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Description:
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This book deals with the emergence of nominal morphology from a
cross-linguistic perspective and is closely related to "Development of Verb
Inflection in First Language Acquisition" (ed. by D. Bittner, W. U.
Dressler, M. Kilani-Schoch) both methodologically and theoretically. Each
of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the
fundamental inflectionally expressed categories of the noun (number, case,
gender) in one of the languages belonging to different morphological types
(isolating, fusional-inflecting, agglutinating, root inflecting) and
families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic/Baltic, Greek, Finnic, Turc, Semitic,
Indian American). The analyses are based on parallel longitudinal
observations of children in their second and early third year of life as
well as their input. The focus lies on the transition from a
pre-morphological to a proto-morphological stage in which grammatical
oppositions and so-called “mini-paradigms” begin to develop. The point at
which children start to discover the morphological structure of their
language and the speed with which they develop inflectional distinctions of
lexical items has been found to be dependent on the morphological richness
of the input language on the paradigmatic as well as the syntagmatic axis
of linguistic structure. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist
theoretical frameworks (Natural Morphology, Usage-based theories).
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