Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

K ALJENAIE
which is the transitive verb xarrab ‘to damage’ where they should use the
intransitive verb ixtarab ‘it is broken’ as in the following extracts (2-3).
(2) Investigator wee ixtarab? ‘oh, is it broken?’
Sara xarrab ‘damaged’
(3) Investigator xarban? ‘is it boken?’
Osama xarrab ‘damaged’
Interestingly, the causative errors are in one type of verb which is taa!
‘fall’, where the children should say tayya! ‘drop’ instead. The context, as
well as sometimes the use of overt subject pronoun, indicates the meaning
of the verb that should be ‘drop’ and not ‘fall’. Causative verbs belong to
Class II which are distinguished by a double middle radical and they all are
transitive. The data shows that causative errors did not occur in Sara’s
production during the study period, while it occurred once in Osama’s
production
As discussed in section 2, there are two forms of verb stem to which
the grammatical inflections are marked, and the difference between the two
forms is in the realisation of their agreement features, that is in
present/imperfective stem, tense and agreement features are realised by
both prefixes and suffixes while the past/ perfect stem is realised by
suffixes. The data shows that not all verbs were unmarked e.g. certain
verbs namely ktb ‘writing’ or s#rb ‘drinking’, are not well-formed words in
Arabic. The table below also reveals the unclassified forms where neither
linguistic nor non-linguistic context account for their ambiguity.
Table 8 Unmarked verb forms in the four children’s production.
Types Sara Osama
Unmarked
Unclassified
36
13%
62
28%
8 22
On just occasions, it appears that Sara omitted the 3 rd feminine suffix.
In sample 12 she was playing with a puzzle as in the following extract (4).
(4) Investigator: xalis- at i- li!ba?
finnish- 3f.pa art- game
‘Has the game finished?’
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