Roots or Edges? Explaining variation in children’s early verb forms across five Mayan languages

Rich inflection and the production of finite verbs in child language

“…Like Blom (2007Blom ( , 2008, I assume that children produce root infinitives while they are in the process of mastering a verbal paradigm to avoid using an incorrect form. Pye et al (2007) found that children acquiring five Mayan languages with rich inflection and ergative or split ergative morphology (K'iche', Tzetzal, Tzotzil, Q'anjob'al and Yukatek) initially produced a high percentage of bare verbs, as children do in Basque. As the authors noted, ''Mayan children do not simply produce a copy of the adult verbs.…”

“…Instead they initially produce only parts of the verbs. Frequency alone cannot account for the parts of the verb that the children produce'' (Pye et al 2007). These authors argued that root infinitives present a challenge to input-driven models of grammatical development, since children are not emulating patterns they have observed in the adult data.…”

The case-agreement hierarchy in acquisition: Evidence from children learning Basque

“…Given the importance of type and token frequency in these models, both connectionist and functionalist approaches to the acquisition of morphology would predict that the most frequent agreement markers in the adult input would emerge first in child speech. Pye et al (2007) investigated whether the order of inflectional morphemes in a verbal complex influenced how early they were acquired by children learning five Mayan languages (Yukatek, Tzetzal, Tzozil, Q'anjob'al, and K'iche'). All of these are ergative languages with mostly agglutinative morphology.…”

“…(11) Mayan transitive verb template Aspect+Abs 1 +Erg+Root+Tran+Abs 2 +Plu (Pye et al, 2007) Pye et al found that children began producing inflection on the right edge of the Mayan verbal complex earlier than morphemes on the left edge. At the earliest stages, children learning these languages produce bare verbs or verbs plus rightedge inflection only, as in example (12), produced by a child acquiring K'iche' (Pye 1983):…”

“…B) Are the verbal agreement morphemes that appear on the right edge of the verbal complex the first to be acquired, as suggested by the findings of Pye et al (2007)? C) To what extent does the order of acquisition of agreement morphemes replicate the implicational hierarchy found in case typology (Blake, 2001)?…”