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

EARLY VERBS IN BILINGUAL ACQUISITION
Rank 1 has būt ‘be’ as nearly the unique verb - in the last 2 samples, it
accounts for one-third of all verb tokens;
Rank 2 typically accounts for around one tenth of all tokens; it is fairly
diversely populated, with 5 verbs, but iet ‘go’ is dominant;
Rank 3 is even more diverse, but ēst, ‘eat’, gribēt ‘want’ and dabūt ‘get’
each occur in two samples; Rank 4, by contrast is sparse.
In Table 5b, there are 13 verb types in all, representing nearly half of all
types in the data (29).
Table 5b. Maija, English, 250-word samples: proportion of main verb tokens,
for the main verbs in first four frequency ranks, by sample
Age 1;5 1;6 1;7 1;8 1;9 1;10 1;11 Total
Rank 1 - be
0.29
record
0.27
be
0.29
be
0.24
be
0.20
be
0.53 39
record
0.24 8
scratch
0.29 5
sit
0.27 4
go
0.20 4
Rank 2 - come
come
0.16
0.09 8
want
0.16 5
Rank 3 - look
look
0.18
0.10 5
stand
0.2 3
do
0.12 2
touch
0.12 2
climb
0.10 2
sit
0.06 2
go
0.06 2
Rank 4 - get
0.10 3
come
come
183