Usage and acquisition patterns of the how come- and why-constructions by young English-speaking children.

This paper explores young English-speaking children’s usage and acquisition patterns of the how come- and why-constructions on the basis of authentic data from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) subcorpora. In doing so, it particularly focuses on whether young children show the same or similar acquisition processes of the two constructions which have similar meanings and if not, in what aspects they display different behavior, and what implications they have in children’s acquisition of wh-question constructions in general. A detailed analysis of the data shows that 1) children start to use and acquire the how come-construction later than the why-construction in general; 2) although they use and acquire the two constructions in a similar way to some extent, their usage and acquisition patterns differ rather significantly, regarding the dependent category/construction types, the illocutionary function distributions/preferences; 3) children’s difficulty in employing SAI in the why-construction is demonstrated in a large number of underdeveloped/erroneous instances with a finite sentence dependent at early acquisition stages and frequent occurrences of the small clause dependent in spite of the lack of parents’ input; 4) children use and acquire the why-construction earlier in the positive contexts than in the negative contexts; 5) parents’ input does not play a sole determining role in accounting for children’s usage and acquisition patterns of the two constructions. The findings of this paper thus make a significant contribution to the body of irregular wh-questions including the how come-construction and typical wh-questions such as the why-construction at the same time, inviting further subsequent empirical studies on the related constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]