11: morphology pt. 2: grammatical morphology across languages

what is the timeline in which children acquire most of their inflectional system (morphemes + rules)

• acquire most their morphemes and rules by age 4

why/ how are children able to acquire inflectional morphology so easily

• universal grammar perspective

  • “[C]hildren are endowed with a disposition for rule learning, knowledge of the kinds of semantic categories typically encoded by inflection, and the kinds of morphological processes that languages typically exhibit.”

• input perspective:

  • Children can get everything they need for the acquisition of inflextion from the input

  • this is because the task of segmenting inflection from the base to which it attaches and assigning an interpretation to an inflectional affix is pretty straightforward

what are the attributes of inflection

• does not involve category change (i.e. they never change the grammatical category of the base to which they attach)

• semantic compositionality: the meaning of the whole word = the meaning of the base word + the meaning of the ending.

• productivity: inflectional affixes attach to virtually all instances of the particular category (ex. plural to virtually all nouns)

evidence from Swahili that suffixes are acquired earlier than prefixes

• Children omit obligatory prefixes in up to 80% of verbs

• obligatory suffixes are omitted in less than 1%

  • during same time period

• no stage in acquisition observed when obligatory suffixes were omitted at high rates

• inflectional suffixes are acquired before the onset of multiword utterances

what is the first possibility as to why suffixes are acquire earlier than prefixes

operating principle A: pay attention to the ends of words

• recency effects: adults tend to remember the most recently presented information best

operating principles (Slobin, 1973)

universal cognitive principles that guide hypothesis formation and learning

what is the second possibility as to why suffixes are acquired earlier than prefixes

• swahili syllable structure constraints

  • in Swahili, roots typically end in consonants but syllables cannot end in consonants

  • All verb roots are followed by a vowel-shaped suffix (-a ‘indicative’, -i ‘negative’, -i ‘applicative’, -e ‘subjunctive’)

    • see slide 7

  • If the child deleted the suffix, the verb word would end in a consonant, in violation of both markedness and the syllable structure constraints of Swahili

infixes

• not as confusing as we think

• Tagalog: Focus affixes: agent-focus (AF) infix <um>, theme-focus (TF) infix <in>

• thematic roles: Verb morphology in Tagalog indicates the thematic role of the argument bearing the focus marker (FOC) ang.

what are the main types of thematic roles

• agent: a participant that the meaning of the verb specifies as doing or causing something (lalake in (2)-(3))

• theme: A participant that is characterized as changing its position or condition, or as being in a state or position (mansanas in (2)-(3))

• 2)  K<um>akain ng mansanas ang lalake.

  <AF>-eat NFOC apple FOC boy

  ‘The BOY is eating an/the apple.’

• K<in>akain ng lalake ang mansanas.

  <TF>-eat NFOC boy FOC apple

  ‘A/the boy is eating the APPLE.’

agent and theme focus rules in tagalog

When the agent (lalake) in a transitive sentence is focus- marked with ang, the verb takes the agent-focus infix <um>:

• K<um>akain ng mansanas ang lalake.

  <AF>-eat NFOC apple FOC boy

  ‘The BOY is eating an/the apple.

When the theme (mansanas) in a transitive sentence is focus-marked with ang, the verb takes the theme-focus infix <in>:

• K<in>akain ng lalake ang mansanas.

  <TF>-eat NFOC boy FOC apple

  ‘A/the boy is eating the APPLE.’

acquisition of tagalog inflixes

• infixes are unexpectedly easy to acquire

• 3 year old children correctly produce focus morphology (agent-focus infix <um> and theme-focus infix <in> in 70% + responses in an elicited production task

why are infixes seemingly easy to acquire

• perhaps because infixes in Tagalog are sometimes realized as prefixes

• when infixes are realized as prefixes, they are easier to isolate from the verb root

  1. Consonant-initial roots: Agent-focus <um> is infix:

     • tawag ‘call’ → t<um>awag, *<um>tawag

  2. verb-initial roots: agent-focus <um> is prefix:

     • abot ‘overtake’ → <um>abot, *a<um>bot

  3. infix vs. prefix is tied to syllable structure:

are morphologically rich systems hard to acquire?

children acquiring morphologically rich languages (like Hungarian) learn the grammatical morphemes of their language at earlier ages than children acquiring more impoverished languages (like English)

why are morphologically rich languages acquired at earlier ages than impoverished languages

• morphologically rich= does a lot of work that syntax does in morphologically impoverished languages

  • English has relatively fixed word order

  • English word order and prepositions indicate the role that a noun plays in the sentence

  • Hungarian:

    • has relatively free word order

    • Case marking (suffixes) on nouns indicates the role that a noun plays in a sentence.

    • Nouns can be declined with 18 case suffixes, most of which

      correspond to prepositions in English.

Do Hungarian children understand case?

yes

• 15-month-old Hungarian children were exposed to words composed of

  a novel noun followed by the inessive suffix (-ban ~ -ben ‘in’).

• Children used their understanding of this suffix to segment

  morphologically complex words into their constituent parts.

• in another situation, children ages 1;5-2;9 made no errors in their production of inessive case (i.e. ‘in’) or superessive case (“on top of”)

• only 2 errors were made in adessive case (“on”)

English acquisition of prepositions like ‘in’ and ‘on’

• appear around age 2;3-2;6

• why so much later than locative case marking in Hungarian?

why is English acquisition of prepositions so much later than locative case marking in Hungarian? (hypotheses)

Hungarian -ban -ben ‘in’

• case markers are affixes: material than can intervene between noun root suffix is limited to plural and possessive

  • ex. haːz-ad-ban→‘house-your-in’

  • ex. haːz-ak-ban → ‘house-pl-in’

• case markers appear to the right of the root as the final suffix in the word (ex. haːz-ban)

English in:

• prepositions are function words: a lot of different types of material can intervene between the preposition and noun

  • ex. in the house
    in an old house
    in a great big house
    in the yet to be built house

• prepositions appear to the left of the root: ex. in school, in the house

Slobin’s operating principle to explain the difference between case and preps in Hungarian and english

• vowels in case markers harmonize with root-final vowel, which makes the cohere as a unit:

  • ex. haːz-ban ‘house-in’

• no vowel harmony or other obligatory assimilation process binds preposition to a noun or other following material