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

EMERGENCE OF TENSE AND AGREEMENT
5. Verb Types
In the previous paragraphs the focus has been mainly on the developmental
order of the grammatical inflections in both tenses. It is important to
examine the root types in the four children’s production since the
characteristic feature of Arabic is its basis of consonantal root (cf. section
2). Table 14 illustrates the types of root structure produced by the two
children during the period of investigation in both present and past tense
which are separated due to the fact that each tense has its own stem form.
Table 14 Types of root in the four children’s production
Root Type
Sara
Osama
Present Past Present Past
CCC 18 16 13 9
CVC 9 9 8 4
CCV 5 2 5 2
CVV 1
Total 33 27 26 15
Looking at the table above, it is obvious that there is not a significant
difference between the total number of root types in both tenses in Sara’s
data in contrast to Osama. He used 26 verb types in the present form and
only 15 in the past. This suggests that the children implemented the
present tense inflections more than the past tense suffixes as discussed
before (cf. section 4.1). The CCC root structure appeared more frequently
in the present tense than in the past, CVC came second and the least
frequent is the CCV. Sara used one type of CVV structure in the verb yaa
‘come’.
Comparing the total number of root types and total number of inflected
verbs as shown in Table 14 above, (type/number present: 33/199, and
26/137; and past: 27/163 and 15/76). One might interpret the low ratio as
showing that children’s use of the grammatical inflection was highly
productive (that is each verb was inflected with more than one inflection).
However, based on further examination on the number of root types that
were inflected with one inflection and those inflected with more as
summarized in Table 15, one can reach a different conclusion.
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