LINGUIST List 6.739

Sat 27 May 1995

Qs: Lg. acquisition, Phonological acquisition, Farsi

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Directory

1. , early word acquisition
2. , Instrumental studies on phonological acquisition
3. Jan Tent, Farsi Morphology

My daughter (16 months) has two kinds of words at this point. She makes
pragmatically conditioned utterances "up!, please, hat [take me outside], read
book". She also says words with concrete object reference: "hat, coat, bib,
bed, bicycle." As yet, she seems to have no relational words at all; i.e.
no verbs, adverbs, adjectives, or prepositions. (N. B. "Up" is probably a
 command.)
I suppose this to be a normal and reasonable way to structure learning, but
have forgotten most of my Language Acquisition course. If anyone has some
bibliography on acquisition of relational words, I would be grateful for it, and
would post a summary if interest seemed to warrant it.
 What I really want to know is: when she does start to acquire relational words
will she (the child) be the Trajector or the Landmark of the relation? Or will
there be no stage when she cannot be both.
While we are climbing out sort of esoteric limbs, has anyone studied whether
children acquire verbs with Agent-orientation (Dixon's term) like "bite, kick,
rather than Patient-orientation, like "shatter, break"?
Agent-oriented verbs describe the participation of the Agent in the situation
presented by the predicate without necessarily specifying the involvement of the
Patient. So "kicking" requires certain activities of the Agent (motion of the
foot), but does not specify the involvement of the Patient.
 I kicked the ball. vs. I kicked the wall.
Thanks in advance for any responses.
Adger Williams
adgerwhope.cit.hope.edu

I would be grateful for references to any published material in the past
ten to fifteen years on instrumental phonetic analyses of phonological
acquisition. In particular, I want to find any studies that use instrumental
data to challenge binary distinctive features (SPE and post-) as
developmentally valid constructs, and that support phonological privative
components (of the type {A}, {I}, {U} etc), as found in dependency
phonology and various related approaches.

If there is sufficient response, I will summarise for the list.

Martin J. Ball, University of Ulster

Dear LINGUISTS,

Is there any one out there who can help me with the
morphological breakdown of the following Farsi expressions?

pasinpariruz
paspariruz
pariruz
diruz

I am especially interested in the meanings of the prefixes
"pas" and "pasin". My library has no Farsi grammar, nor are
speakers of Farsi very common in Fiji.

Your help would be very much appreciated.

Jan Tent
Department of Literature and Language
School of Humanities
The University of the South Pacific
P.O. Box 1168
Suva
FIJI

TEL: (679) 313900 Ext. 2263
FAX: (679) 305053
E-mail: TENT_Jusp.ac.fj