acquisition and morphology

[William Snyder]

[The following is being re-posted; I don't think it went out on the list the
first time I sent it.]

Dear Damir,

In a paper with Ann Senghas and Kelly Inman, I examined one prime candidate for
a direct link between inflectional morphology and syntax, and concluded (based
on acquisitional evidence) that the link is not really all that strong.  The
reference is the following:

Snyder, W., Senghas, A., and Inman, K. (2001) "Agreement morphology and the
acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish." Language Acquisition 9:157-173.

For related conclusions about word order and inflectional morphology, based on
comparative rather than acquisitional evidence, I recommend the recent (2000
and later) work of Jonathan Bobaljik.

Best,

William

--- Damir Æavar <dcavar at indiana.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am searching for literature on acquisition of morphology. In particular, I
> am interested in possible phases, whether there is some evidence for the
> acquisition of inflectional preceding derivational morphology in English or
> vice versa, whether there is such a phenomenon observed and documented in
> other languages, with other types of suffixes, prefixes, and infixes. Did
> somebody identify morphological acquisition phases and does this in any way
> correlate with quantitative properties of these morpheme types or any other
> property?
>
> I was pointed to Roger Brown's work from 1973. If there is something more
> (recent) on that, also quantitative analyses of morpheme distributions in
> different languages, and especially something on morphologically rich
> languages, I would be grateful for a hint!
>
> Another area of interest is related to the often mentioned correlation
> between morphological richness and lack of word order restrictions (and vice
> versa). Did somebody work on the relation between these two phenomena in
> language acquisition? (That is, presupposing a "late" (compared to lexical
> words) acquisition of morphology, is there a correlation between the amount
> or type of morphology acquired with the amount or type of word order
> variation in the target language? and so on... :-) )
>
>
> Thanks and best wishes
> Damir
>
>
> --
> Damir Cavar
> Web: http://mypage.iu.edu/~dcavar/
>
>
>




=====
Prof. William B. Snyder
Department of Linguistics
University of Connecticut