Reformulation Et Acquisition De La Complexité Linguistique: Perspective Interlangue ed. by Claire Martinot et al. (review)

The main argument underlying this research report is that language acquisition is essentially a linguistic activity. Children spontaneously use the principle of reformulation as they, first, simplify a complex and variable linguistic input and, subsequently, produce an output that has varying degrees of complexity. The authors focus on paraphrasing because it mirrors this input-output negotiation and because the acquisition of paraphrases can provide insights about different stages of acquisition. Four teams of researchers analyzed data from four languages: French (Martinot), Italian (Gerolimich; Castellani), Croatian (Bošniak Botica; Kuvač Krajlević; Vujnović Malivuk), and Polish (Paprocka-Piotrowska; Karpińska-Szaj; Wojciechowska). Each team followed the same methodology: 60 children (in groups of 20 aged 6, 8, and 10 years) listened to a story, approximately 400 words in length, about a visit to an enchanted forest; each child retold the story immediately after hearing it; the children's accounts of four of the 14 séquences that make up the source text were selected for analysis. Among the main components of the analytical framework, which is quite complicated, are identifying nine reformulation mechanisms, which include seven categories of paraphrases, and analyzing the treatment of verbs that have different degrees of semantic complexity (for example, chuchoter and découvrir are less complex than guetter and apercevoir). Results suggest that there are stages in the mastery of paraphrasing. For example, in all four languages the number of syntactic paraphrases increases with age (source: elle tenait par la main une petite fille > output: elle tenait la main d'une petite fille) as does the number of semantic paraphrases (ils firent quelques pas > ils s'approchaient un peu; ils furent éblouis par la lumière > ils voient une mer éblouissante). Similarly, only older children reformulate more complex verbs (fabriquer, guetter) while children of all three age groups can reformulate less complex verbs (écrire, découvrir). This pattern is consistent across the four languages. Overall, however, this book is very much a work in progress. The authors report frequency counts and bar graphs to show trends in their data. This descriptive approach to quantification needs to give way to more advanced statistical models that test specific claims about the different types of paraphrases and about age-group differences. In addition, greater attention to the formal syntactic and semantic properties of paraphrases should lead to a clearer and more streamlined analytical framework. This would also help elucidate claims such as the one that there is an order of increasing complexity among analytical, formal, and synthetic categories of paraphrases. On a more positive note, the researchers have created a rich database that can be used in follow-up studies that address related issues such as gender differences and the nature of individual speaker differences. Of special interest are the detailed and well-written discussions about the challenges that the authors faced as they classified paraphrases in the four languages. More generally, this research makes a strong contribution to our knowledge of paraphrases, which are discussed only infrequently in language acquisition studies and in the linguistics literature in general.