Getting to the Root of the Matter

Author(s):  
Natalie Batmanian ◽  
Karin Stromswold

Spontaneous speech data from three monolingual Turkish-speaking children between the ages 2;1 and 2;8 revealed that children produce bare lexical stems in ungrammatical contexts before they use grammatical morphemes productively. Given that root words are very rare in Turkish, the fact that Turkish children produce them indicates that they are able to decompose multimorphemic words into root + grammatical affixes. We also tested the hypothesis that when the correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning is one-to-one, morphemes are likely to be acquired earlier than when the correspondence between form and meaning is one-to-many (Slobin, 1973). Three grammatical morphemes, despite appearing equally frequently in adult speech, were acquired at different stages by children. The past tense inflection –di, which has a one-to-one correspondence between morphological form and grammatical meaning, is the morpheme that was acquired first by the children.

2002 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Sampson

Nonstandard dialects often use the same form for the past tense and past participle of irregular verbs for which the standard language has distinct forms. One possible reason would be that some speakers have a nonstandard system of verb qualifiers (tense, mood, and aspect markers) in which the past tense/past participle distinction is functionally redundant. Data on spontaneous speech in Britain in the 1990s partly supports this by showing marked regional variation in the use of the Perfect construction. However, some nonstandard past tenses cannot be explained in terms of a nonstandard qualifier system.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-106
Author(s):  
MARIKO UNO

AbstractThis study investigates the emergence and development of the discourse-pragmatic functions of the Japanese subject markerswaandgafrom a usage-based perspective (Tomasello, 2000). The use of each marker in longitudinal speech data for four Japanese children from 1;0 to 3;1 and their parents available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000) was coded and analyzed. Findings showed that the four children initially usedwaas awh-question marker. They then gradually shifted its use to convey the proposition of given information. In contrast, the use ofgavaried among the children. One child usedgawith dynamic verbs in the past tense to report events he witnessed/experienced, while the other three children used it with a particular stative predicate in the present tense, expressing their subjective feeling toward referents. Findings were explained by the frequency of input to which the children had been exposed.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 167-192
Author(s):  
Lea Sawicki

The article deals with the use of simplex and compound (prefixed) verbs in narrative text. Main clauses comprising finite verb forms in the past and in the past habitual tense are examined in an attempt to establish to what extent simplex and compound verbs exhibit aspect oppositions, and whether a correlation exists between the occurrence of simplex vs. compound verbs and distinct textual units. The investigation shows that although simple and compound verbs in Lithuanian are not in direct aspect opposition to each other, in the background text portions most of the verbs are prefixless past tense forms or habitual forms, whereas in the plot-advancing text portions, the vast majority of verbs are compound verbs in the simple past tense.  


2008 ◽  
Vol 155 ◽  
pp. 23-52
Author(s):  
Elma Nap-Kolhoff ◽  
Peter Broeder

Abstract This study compares pronominal possessive constructions in Dutch first language (L1) acquisition, second language (L2) acquisition by young children, and untutored L2 acquisition by adults. The L2 learners all have Turkish as L1. In longitudinal spontaneous speech data for four L1 learners, seven child L2 learners, and two adult learners, remarkable differences and similarities between the three learner groups were found. In some respects, the child L2 learners develop in a way that is similar to child L1 learners, for instance in the kind of overgeneralisations that they make. However, the child L2 learners also behave like adult L2 learners; i.e., in the pace of the acquisition process, the frequency and persistence of non-target constructions, and the difficulty in acquiring reduced pronouns. The similarities between the child and adult L2 learners are remarkable, because the child L2 learners were only two years old when they started learning Dutch. L2 acquisition before the age of three is often considered to be similar to L1 acquisition. The findings might be attributable to the relatively small amount of Dutch language input the L2 children received.


Author(s):  
З.И. Годизова ◽  
Д.В. Габисова

Актуальность предпринятого исследования обусловлена тем, что причастие в современном осетинском языке не привлекало активного внимания ученых, имеются лишь общие описания причастий, а специальные исследования, посвященные причастиям, практически отсутствуют. Представляется интересным и актуальным сравнение системы причастий и их грамматических особенностей в осетинском и русском языках. Этот интерес обусловлен принадлежностью сопоставляемых языков к общей индоевропейской семье языков, а также тесным их взаимодействием в условиях двуязычия, что, очевидно, может отразиться и на системе причастий. Научная новизна данной статьи заключается в том, что в ней исследуются грамматические особенности всех разрядов причастий в осетинском языке в сопоставлении с русским языком. На основании проведенного анализа установлено, что в современном осетинском языке система причастий включает пять разрядов, разнообразных в своих грамматических проявлениях, в степени регулярности, в склонности переходить в состав других частей речи. Выявлены наиболее значительные отличия осетинских причастий от русских: существование причастий будущего времени в системе осетинского языка, отсутствие у причастий показателей времени и залога, а также именных грамматических категорий (падежа, числа, рода). Установлено также, что в осетинском языке категория вида в большей степени управляет категорией времени, в силу чего несовершенный вид причастий предполагает только настоящее время, а совершенный только прошедшее отсутствует четкая залоговая оппозиция причастий в осетинском языке. Определено также, что осетинские причастия не имеют членных (полных) форм, но функционируют в роли и сказуемого, и определения, хотя в большей степени тяготеют к предикативной роли. В осетинском языке причастия гораздо менее употребительны сравнительно с причастиями в русском языке и чаще вступают в отношения грамматической омонимии с другими частями речи. The relevance of the undertaken study is determined by the fact that participles in the modern Ossetian language are still insufficiently studied. There are only the most general descriptions of grammar features of participles. The comparison of the system of participles and their grammar features seems interesting and actual, especially considering the fact that the Ossetian and Russian languages belong to different groups of the Indo-European language family. Furthermore, in the context of bilingualism the Russian and Ossetian languages interact actively and that can affect the system of participles. The scientific novelty of the article is determined by the fact that it examines the grammatical features of all categories of participles in the Ossetian language in comparison with the Russian language. The conducted research allowed to elicit five categories in the system of participles in the modern Ossetian language. The analysis of the results showed the participles are diverse in their grammatical characteristics, in the degree of regularity, and in the tendency to transition into other parts of speech. The research defined the most significant differences between Ossetian and Russian participles: existence of future participles in the system of the Ossetian language absence of adjectival grammar categories of gender, number and case as well as formal markers of tense and voice in Ossetian participles. The tense category in Ossetian subordinates to the aspect category to a far greater extent therefore the imperfective aspect of participles accepts the present tense forms only, while perfective acts in the past tense forms Ossetian participles lack explicit voice opposition. Ossetian participles do not have full forms, but they can have syntactic functions of both the predicate and the attribute in a sentence, although the predicative function is more typical for them. Participles in the Ossetian language are much less common compared to participles in Russian and are more disposed to conversion (transition to the category of nouns, verbal adverbs, adjectives, words of the state category).


1988 ◽  
Vol 15 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 187-205
Author(s):  
J. A. Le Loux-Schuringa

Summary In this paper some theories on tenses are described. These theories appeared in the Netherlands in the first half of the 19th century. The purpose is not just describing the different tense-systems of P. Weiland (1805), W. Bilderdijk (1826), W. G. Brill (1846) and L. A. te Winkel (1866). In the first half of the 19th century some fundamental changes took place. It is shown that these changes are based upon continuity of research of time and tense in the Dutch tradition. This continuity is found on three levels: (a) The research was concentrated on the verbal forms, no other information from the sentence was used. (b) The grammarians took the relationship between linguistic forms and logical categories as a one-to-one relation. (c) The morphological form of the Dutch language determined the grammatical representation of the tense-systems more and more.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Marina Akimova

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (6) ◽  
pp. 36-47
Author(s):  
Rashid Chandio ◽  
Shadab Fatima ◽  
Tarique Tarique ◽  
Saira Soomro

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