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K ALJENAIE Table 15 Number of Inflections on roots in the four children’s production N. of Sara Osama Inflection Present Past Present Past 1 21 19 19 8 2 6 5 4 4 3 2 1 2 2 4 3 2 1 5 1 1 To begin with, the majority of root types appeared with one grammatical marker and the ones that appeared with two markers were significantly rare while the ones that appeared with more than that are even more rare across the children. The data reveals that most verbs with one marker are inflected with the 1 st singular. Sara and Osama inflected one verb with 5 grammatical present tense markers (la$ab ‘play’ and raa! ‘go’ respectively). 6. Discussion Characteristics of children’s acquisition of language may provide insight into both the nature of language structure and the nature of human learning. One of the main findings of this research is the presence of UG to the four children in the form of FCs from the earliest recording sessions. This finding is an apparent challenge to the current theories of language acquisition such as that of Radford (1990), who assumes that early child language is mainly lexical-thematic progressed to functional-nonthematic and UG makes different types of principle available to the child at different stages of maturation. Apparently, the results did not show a pattern suggestive of Radford’s hypothesis even though the data revealed that elements associated with functional categories were not always present and were not frequently used in the children’s early language. This nonetheless suggests that early grammar cannot be characterized as a stage where functional items are universally absent. Overall, what the data reveals is that the children’s verb system is not limited to just a few adult inflections. The data obtained in this study reveal many facts about the manner in which Kuwaiti children acquire Arabic as a native language. In the age range from 2;0 –2;6, a rich variety of distinct verb inflections were found in the two children’s production data. Hyams (1987:4) justifies the ease of the acquisition of grammatical inflection with reference to “how the system interacts with principles of UG, or more to the point whether the 20
EMERGENCE OF TENSE AND AGREEMENT inflectional system is a core or peripheral property of the language”. Children in this study appear to develop their morphological inflections in much the same manner as that observed for children learning other languages. The grammatical infixes appeared in a certain pattern in which the singular precedes the plural, which is consistent with Pizzuto & Caselli (1992,1994) and Robin & Pine (1998). The data shows that the use of inflections increased in frequency and accuracy with age. However, the two children typically produced verbs in different contexts which lacked any kind of finite morphology in both present and past tense, where grammatical inflections are required in the adult language. First of all, in the present tense the unmarked forms appeared homophonous to the stem or imperative form. In other words, the unmarked forms can be called stem or imperative forms. In order to identify them as stems, forms such as ktib, s#rab or lbis (write, drink and put on respectively) would be expected in the four child’s production data; however, none of these stem forms were found during the observation period. Accordingly, the unmarked forms cannot be referred to as stems. The other possibility is to call these masculine imperative forms of the adult language such as roo! and dawir for ‘go and ‘search’ respectively, since the masculine has zero marking (the feminine and plural imperative have a suffix). As for the CCC root structure of some verbs where a prefixed vowel is required as in i-ktib ‘write!’ for the masculine imperative, the children avoided using that. The data reveals that in roots such as s#rb and ktb (drink and write respectively) the children never unmarked these types of verb which would not be well-formed words. Therefore, children did not say s#rab instead of a-s#rab ‘I drink’ as they did with dawir instead of a-dawir ‘ I search’. It is important to bear in mind that since s#rb and dawir are CCC root structures, the former unmarked form is an inappropriate stem s#rab and the masculine imperative required the prefix vowel i-and the latter unmarked form is homophonous to the masculine imperative form. Rather, they do not leave s#rab unmarked, they substituted the required inflection for other ones (in most cases the 1 st singular present tense) a-s#rab ‘I drink’ (cf section 4.1). Regarding the past tense, the production data shows that they used the 3 rd person masculine verb form which is a zero morpheme where some inflections were clearly required. In sum, what has been proposed so far is that the various properties which characterize the children’s early grammar, particularly the optionality of unmarked forms, can be handled in a more unified way. The masculine imperative and the 3 rd person 21
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Page 6 and 7: K ALJENAIE testing ground. To what
Page 8 and 9: K ALJENAIE causative form is basica
Page 10 and 11: K ALJENAIE person diagram, the two
Page 12 and 13: K ALJENAIE 3.2 Data Analysis The sa
Page 14 and 15: K ALJENAIE Table 4 Osama’s longit
Page 16 and 17: K ALJENAIE The asterisk indicates t
Page 18 and 19: K ALJENAIE which is the transitive
Page 20 and 21: K ALJENAIE confirming Hyams (1986)
Page 22 and 23: K ALJENAIE Table 12 Sara’s realiz
Page 26 and 27: K ALJENAIE masculine forms are cons
Page 28 and 29: K ALJENAIE Motar, A. (1969). Khasai
Page 30 and 31: P. COUTSOUGERA Plural Plural Singul
Page 32 and 33: P. COUTSOUGERA e.g. [peδja'] *[pe
Page 34 and 35: P. COUTSOUGERA Tableau 1: Opacity i
Page 36 and 37: P. COUTSOUGERA As can be seen, in r
Page 38 and 39: P. COUTSOUGERA 6.1 Selection of the
Page 40 and 41: P. COUTSOUGERA /alevr-I-a/ Tableau
Page 42 and 43: P. COUTSOUGERA different areas of t
Page 44 and 45: P. COUTSOUGERA ruled out as it viol
Page 46 and 47: P. COUTSOUGERA operation McCarthy p
Page 48 and 49: P. COUTSOUGERA Tableau 6: Applicati
Page 50 and 51: P. COUTSOUGERA References Anderson,
Page 52 and 53: R. INGHAM cognitive deficits. They
Page 54 and 55: R. INGHAM 2. Subjects and hypothese
Page 56 and 57: R. INGHAM good as their CA matches
Page 58 and 59: R. INGHAM 100 90 80 70 60 50 40 30
Page 60 and 61: R. INGHAM Did the [+LD] group perfo
Page 62 and 63: R. INGHAM using the Wilcoxon ranked
Page 64 and 65: R. INGHAM representations but also
Page 66 and 67: R. INGHAM Van der Lely, H., & L. St
Page 68 and 69: P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS some vene
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS 3. Intern
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS • Varia
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS Despite s
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS naturalne
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS apparent
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS Summary f
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS Table 2 T
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS regard it
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS The ‘gr
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS Table 4 (
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS sociodemo
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS Bardovi-H
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P. KERSWILL & A. WILLIAMS språkfö
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S. KULKARNI in the Indian caste hie
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S. KULKARNI ideologies, each emphas
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S. KULKARNI century. The Sabha was,
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S. KULKARNI The main study includes
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S. KULKARNI 4. Quantitative Analyse
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S. KULKARNI comparatively lower (in
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S. KULKARNI Table 3: Percentage use
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S. KULKARNI showing an almost compl
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S. KULKARNI 50 mean % std. score 40
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S. KULKARNI 100 mean % std. score 9
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S. KULKARNI Marathi the kin term /m
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S. KULKARNI not by the less-privile
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S. KULKARNI Bapuji, B.R. (1994).
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S. KULKARNI Sastry, J.V. (1993). Re
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J. MARSHALL 2. Change versus Resist
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J. MARSHALL have become more expose
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J. MARSHALL anthropologists. As man
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J. MARSHALL for data such as Milroy
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J. MARSHALL To some extent, [networ
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J. MARSHALL these close-knit ties a
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J. MARSHALL Life mode 1. Life modes
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J. MARSHALL There are, however, som
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J. MARSHALL can choose a high level
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J. MARSHALL Pedersen therefore, lik
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J. MARSHALL case that these people
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J. MARSHALL 6. Research Question an
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J. MARSHALL ‘are high in frequenc
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J. MARSHALL 6.5. Morphological Vari
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J. MARSHALL 4 Do you work/go to sch
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J. MARSHALL 8) I never eat brose or
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J. MARSHALL mentioned, a ‘real ti
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J. MARSHALL 3. LEXREC. This is an i
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J. MARSHALL which comes nearest to
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J. MARSHALL LIFMODLEXREC 60 50 40 L
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J. MARSHALL the different tests wer
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J. MARSHALL PHOVAR = 21.1 + 0.573 A
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J. MARSHALL There is no significant
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J. MARSHALL 7.6. SOCNET as a Predic
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J. MARSHALL SOCNET is again not sig
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J. MARSHALL integrated sociolinguis
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I. SINKA, M. GARMAN AND C. SCHELLET
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