Children’s acquisition and uses of what about and how about constructions: A corpus-based perspective

Children’s acquisition and uses of what about and how about constructions: A corpus-based perspective

This paper investigates the acquisition and usage patterns of the what about and how about constructions by young English-speaking children in North America, making use of corpus data from CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) subcorpora. In previous literature, irregular wh-questions including the two under investigation have not received much attention compared to regular wh-questions and empirical studies on irregular wh-question constructions in general and children's acquisition of them have not been much conducted. In addition, previous literature on the two irregular wh-question constructions has mainly discussed their similarities. The findings of this corpus-based study, however, show that children acquire and use the two constructions in rather different ways in early childhood, and in doing so, their parents' input plays an important role, displaying similar behavior and tendencies in several respects. Nonetheless, a detailed analysis of the children's and their parents' what about and how about construction examples based on their dependent categories reveals that young children's uses of the two constructions exhibit some idiosyncratic linguistic features and tendencies, which are not observed in parents' data and general English. The observations made in this paper suggest that it is worth examining children's acquisition and usage patterns of the two constructions, with particular focus on preferred subtypes and illocutionary functions for each dependent category.