Developmental profile: Fuad

Fuad’s narratives are characterised by his aim to convey complex meanings that go well beyond simple picture descriptions. The increasing diversity of lexical elements used to describe the story characters’ emotions and goals contrasts with the lack of the structural means necessary to express complex temporal and spatial relations. Only toward the end of the recording time covered in the present study do these structural means become available. Text length increases from about 30 propositions at the beginning of the study to about 80 at the end of the study.

Summarising (cf. Table 4.16), Fuad shows a liberal use of main clause word orders as of file 1 including DGS-like sentential patterns. Fuad expands the VP format to accommodate constructions with complex verbs, but fails to consistently apply verb raising with main verbs. The overgeneralisation of the preposition auf (‘on’) to mark the relation between the verb and its complements suggests that he pools his resources to fill some of the remaining gaps concerning the mor- phosyntactic means necessary to express grammatical relations.

Table 4.16: Fuad’s German profile.

Table 4.16: continued