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

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

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

Simultaneous Bilingual Acquisition of Plural Forms in German and Croatian

Der vorliegende Beitrag befasst sich mit dem Pluralerwerb von simultan-bilingualen Kindern, die in Wien mit Deutsch und Kroatisch aufwachsen und im Alter von 3 und 4 Jahren an je vier Erhebungszeitpunkten (im Abstand von 3 – 12 – 3 – 12 Monaten) zuhause und im Kindergarten auf ihre Pluralentwicklung mittels eines Mixed-Methods-Ansatzes untersucht wurden. Dabei kamen formale Pluraltests, Spontansprachenaufnahmen sowie eine semi-spontane Bildgeschichte zum Einsatz. Die Ergebnisse werden mit monolingualen und sukzessiv-bilingualen Daten in Relation gesetzt. Die Daten deuten darauf hin, dass eine gegenseitige Beeinflussung der beiden Sprachen bei der Pluralproduktion stattfindet.This paper deals with the acquisition of plural forms in German and Croatian by simultaneously bilingual children growing up in Vienna. At the age of 3 and 4, the children were tested at home and in their kindergarten on four different occasions (3, 12, 3 and 12 months apart) in order to examine their development of plural forms using a mixed-method approach, i.e. formal plural tests, spontaneous speech recordings, and a semi-spontaneous picture story. The results are related to monolingual and successive-bilingual data. The data gained from the experiment suggests that there is a mutual influence between the two languages in the production of plural forms