Early verb development in two french-speaking children

This paper deals with early verb development (e.g., person, tense) until the emergence of verb-paradigms in two French-speaking children. I will show the parallelism between the two children in the gradual building of paradigms, despite considerable differences in the rate of development. Individual differences on the other hand will bring me to reconsider the broad category of premorphological rote-learnt forms which already displays some patterning in one of the children's data

First verbs : On the way to mini-paradigms

This 18th issue of ZAS-Papers in Linguistics consists of papers on the development of verb acquisition in 9 languages from the very early stages up to the onset of paradigm construction. Each of the 10 papers deals with first-Ianguage developmental processes in one or two children studied via longitudinal data. The languages involved are French, Spanish, Russian, Croatian, Lithuanien, Finnish, English and German. For German two different varieties are examined, one from Berlin and one from Vienna. All papers are based on presentations at the workshop 'Early verbs: On the way to mini-paradigms' held at the ZAS (Berlin) on the 30./31. of September 2000. This workshop brought to a close the first phase of cooperation between two projects on language acquisition which has started in October 1999: a) the project on "Syntaktische Konsequenzen des Morphologieerwerbs" at the ZAS (Berlin) headed by Juergen Weissenborn and Ewald Lang, and financially supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and b) the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" coordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences

Filler + Infinitive and Pre- and Protomorphology Demarcation in a French Acquisition Corpus

This paper presents a case study on the acquisition of grammatical morphemes via fillers, i.e., underspecified place holders, with particular focus on early structures made up of a filler followed by an infinitive. The path leading from fillers to French semi-auxiliaries and subject clitics is analyzed within the framework of Natural Morphology and constructivism which assumes that grammatical modules are not innate but are constructed by children. The evolution of fillers in the corpus studied is described as a grammaticization process of form and meaning through successive linguistic dissociations. Emphasis is put on the functional polyvalence of fillers and on their relation to the main phases in the construction of gramma

Arbitraire ou motivation des structures linguistiques? Le tournant de 1980

En 1980, la linguistique générative, ou plus précisément le modèle dit «transformationnel», occupe aux États-Unis une position hégémonique depuis près de deux décennies. Mais cette année-là, davantage que le manuscrit technique «On Binding», que Noam Chomsky ne destinait pas à la publication, ou que la traduction anglaise du débat qui l’avait opposé à Piaget, c’est la parution de son livre Rules and Representations qui retient l’attention, comme en témoigne le débat organisé par la revue Beha..

First tentative conclusions on the early development of verb morphology

In these conclusions we can deal only with some of the tentative comparative results of the workshop papers on the early development of verb morphology. The main focus is on criteria of how the child detects morphology and how this emerging morphological competence develops in its earliest phases. In view of the purpose and tentative character of these conclusions, all references will be limited to the papers of the workshop and to earlier studies by workshop participants within the "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition". Much more will be given in the projected final publication

On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems

Inflectional classes are a property of the ideal inflecting-fusional language type. Thus strongly inflecting languages have the most complex vertical and horizontal stratification of hierarchical tree structures. Weakly inflecting languages which also approach the ideal isolating type or languages which also approach the agglutinating type have much shallower structures. Such properties follow from principles of Natural Morphology and from the distinction of the descendent hierarchy of macroclasses, classes, subclasses, subsubclasses etc. and homogeneous microclasses. The main languages of illustration are Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkis

Acquisition of verbs in Croatian, French and Austrian German - an outline of a comparative analysis

Research of child language acquisition, i. e. comparisons of acquisition in typologically different languages, play a significant role in shedding some light on universal linguistic features. The aim of our paper is to compare acquisition of verbal morphology in three languages belonging to different branches of IndoEuropean languages and to compare developing verbal systems in children as well as the order of emergence of verbal forms in each of them. Furthermore, the results on regularities occurring in all three languages have been discussed. The analysis of process of developing verbal system within each particular language is based on tense and mood. Provided error analysis gave us some further insights into the linguistically active role that child takes at certain stage of its linguistic development. The intention of this paper is to point to relevant aspects of developing linguistic system common to all three analysed languages, but at the same time drawing the attention to those language segments that need to be taken into consideration due to the limitations imposed by the language variations

Acquisition of verbs in Croatian, French and Austrian German - an outline of a comparative analysis

Research of child language acquisition, i. e. comparisons of acquisition in typologically different languages, play a significant role in shedding some light on universal linguistic features. The aim of our paper is to compare acquisition of verbal morphology in three languages belonging to different branches of IndoEuropean languages and to compare developing verbal systems in children as well as the order of emergence of verbal forms in each of them. Furthermore, the results on regularities occurring in all three languages have been discussed. The analysis of process of developing verbal system within each particular language is based on tense and mood. Provided error analysis gave us some further insights into the linguistically active role that child takes at certain stage of its linguistic development. The intention of this paper is to point to relevant aspects of developing linguistic system common to all three analysed languages, but at the same time drawing the attention to those language segments that need to be taken into consideration due to the limitations imposed by the language variations

On the Typology of Inflection Class Systems

Inflectional classes are a property of the ideal inflecting-fusional language type. Thus strongly inflecting languages have the most complex vertical and horizontal stratification of hierarchical tree structures. Weakly inflecting languages which also approach the ideal isolating type or languages which also approach the agglutinating type have much shallower structures. Such properties follow from principles of Natural Morphology and from the distinction of the descendent hierarchy of macroclasses, classes, subclasses, subsubclasses etc. and homogeneous microclasses. The main languages of illustration are Latin, Lithuanian, Russian, German, French, Finnish, Hungarian and Turkish