Abstrakt
The verb 'to be' is highly prevalent, serving multiple grammatical functions and appearing early in children's language production. Previous research suggests that impaired production of the verb 'to be' in young children may reliably indicate disordered language development. Specifically, when learning English and other languages, children with developmental language disorder frequently omit both copula and auxiliary forms of 'to be' more frequently and for longer periods compared to their typically developing peers. However, identifying the specific positions where obligatory copula or auxiliary forms of 'to be' have been omitted poses challenges. In our study, we investigate the overall acquisition pattern of the verb být 'to be' in Czech children and explore the potential of using its spontaneous production as a measure of language development without relying on identifying omitted obligatory positions.
During the presentation, I will begin by providing basic concepts of corpus-based research in the field of language acquisition. Following that, I will introduce a newly compiled Czech corpus consisting of transcripts of spontaneous interactions between children and adults. Finally, I will approach the analysis of the verb být 'be' within this corpus, shedding light on its usage patterns in children as well as in their caregivers and its relation to the general language development.