Left and right dislocations in French and English: A case study.

This paper investigates the way a French-English bilingual child encodes old and new information in language-specific ways in her two languages. French relies heavily on the use of dislocations whereas their use in discourse is considerably more limited in English (Notley, Van der Linden, & Hulk, 2007). To date, little is known about whether bilingual children are sensitive to the subtle discourse-pragmatic constraints that regulate the distribution of word order in French and English, and, more specifically, the extent to which the regular use of two languages may lead to systematic cross-linguistic influence from French to English in the use of dislocations. In this study, I examine the longitudinal corpus of a French-English bilingual child (2;4.0-2;8.24) in conversation with her carers. The data demonstrates cross-linguistic influence from French to English from the early stages of word combination to later development. (1) yeah that croissant, I eat 0. (Anne 2;4) (2) 0 need weewee, that one. (Anne 2;8.27) The results also provide evidence on the relationship between the input and the children’s productions in French with a clear influence in the proportion of left and right dislocations despite slight differences in their choices of pragmatic functions of dislocations and on the nature of the dislocated elements.This paper reports that crosslinguistic influence occur for topichood at the level of a whole construction rather than only as it has been demonstrated so far at the level of individual referential expressions (e.g. pronouns for topic shift) (Serratrice et al 2011).