MLU counts

[Margaret Fleck]

How (briefly) was "verb" defined here?  E.g. does it include words describing
states (e.g. tall) which act as verbs in some languages but require an
easily-omitted auxiliary verb in others (e.g. English)?  How does one decide
what to count as a verb in a language like English which has many words whose
part of speech is ambiguous due to lack of morphological markings?

????

Margaret


--- "Hyams, Nina" <hyams at humnet.ucla.edu> wrote:

> With respect to the issue of devising a valid cross-linguistic measure, it
> is likely that any such measure will have to consist of several factors.
> This was done by Kamil Ud Deen (University of Hawaii) in his UCLA
> dissertation on acquisition of Nairobi Swahili. Kamil devised a composite
> measure of linguistic development that consisted of 3 factors -- MLU, verbs
> per utterance (suggested by Virginia Valian), .....