Chapter 9 - LOT publications

Accounts of SLI in Afrikaans
9.2.3. Are the predictions of the ATOM for Afrikaans borne out?
As stated above, the ATOM would predict that Afrikaans verbs may
occur in their infinitival form in the language of children with SLI. As
these verbs must also appear in a form resembling the infinitival one in
the language of both typically developing children and adult speakers,
this prediction was judged to be linguistically insignificant. The only
present tense verb forms which may potentially have been interesting,
were those of have and be, for which the infinitival form and the inflected
form differ. Unlike what was predicted by the ATOM, the Afrikaansspeaking
children with SLI did not produce utterances such as (170) and
(171), where have and be occur in their infinitival form. Interestingly, one
girl with SLI did the reverse: She used the inflected form of be (i.e., is)
instead of the infinitival one (wees), as illustrated in (172). 163
(170) Target:
sy hierdie mannetjie hê
sy het hierdie mannetjie
she this figurine have-INF
she have this figurine
‘She has this figurine’
(171) Target:
hy hier wees
hy is hier
he here be-INF
he be here
‘He is here’
(172) Target:
moet daar nog ’n wit ding in is daar moet nog ’n wit ding in wees
must there still a white thing in is there must still a white thing in be
‘There must still be a white thing in there’
A second possible prediction that the ATOM made for Afrikaans was
that utterances of Afrikaans-speaking children with SLI will demonstrate
the correct surface word order, under the assumption that XPs can move
to the specifier position of CP and V can move to C in main clauses.
This was not always the case. Simple declaratives with SOV and
embedded sentences with SVO occurred, as shown in (173) and (174),
respectively.
163 This girl did not produce wees at all in the 30 minute language sample. She did
produce grammatical utterances containing is; however, she also at times omitted is
from obligatory contexts.
258