Indicative before infinitives?

[Tiiu Salasoo]

 Dear Asma Siddiki,

I also would  like to stress that it depends very much on the language
concerned and, thus, also on the input.

As a further clarification for Estonian, a synthetic, semi-agglutinative
language, all the children I have studied (3 extensively, others more
superficially) used unmarked verb stems first. But there may be 6 allomorphs
for a stem of a verb!

The present indicative stem allomorph is used unmarked in 2 adult forms: on
its own as the singular imperative, e.g. "tee!" (make!) (occuring usually
very often in the input as commands to the child) and as part of negation,
e.g. "ei tee" (not make) - and these forms were among the first used by the
children, who continued also for a while to use the indicative stem without
the person markings, which adults would add, e.g. "teen" (make - present 1st
person singular).

There are 2 infinitives in Estonian. The unmarked ma-infinitive stem is never
used by adults, it is used in the past tense with the past tense marker,
followed by the person marker (except for the 3rd person singular), e.g.
"tegi" (made - past 3rd person singular), tegin (made - past 1st person
singular). The second, da-infinitive, used with transitive verbs, has as a
specific stem allomorph,usually marked by -da, sometimes just by -a,  e.g. as
in "teha "(to make). Although there was some variation among the children in
terms of the length of the interval, the ma-infinitive stem began to be used
always after the first use of the indicative stem, first unmarked and later
marked. Great variation was seen, however, in the use of the da-infinitive:
the bilingual child using it a month after the first observation (when he was
already using the indicative stem), the child in the native environment using
it first about 5 months after the first use of the indicative stem, and the
child in Australia had not used it yet 5 months after the initial use of the
indicative stem (when the observation ended). Thus the Estonian infinitives
were definitely used later than the present indicative stem.

More detail can be found in:

Salasoo, T. (1996) Observations in the Natural Acquisition of Estonian
Morphology - A Mix-and-Match of Stems and Suffixes. Paper presented at the
FU8 Congressus Octavus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum 10-15.8.1995, at
Jyväskylä, Finland and in Martin, M. & Muikku-Werner, P. (Eds.). Finnish and
Estonian - New Target Languages, Centre for Applied Language Studies,
University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Salasoo, T. (1997). Same Goal in Three Settings: Early Acquisition of
Estonian in Native Monolingual, Non-native Monolingual and Bilingual
Environments. Paper at the XVI International Congress of Linguistics at
Paris, France, 20-25.7.1997. CD-ROM on the conference, Elsevier, 1998.

Asma Siddiki wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> I don't know the answer to the following question and would like some help
> please.
>
> Do children learn the
> infinitive later than the indicative, and if so, then why?
>
> references????  - thanks.
>
> Asma
> ************************************************************
> Asma Siddiki                 Dept. of Experimental Psychology
> Oriel College                South Parks Road
> Oxford University            Oxford University
> OX1 4EW                      OX1 3UD
> *************************************************************