Beyond the Two-Clause Sentence: Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Six Languages

Clause chains are a special type of complex sentence, found in hundreds of languages outside Western Europe, in which clauses are dependent but not embedded, and dozens of clauses can be combined into a single sentential unit. Unlike English complex sentences, clause chains’ distribution is partially predictable in that they can, most fundamentally, be linked to a particular semantic context: description of temporally sequential events or actions. This and the morphological simplicity of verb forms in clause chains may combine to accelerate their acquisition by children, relative to complex sentences in other languages. No previous cross-linguistic studies of the acquisition of complex sentences have investigated clause chaining. In this paper, we report insights from a survey of the acquisition of clause chaining in six languages of diverse stocks with child speech databases spanning 1;1 to 10 years. Overall, children acquiring clause chaining languages begin to produce 2-clause chains between around 1;11 and 2;6. An initial stage in which chains are limited to just two clauses in length is followed by a stage in which longer chains of 3–5 clauses are also produced. Children acquiring languages in which adults produce both same-subject and different-subject clause chains produce a similar mix from early on; for some languages, this involves morphological “switch-reference” marking that anticipates the identity of the subject of an upcoming clause. This survey broadens our understanding of the acquisition of complex sentences by adding new data on the acquisition timing, semantics, and reference continuity of early clause chains.