27.4576, Diss: Little kids, big verbs: The acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs

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LINGUIST List: Vol-27-4576. Wed Nov 09 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.4576, Diss: Little kids, big verbs: The acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs

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Date: Wed, 09 Nov 2016 13:34:53
From: William Forshaw [wforshaw at gmail.com]
Subject: Little kids, big verbs: The acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs

 
Institution: University of Melbourne 
Program: School of Languages and Linguistics 
Dissertation Status: Completed 
Degree Date: 2016 

Author: William Forshaw

Dissertation Title: Little kids, big verbs: The acquisition of Murrinhpatha
bipartite stem verbs 

Dissertation URL:  https://minerva-access.unimelb.edu.au/handle/11343/119578

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
                     Morphology

Subject Language(s): Murrinh-Patha (mwf)


Dissertation Director(s):
Rachel Nordlinger
Barbara Kelly

Dissertation Abstract:

This thesis examines the acquisition of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language
of northern Australia, based on semi-naturalistic data from 5 children
(1;9-6;1) over a two-year period. It represents the first detailed acquisition
study of an Australian non-Pama Nyungan language and thus contributes to a
growing crosslinguistic and typological understanding of the process of
language acquisition. In particular it focuses on the acquisition of
Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verbs and the acquisition of complex inflectional
verbal paradigms. These structures pose a number of challenges to the language
learner, which raise questions for current theories of morphological
acquisition.

The structure of this thesis is built around three major research questions.
The first aims to describe the characteristics of early verb use in
Murrinhpatha both with regard to their structure and their semantics and
pragmatics. I describe the development of verb structures in Murrinhpatha
finding that these are sensitive to phonological/prosodic factors and not
truncated according to morphosyntactic factors. The semantics and pragmatics
of early verbs show similarities to English-acquiring children despite the
great typological differences of these languages. Secondly I examine the
acquisition of the complex inflectional paradigms of Murrinhpatha classifier
stems. This system appears to be too complex to allow for abstract rule-based
morphological acquisition but also too large to rely on rote learning of
individual inflected forms. I find that children begin by using a small core
of rote learned inflected forms and gradually expand verb paradigms along
predictable pathways relying on low level analogy and semi-regular patterns of
inflection. Finally I consider the acquisition of Murrinhpatha bipartite stem
verb morphology. These verbs are constructed of two stem elements, a
classifier stem and a lexical stem, which co-vary to encode verbal semantics
and argument structure. Such a system has not previously been explored from an
acquisition perspective, and thus I investigate how children acquire the
underlying compositional principles of the system. While children do use
bipartite stem morphology contrastively, they are found not to acquire the
compositional principles underlying the system in the age range considered.
This suggests that the Murrinhpatha bipartite stem verb system is not regular
or transparent enough to allow for the acquisition of the principles of
compositionality during the earlier stages of development.




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