Nominal Compound Acquisition

This book offers a systematic study of the emergence and early development of compound nouns in first language acquisition from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. The language sample is both genealogically and typologically diversified, ranging from languages rich in compounds, such as German, Saami, Estonian and Finnish, to languages poor in compounds, such as French. Some of them differ in compound richness according to genres of adult-directed speech in contrast to child-directed speech and thus also child speech, like Russian, Lithuanian and especially Greek. Differences in the delimitation and transition between compounds and phrases and in the distribution of subtypes of compounds in these languages involve great typological variety and thus different tasks for children acquiring them. The eleven languages investigated in the volume and the common methodology of longitudinal collection of spontaneous speech data concerning the interaction between children and their caretakers or peers, supplemented by lexical typology as a new means of cross-linguistic comparison of language acquisition, allow new generalizations and make the volume a unique contribution.

The typological, contrastive, and descriptive studies in this volume investigate the strategies employed by the world’s languages to create complex denotations by combining two noun-like elements, together with the kinds of semantic relation they involve, and their acquisition by children. The term ‘binominal lexeme’ is employed to cover both noun-noun compounds and a range of other naming strategies, including prepositional compounds, relational compounds, construct forms, genitival constructions, and more. Overall, the volume suggests a new, cross-linguistic approach to the study of complex lexeme formation that cuts across the traditional boundaries between syntax, morphology, and lexicon.

This volume brings together a collection of original articles investigating state-of-the-art themes in morphology. The papers in the volume provide an in-depth analysis for spoken and sign languages within morphological word domain, morphosyntax and morphophonology. Bringing data from a variety of languages including Turkish, some understudied ones (e.g. Turkish Sign Language, Late Ottoman Turkish) and also endangered languages (e.g. Karachay-Balkar, Sauzini, Cappadocian, Aivaliot and Pharasiot Greek), the volume will be of special interest to a wide audience ranging from typologists to theoretical linguists and graduate students in linguistics and is expected to generate further research on the above mentioned languages, as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the themes explored in the volume.

This book offers the first systematic study of the early phases in the acquisition of derivational morphology from a cross-linguistic and typological perspective. It presents ten empirical longitudinal studies in genealogically and typologically diverse languages (Indo-European, Finno-Ugric, Altaic) with different degrees of derivational complexity. Data collection, analysis and systematic comparison between child speech and parental child-directed speech are strictly parallel across the chapters. In order to identify the productivity of a derivational pattern, signalling the crucial developmental stage in its acquisition, the concept of the mini-paradigm criterion was applied. Similar developmental processes can be observed in all children, independent of the language they acquire, but the children’s courses of development also show obvious typological differences. This points towards an important impact of the structural properties of the specific language on emergence, use and the early course of development of derivational patterns.

This book deals with the development of modality from a crosslinguistic perspective and is closely related to two earlier volumes on the development of verb and nominal inflection in first language acquisition (SOLA 21 and 30) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the form and function of expressions of deontic and dynamic agent-oriented modality or epistemic and evidential propositional modality in one of fourteen languages belonging to different morphological types and language families (seven Indo-European and seven non-Indo-European). The analyses are mainly based on longitudinal observations of children in their 2nd and 3rd years of life in conversational interaction with their caregivers, mostly the mothers. Main issues addressed are the development of directives and modulations of information in terms of certainty and evidentiality, also taking into account children’s developing social-pragmatic and cognitive skills. One of the main findings is that agent-oriented and propositional modality may develop in parallel depending on the typological characteristics of the language acquired. The decisive factor is whether notions of propositional modality are grammaticized and obligatorily expressed in the language. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Usage-based theories, Natural Morphology).

Now in its fourth edition, this textbook has been extensively updated and provides a comprehensive account of first language acquisition.