Denominal verbs and creativity in child Romanian (original) (raw)
Related papers
Analytical and synthetic verb constructions in Russian and English child language
Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, 2006
This paper deals with the differences in the early acquisition of verb constructions by two L1 Russian-speaking and two L1 English-speaking children and compares the emergence of finite and non-finite verb forms in the first six months of early verb production. As an analysis of the early verb forms will show, large language-specific differences exist with regard to the amount of finite vs. non-finite verb forms in the children's early productions although children acquiring either language display a preference for infinitival and/or other non-finite verb forms for a short period of time. Given the notable differences between Russian and English with regard to the richness of the inflectional system and the predominantly synthetic versus the predominantly analytical nature of Russian versus English verb constructions, the paper aims to show to what extent language-specific properties including the frequency of linguistic elements may contribute to the acquisition of different verbal constructions.
Proceedings of the International Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, 2008
Verbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events, which are temporally ephemeral, and the beginning and the end of the action referred to by the verb are not clearly specified. Second, a verb takes nouns as arguments, and the meaning of a verb is determined as the relation between the arguments. To infer the meaning of a verb, children need to attend to the relation between the objects in the event rather than the objects themselves. In so doing, children make use of a variety of cues such as argument structure, meta-knowledge of the lexicon, and extra-linguistic contextual cues. In this paper, I present two lines of my recent research concerning young children's novel verb lear...
This paper constitutes an attempt to shed some light on the formation of innovative verbs by Polish and English-speaking children. It argues that verbal innovation can be accounted for on the grounds of Natural Morphology, proposing that children opt for cognitively simple, i.e. unmarked derivational patterns. Consequently, they come up with iconic coinages that are either metaphorical (in the sense of Natural Morphology), or diagrammatic and, at the same time, morphotactically and semantically transparent. As might be easily predicted, iconicity manifests itself in the two languages in question through the use of different derivational mechanisms stemming from typological divergences between English and Polish.
Comparing different models of the development of the English verb category
Linguistics, 1998
In this study data from the first six months of 12 children's multiword speech were used to test the validity of Valians (1991) syntactic performance-limitation account and Tomasello's (1992) verb-island account of early multiword speech with particular reference to the development of the English verb category. The results provide evidence for appropriate use of verb morphology, auxiliary verb structures, pronoun case marking, and SVO word order from quite early in development. However, they also demonstrate a great deal of lexical specificity in the children's use of these systems, evidenced by a lack of overlap in the verbs to which different morphological markers were applied, a lack of overlap in the verbs with which different auxiliary verbs were used, a disproportionate use of the first person singular nominative pronoun I, and a lack of overlap in the lexical items that served as the subjects and direct objects of transitive verbs. These findings raise problems for both a syntactic performance-limitation account and a strong verb-island account of the data and suggest the need to develop a more general lexicalist account of early multiword speech that explains why some words come to function as "islands" of organization in the child's grammar and others do not. There has been a growing awareness in recent years of the shortcomings of models of grammatical development based on the gradual extension of cognitive-semantic categories. First, there is the problem that children's early grammatical knowledge does not appear to be restricted in the way that such models would seem to predict (Maratsos 1982, 1988; Maratsos and Chalkley 1980). For example, the set of nouns used by young children in Determiner 4-Noun sequences is semantically heterogeneous in the sense that it includes not only nouns denoting concrete objects (e.g. ball), but also nouns that denote actions (e.g. walk), nouns that denote locations (e.g. kitchen), and even nouns that denote abstractions (e.g. minute) (Valian 1986; Pine and Lieven 1997).
A Construction Account of Novel Verb Learning
This study seeks to investigate how children are able to move from single word utterances to adult-like argument structure constructions. While previous research has shown that children are able to map novel verbs onto transitive scenes using syntax alone, the acquisition process of these syntactic argument structures is still unclear. One possible explanation lies in a construction account which holds that language acquisition is a process of building linguistic form/meaning constructions around an exemplar and a subsequent abstraction process which allows the comprehension and production of novel forms. This study will use a preferential looking task to investigate whether young children (20-30 months) able to map novel verbs in the English ditransitive without visual cues. Crucially, this study will also investigate whether acquisition of an exemplar form aids young children in the ability to use the ditransitive structure to map novel verbs.
Children's Knowledge of Verb-Structure: Data from Hebrew
1989
The acquisition of morpheme-structure constraints by children is discussed. The focus is a subset of verbs in modern Hebrew and the language-specific knowledge that children acquire of what constitutes a possible verb in their language, from the point of view of both internal form and of categorical appropriateness for naming a certain semantic content or transitive relation. The application of two complementary processes, root extraction and pattern assignment, by 60 Hebrew-speaking children and 12 adults was studied. Subjects were asked to interpret and produce innovative verbs based on familiar nouns and adjectives. The three main findings include the following: (1) children can perform root extraction from as young as age three, and do better at identifying consonantal roots when they are presented with novel verbs for comprehension than in producing novel verbs by extracting roots from nouns or adjectives they know; (2) when children produce new verbs, their innovatlonr, conform closely to the grammatical structure of the standard morphological patterns used for constructing verbs in Hebrew; and (3) all child subjects, aged 3-9, overwhelmingly favor the verb pattern preferred for denominal verb-formation in current Hebrew, even though other patterns are equally available in the established lexicon and in the children's own speech. (MSE)
2019
Verbs are not only the semantic center of information in an utterance denoting and locating events in time and space but also form the morphosyntactic anchor point of information in a sentence. The verbal system of a language thus plays a pivotal role in language acquisition. Learning about the complex features and functions of verbs is one of the main challenges in early first language acquisition. The earliest verb forms in children’s production are grammatically and lexically specific constructions, which are presumably rote learned (Lieven et al., 1997; Pine & Lieven, 1997; Tomasello, 1992, 2000, 2003). During this phase, children hardly display any flexibility of usage; but soon after using the first rote-learned constructions children start to produce new forms and apply them to new contexts. So far, relatively little is known about the details of this generalization process. Here we focus on the development of flexibility in the use of Russian verb morphology. We analyze the ...