How can we explain that young children appear to acquire very different morphological systems in similar ways? What are the similarities in acquisition across the very different language systems that they learn? Are also different parts of morphology, such as inflection and derivation acquired in similar ways? Are there differences in nominal vs. verbal morphology?

In providing answers to such basic questions this volume presents the intermediate results of the international "Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" co-ordinated by Wolfgang U. Dressler in behalf of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. Premorphology refers to the phase when small children use only isolated rote-learnt morphological forms and onomatopoetic and other extragrammatical morphology-like operations. In the protomorphological phase children detect morphology and start to actively compose and decompose words. The aim of this project is to compare the acquisition of morphology in up to 20 languages by children from about 1;2 through at least 3;0 years of age. The book includes several introductory chapters written by the project co-ordinators on the base of the written reports of participants and several studies on the acquisition of noun and verb morphology in the transitory phase from pre- to protomorphology and in the protomorphological phase in nine languages (Croatian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Russian, Spanish, and Yucatec Maya). Whereas the introductory chapters focus on crosslinguistic comparison, the other authors describe children’s acquisition of single languages in detail. Both inflectional and derivational morphology are investigated in nouns, including such topics as compounding, diminutive formation, case and number distinctions. Verbs are described from the point of view of inflectional morphology and agreement.

Table of contents:

Maria Voeikova (Saint Petersburg, Vienna) & Wolfgang U. Dressler (Vienna): Introduction

Ursula Stephany (Cologne): Early development of grammatical number – a typological perspective

Maria Voeikova (Saint Petersburg, Vienna): The acquisition of case in typologically different languages

Marianne Kilani-Schoch (Lausanne) & Wolfgang U. Dressler (Vienna): The emergence of inflectional paradigms in two French corpora: an illustration of general problems of pre- and protomorphology

Sabine Klampfer & Katharina Korecky-Kröll (Vienna): Nouns and verbs at the transition from pre- to protomorphology: a longitudinal case study on Austrian German

Barbara Pfeiler (Merida): Noun and verb acquisition in Yucatec Maya.

Klaus Laalo (Tampere): Acquisition of case in Finnish: a preliminary overview...

Ineta Savickiene (Kaunas): The emergence of case distinctions in Lithuanian

Maria Voeikova (Saint Petersburg, Vienna) & Natalia Gagarina (Berlin): Early syntax, first lexicon and the acquisition of case forms by two Russian children

Anna de Marco (Cosenza): The development of diminutives in Italian: input and acquisition

Victoria Marrero (Madrid), María José Albalá (Madrid) & Ignacio Moreno (Málaga): Use of diminutives by children and adults in Spanish. A preliminary analysis

Carmen Aguirre (Vienna): The acquisition of tense and aspect morphology: a key for semantic interpretation

Zrinka Jelaska, Melita Kovacevic & Maja Andel (Zagreb): Morphology and semantics – the basis of Croatian case

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