The role of illocutionary operators in the emerging grammars of bilingual children

Abstract

In this paper, we bring together recent discussions about the role of function words in emerging monolingual grammars with the discussion about role of these words in mixed utterances in emerging bilingual grammars.

Recently several linguists have addressed the question of determining the organizing principles of early syntax in developing grammars of monolingual children. Van Kampen (this volume), Tracy (2002), among others, note that in early two-word utterances certain “function” words occur very frequently and play a special role: they appear as illocutionary operators and seem to have a bootstrapping function with respect to the development of syntactic structure. In this article, we consider spontaneous production data from three bilingual Dutch/French children and seek to answer the question whether the role of “function” words is the same in these bilingual developing grammars as in monolingual grammars. We show that this indeed appears to be the case. We then examine the claim by Deuchar and Quay (2000) that “function words” are mixed more readily than other words. We argue that our data do not present convincing arguments in favor of such a hypothesis.