two and five, examining the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and non-finite relative clauses, and co-ordinate clauses. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the language, the complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the child's social-cognitive development.This new and pathbreaking study provides the first comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences. Holger Diessel investigates spontaneous speech in English-speaking children aged between two and five, examining the acquisition of infinitival and participial complement clauses, finite complement clauses, finite and non-finite relative clauses, and co-ordinate clauses. He argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the language, the complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the child's social-cognitive development.This comprehensive account of how children acquire complex sentences investigates spontaneous speech in English-speaking children between ages two and five. After examining the acquisition of numerous types of clauses, Holger Diessel argues that the acquisition process is determined by a variety of factors: the frequency of the various complex sentences in the language, the complexity of the emerging constructions, the communicative functions of complex sentences, and the child's social-cognitive development.1. Introduction; 2. A dynamic network model of grammatical ls(