No abstract

The study is aimed at exploring the occurrence of innovative verb forms recorded in early spontaneous children's production of Serbian-a language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. The overgeneralized verbs were retrieved from the corpus of eight children's production, longitudinally recorded from 1;6 to 4;0, and the developmental patterns of the distribution across age were explored. The analysis shows that overgeneralizations *hoćem 'want' 1.sg.pres., *nećem 'want' 1.sg.pres., *možem 'can' 1.sg.pres. and *bidem 'be' 1.sg.pres. are the typical representatives of early overgeneralizations in Serbian. They are typically recorded in all children's speech samples with relatively high frequency. The overgeneralized *hoćem and *nećem developmentally precede all other overgeneralized verbal forms, but disappear earlier than others. The overgeneralizations of contentive verbs, usually hapaxes, spread later and retain their position long after. The findings are discussed in comparison with the previous findings on overgeneralizations, with particular attention to the developmental patterns they exhibit.

The study aims to explore the factors underlying the non-canonical postnominal positioning of adnominal modifiers in the noun phrase in the Gurbet Romani variety spoken in Eastern Serbia. The noun phrases are excerpted from the Knjaževac Gurbet Romani corpus, which consists of adults' and children's samples of transcribed oral narratives. The quantitative analysis shows that the prenominal position of modifiers is the default one, given the low frequency of postposed modifiers in the adults' and children's samples (3.7% and 1.3%, respectively). The main part of the study is focused on the reasons for the non-canonical positioning of modifiers in the NP, and points towards several pragmatic factors as relevant for the postnominal positioning: the contrastive and information focus and stylistic effects.