| Автор | WILSON, STEPHEN |
| Дата выпуска | 2003 |
| dc.description | Children learning English often omit grammatical words and morphemes, but there is still much debate over exactly why and in what contexts they do so. This study investigates the acquisition of three elements which instantiate the grammatical category of ‘inflection’ – copula be, auxiliary be and 3sg present agreement – in longitudinal transcripts from five children, whose ages range from 1;6 to 3;5 in the corpora examined. The aim is to determine whether inflection emerges as a unitary category, as predicted by some recent generative accounts, or whether it develops in a more piecemeal fashion, consistent with constructivist accounts. It is found that for each child the relative pace of development of the three morphemes studied varies significantly, suggesting that these morphemes do not depend on a unitary underlying category. Furthermore, early on, be is often used primarily with particular closed-class subjects, suggesting that forms such as heʼs and thatʼs are learned as lexically specific constructions. These findings are argued to support the idea that children learn ‘inflection’ (and by hypothesis, other functional categories) not by filling in pre-specified slots in an innate structure, but by learning some specific constructions involving particular lexical items, before going on to gradually abstract more general construction types. |
| Издатель | Cambridge University Press |
| Название | Lexically specific constructions in the acquisition of inflection in EnglishThis research was supported by a University Fellowship from the UCLA Department of Linguistics. I would like to thank Ayşe Pınar Saygı ;n, Bruce Hayes, Tim Arbisi-Kelm, Elena Lieven, Susan Curtiss, Nina Hyams, Carson Schütze, Ken Wexler, and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments and suggestions, and the audiences of talks at UCLA and UCSD where I presented some of this material. I thank also Roger Brown, Patrick Suppes and Jacqueline Sachs, for their generosity in submitting data to CHILDES which I have used, and Brian MacWhinney, for maintaining this invaluable resource. All responsibility for errors and shortcomings is of course entirely my own. |
| DOI | 10.1017/S0305000902005512 |
| Electronic ISSN | 1469-7602 |
| Print ISSN | 0305-0009 |
| Журнал | Journal of Child Language |
| Том | 30 |
| Первая страница | 75 |
| Последняя страница | 115 |
| Аффилиация | WILSON STEPHEN; University of California; UCLA |
| Выпуск | 1 |
