Left- and Right-dislocations as Adjunctions in Early Child French

This paper outlines the initial stages in the acquisition of dislocations (as in (1)) by young francophones before the age of 2;6. Dislocations are shown to be derived by adjunction to IP or CP in the child language. A structure-building analysis of the data reveals that the ability of the child to implement CP is a prerequisite for certain types of dislocations. The implications of my results for the study of the adult language are twofold: (i) If no feature-checking is involved in the derivation of dislocations in child French, it is very likely that the same applies to adult French. (ii) The dialectal split observed among the children may be an indication that adult Belgian French requires an analysis of the left periphery different from that of other dialects.