The acquisition of adverbial clauses by children acquiring English: the effect of syntax

The goal of this project is to investigate the effect of syntactic factors on children's acquisition of adverbial clauses in
English. Whereas many studies have explored the role of semantic factors, syntactic factors have been much less
explored. I will conduct comprehension tasks with monolingual English children in years 4-5 (ages 8-10) to investigate
the effect of three syntactic distinctions between adverbial clauses. None of these syntactic distinctions have been
investigated in relation to acquisition in English and two have not been investigated in any language. Since one of these
syntactic distinctions has never been formally analysed, I will provide an analysis for it (which may have implications for
the typology of adverbial clauses). I will also use my results to shed light on whether the diachronic changes that
adverbial clauses have undergone in English could have plausibly been driven by children. To do this, I will compare the
types of adverbial clauses that the children in my study find most difficult to the changes adverbial clauses have
undergone in English (using corpora, such as the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (Taylor et
al. 2003) and the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (Kroch 2020)). This project will involve the collection of
original data which will improve our understanding of the acquisition of adverbial clauses and our knowledge of the effect
of syntax on the acquisition of late phenomena generally.