Indicative before infinitive?

[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.

Regards,
Tiiu Salasoo