From literal to figurative: Constructional Patterns of see and sehen in Early Bilingual Development

Aim We investigate the early use of figurativity in two German-English bilingual children aged 2-4. Adopting a usage-based approach, we examine how differences in the children’s German and English input situation are related to their production of the verbs see and sehen. We are interested in whether literal and figurative uses of the same verb are tied to different grammatical constructions in the input and the output. Method, Data and Analysis We investigate data from two children from the MPI-EVA-Leipzig Corpus, Fion and Silvie. All instances of the verb lemmas were retrieved and subsequently coded for figurativity and syntactic pattern. Findings The verbs see and sehen are frequently used figuratively. Parents often use these verbs to establish shared attention. The children primarily produce literal cases, but their emerging figurative uses occur in patterns consistent with the input. Our findings show an association between figurativity and construction: literal uses favour a verb + NP pattern, whereas figurative uses disprefer this pattern. Language-specific differences in the relative frequency of figurative use in the children’s input are reflected in their language-specific production. Originality Figurative language acquisition has largely focused on comprehension or experimental elicitation. Our study instead investigates the spontaneous production of figurative language longitudinally in two bilingual children and directly relates their production to the language-specific input they receive. By combining an analysis of input-output relations with an investigation of constructional patterns, the study examines how figurative meanings, and their grammatical realizations develop in bilingual language acquisition. Significance Our study contributes to understanding early acquisition of metaphorical language. It shows that figurative uses emerge first in contexts where a literal meaning is also applicable and that figurative understanding develops gradually in both languages. Our findings support the view that bilingual development is sensitive to the distributional properties of the input. Keywords: language acquisition, bilingual, figurativity, metaphor, usage-based, corpus linguistics, construction grammar