Precursors of Coordinate Constructions: Polish-Bulgarian Parallels

The purpose of this paper is to compare the earliest stages in the ontogeny of coordinate constructions - both phrasal and sentential - in the development of children acquiring two genetically and structurally related languages, Polish and Bulgarian. The data regarding Polish are excerpted from the speech production of 3 of the children belonging to Szuman's corpus included in CHILDES; the Bulgarian data come from 3 Bulgarian subjects whose language development was traced by the author of this paper. The results show that for both languages, the earliest and most primitive forms of coordination consist of sequences containing two or more NPs with existential semantics. The further acquisition of coordinate constructions displays two lines of development. The first line concerns phrasal coordinate constructions including subject, object and adverbial coordinate phrases, whereas the second line affects the development of sentential coordination. The two developmental lines take their course more or less simultaneously, that is, children produce phrasal coordinate constructions on one hand and two types of sentential coordination on the other: such that can be transformed into phrasal coordinate structures by means of the operation of deletion, and such that cannot, so-called irreducible coordinate sentences. Language specificity did not prove to play any important role in the development of coordination in the speech of the Polish and the Bulgarian children. The analyses and discussions emphasize the interplay between children's cognitive, communicative and linguistic development.