Acquisition of reflexive and reflexively used pronouns in Croatian and Austrian German: A corpus-based study

Abstract

Acquisition of pronouns in L1 has often been used as a testing ground for postulates of linguistic theories. The present study approaches the subject differently, by contrastively studying the early acquisition of a specific set of pronouns in Croatian and Austrian German. The data were extracted from three children’s corpora of spontaneous language production for each language. The emergence and early production of specialised reflexive pronouns and reflexively used personal pronouns in the two languages were examined and compared with the emergence of non-reflexively used personal pronouns. The results have shown that reflexive and reflexively used pronouns emerge later and initially at a slower pace in child production in Austrian German than in Croatian. The same is true for the emergence of non-reflexively used personal pronouns in the oblique cases. No clear temporal precedence in child production was found for either reflexive/reflexively used or non-reflexively used personal pronouns. The differences found in the acquisition timeline between the two languages are accounted for by the differences between the two languages in terms of nature of the pronominals used as reflexive markers, distribution of reflexive and reflexively used pronouns in the CDS, and morphological richness.