Coining complex compounds in English: Affixes and word order in acquisition (original) (raw)

Novel English compound nouns of the type clock-maker require knowledge of the appropriate affixes and their placement as well as of modifier-head word order. Children aged 3;0 to 7;0, asked to coin agentive and instrumental compounds, appear to go through three stages in learning how to produce them: ( 1) they combine bare verbs with head nouns denoting the pertinent category, as in a wash-man, an open-machine; (2) they construct ungrammatical compounds from verb phrases with a verb and noun combined, in that order, as in a kick-ball, a build-wall. When they add affixes like -er to such compounds, they add them to the head of these constructions, namely the verb bases in leftmost position, as in a puller-wagon, a builder-wall; and finally ( 3) they realize that the heads of compound nouns go in the rightmost slot, regardless of whether the head has a noun or verb base. This leads them to use the appropriate compound order, as in a water-drinker, a wagon-puller. These stages in production , we argue, are the outcome of reliance on certain acquisitional principles. These account bot/1 for mastery of affixes before word order, and for reliance on sentential V + 0 word order prior to mastery of compound, 0 + V, order in complex compounds.