Usage-based approaches have become increasingly important in research on language
acquisition and recently also in bilingual first language acquisition. Lexically specific patterns, such
as What’s this? and frame-and-slot patterns, such as [I want X] play an important role in language
acquisition scenarios. The ubiquity of such conventionalized chunks and frame-and-slot patterns
supports the idea that children construct their early utterances out of concrete pieces they have heard
and stored before. To investigate the emergence of patterns in children’s speech the traceback method
has been developed, which accounts for the composition of utterances by relying on previously
acquired material. Recently, the traceback method has also been applied to code-mixed utterances in
bilingual children testing the assumption that bilingual utterances are structured around a frameand-
slot pattern in which the open slot is filled by (a) word(s) from the other language, e.g., [where is
X] as in where is das feuer ‘where is the fire’. In this paper we want to present how the empirical use of
the traceback method, and the general adoption of a usage-based theoretical perspective, can shed
new lights on the study of bilingual phenomena, such as code-mixing.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:87244 |
| Date | 28 September 2023 |
| Creators | Endesfelder Quick, Antje, Backus, Ad |
| Publisher | MDPI |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 135, 10.3390/languages7020135 |
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