The Acquisition of Complex Morphology

Abstract

Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world’s languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions, large irregular inflectional paradigms, and bipartite stem verbs, which all pose interesting challenges to the learner, as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity, which broadly includes factors such as transparency, predictability/regularity, richness, type/token frequency and productivity, must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems.

How diverse is child language acquisition research?

“…For instance, phonological systems vary as much as grammatical systems, and so too does the concept of 'word', which is less easily divorced from grammar in morphologically rich languages than it is in analytic languages like English. Thus, a child acquiring the polysynthetic language Murrinhpatha (non-Pama-Nyungan, Australia), where a whole clause is expressed in a complex verb phrase, is faced with a very different problem when learning verbs compared to a child acquiring English or German (Forshaw, 2021). The small amount of research on sign languages is also notable, meaning that we have yet to chart the wellspring of insights that the influence of modality has on the acquisition of linguistic systems.…”

“…Work on highly inflected languages has challenged theoretical approaches to morphological acquisition that postulate the use of abstract rules (Marcus et al, 1992; Pinker, 1999), and instead provide evidence in favour of schema-based generalisations (e.g. Dabrowska & Szczerbinski, 2006; Engelmann et al, 2019; Forshaw, 2021; Granlund et al, 2019). Work on sign languages, a large proportion of which are endangered (Woodward, 2018), places crucial constraints on theorising and reveals how the core features of the language faculty emerge independent of modality (Morgan, 2014; Sandler & Lillo-Martin, 2006).…”

Book Review: Veronica Mattes, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler (Eds.), The acquisition of derivational morphology: A cross-linguistic perspective

“…Street, 1987; Walsh, 2011), children acquiring bipartite stem verbs constructed of interchangeable lexical and classifier stems which together account for verbal semantics and argument structure (Nordlinger & Caudal, 2012) do not readily divide meaning across these elements. Although many stem combinations are transparent, there are also many opaque combinations (Forshaw, 2021, pp. 18–25).…”

“…18–25). The lack of morphosemantic transparency and productivity across the bipartite stem verb system results in children showing little evidence of needing to decompose and compose meaning from individual stem elements before age 6 despite using a range of diverse combinations (Forshaw, 2021, pp. 137–138).…”

“…The role of pragmatics in the acquisition of derivational morphology and morphology in general is an interesting area for future investigation given that the way in which language is used to do things has been shown to affect acquisition of particular language structures in some languages. For example, pragmatics has been argued to influence the acquisition of passive constructions in Sesotho (Demuth, 1989), the ergative marker in Samoan (Ochs, 1988) and imperative constructions in Finnish (Laalo, 2003) and Murrinhpatha (Forshaw, 2021, Chapters 5–6).…”