17.360, Review: Lang Acqn/Morphology: Voeikova & Dressler (2002)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-17-360. Thu Feb 02 2006. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 17.360, Review: Lang Acqn/Morphology: Voeikova & Dressler (2002)

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1)
Date: 31-Jan-2006
From: Alexandra Galani < ag153 at york.ac.uk >
Subject: Pre- and Protomorphology 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 13:54:32
From: Alexandra Galani < ag153 at york.ac.uk >
Subject: Pre- and Protomorphology 
 

EDITORS: Voeikova, Maria D.; Dressler, Wolfgang U. 
TITLE: Pre- and Protomorphology
SUBTITLE: Early Phases of Morphological Development in Nouns and 
Verbs
SERIES: LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Lincom GmbH
YEAR: 2002
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-556.html 

Alexandra Galani, University of York

BOOK DESCRIPTION 

The volume is a collection of twelve papers on the acquisition of 
nominal and verbal morphology (inflectional and derivational) from a 
language-specific as well as cross-linguistic point of view. The first two 
chapters report on the acquisition of number and case from a cross-
linguistic perspective, whereas the remaining ten discuss patterns in 
French, Austrian German, Yucatec Maya, Finnish, Russian, Italian, 
Spanish and Croatian, respectively. The papers present some the 
results of the ''Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in 
Language Acquisition'' (Dressler, Austrian Academy of Sciences). 

Introduction (pp. 3-5)
Voeikova and Dressler give a short but nonetheless clear enough 
summary of the contents of the present volume. The papers address 
the question of how different morphological patterns -- in 
morphological rich languages which may be closely related or 
typologically different -- are acquired in similar ways. They explain that 
the ''Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology'' 
distinguishes two phases in acquisition: in the premorphological phase 
only few extragrammatical morphological operations occur and rote-
learnt forms are used. The system becomes dysfunctional, though, 
when syntactic patterns which require morphological marking of 
categories emerge. On the other hand and during the 
protomorphological phase of language acquisition, the morphological 
system begins to develop and children start to construct/acquire 
morphological patterns.

Stephany, Ursula
Early development of grammatical number -- a typological perspective 
(pp. 7-23)
Stephany discusses the development of grammatical number in the 
early developmental stage (0;11-4;08) from a typological perspective; 
Turkish, Finnish, Georgian, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Russian, Greek, 
Northern and Austrian German, Italian, French and Yucatec Maya. 
She takes in to consideration studies based on one child contra other 
works in the literature which have been conducted on many children 
for shorter periods of time. She attempts to address the following 
questions: do the differences between agglutinating and fusional 
languages influence the early development of nominal number 
marking? What are the differences/similarities between the 
developments of nominal marking in languages where it is marked 
periphrastically versus those in which it is marked synthetically? 
Finally, is the development of grammatical number influenced by the 
obligatory versus facultative marking of nominal number? Stephany 
reports that nominal number marking in agglutinating versus fusional 
languages as well as its synthetic versus analytic means of marking is 
not significantly different. She notes, though, that transparent marking 
in languages such as Turkish and French is mastered more easily and 
becomes productive more quickly than non-transparent one in 
languages such as Greek, Lithuanian or Russian. 

Stephany addresses the questions in a straightforward and 
comprehensible way. The reader knows exactly which questions 
around the development of grammatical number interest the author. 
The author provides useful tables which summarise the findings. The 
discussion of the development of number marking in agglutinating 
versus fusional languages is detailed and clear. This section is the 
lengthiest and the most interesting one. I believe that the paper could 
have benefited, if a brief summary of how the morphological system of 
nominal marking in each language works in general before emerging 
on to the patterns employed by children, as it is not always clear what 
the case is. 

Voeikova, Marina
The acquisition of case in typologically different languages (pp. 25-44)
Voeikova discusses the acquisition of the case systems in Croatian, 
Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Russian and Turkish. 
She focuses around the question of whether children -who acquire 
typologically different languages- show differences in the process of 
mastering case distinctions and examines if this difference can be 
explained in terms of the structure of each language. She concludes 
that there are language-specific features that play role in the 
acquisition of case systems. These may be syntactic, morphological or 
phonological. Syntactic features play a significant role in languages 
with periphrastic case marking, whereas in morphologically rich 
languages children develop a system which is not always connected 
to a syntactic development. On the other hand, in cases which involve 
the development of declension classes based on phonological 
patterns, children acquire case marking in an easier way. She clearly 
shows that when inflectional classes are not predicted overtly based 
on the phonological forms, children create a simplified system during 
the transition from the premorphological to the protomorphological 
stage in agglutinating languages in many cases.  

This is an interesting paper on the acquisition of case from a 
typological point of view. The discussion is clear and the paper is easy 
to follow. Voeikova first gives the main properties and characteristics 
of each language discussed and then moves on to the patterns 
noticed in child language acquisition.    

Kilani-Schoch, Marianne and Dressler, Wolfgang D. 
The emergence of inflectional paradigms in two French corpora: an 
illustration of general problems of pre- and protomorphology (pp. 45-
59)
Kilani-Schoch and Dressler argue that the emergence and 
development of morphological paradigms is an important level for the 
construction of morphological patterns by children. They examine the 
emergence of the first verb paradigms in two French children and 
propose that the morphological development is completed in three 
phases; pre-, proto- and modularised morphology. This consequently 
means that there is a difference between the emergence, the 
acquisition (Berman 1986) (during the pre-morphological stage with 
no grammatical morphology) and the mastery (Radford 1990) of 
morphological forms (protomorphological stage). In the 
premorphological phase, morphological operations are 
extragrammatical or role-learnt, whereas in the protomorphological 
phase, the system begins to develop, first limited to some lemmas and 
then increasing to new mini-paradigms. 

The chapter is theoretical in nature. The goals and the questions are 
well-presented. Exemplification of each point (both theoretical and 
empirical) is also good. The paper would have benefited, though, if 
the discussion of the findings has been further expanded, especially 
the section on morphosemantics. An explanation on the 
characteristics of macroclass and microclass would have also been 
useful. 

Klampher, Sabine and Korecky-Kröll, Katharina
Nouns and verbs at the transition from pre- to protomorphology: a 
longitudinal case study on Austrian German (pp. 61-73)
The authors compare the development of nominal and verbal 
morphology of an Austrian child focussing on the transition from pre- 
to protomorphology. They find that asynchrony is observed in the 
acquisition of nominal versus verbal morphology which is also parallel 
with the developmental sequences in the lexical development.

This is a well-written paper. The purposes of the paper are clearly 
defined in the first section. There is a good introduction to the data 
they are using and the results are presented in a clear, simple and 
coherent fashion. The tables, figures and examples provided also give 
a complete picture of the issues involved and the results reached. The 
sections are of equal length. 

Pfeiler, Barbara
Noun and verb acquisition in Yucatec Maya (pp. 75-82)
The purpose of this paper is to determine whether verbs are learnt 
later than nouns. The author attempts to present some findings 
around the acquisition of verbal and nominal morphology in Yucatec 
Maya. She concludes that the child first acquires deictic and 
topicalisation suffixes and then pluralisation ones with animate nouns 
and later possessive prefixes. On the other hand, the development of 
verb inflection starts at the age of 2;0. Nouns are acquired first and 
verbs are productively used only later on.

This is the shortest chapter in the volume. It is not clear whether it 
presents the findings of previous studies or a new analysis, and it 
appears to raise a lot more questions that what it actually addresses. 
It summarises the patterns observed in different Maya languages 
rather than what these results mean. The emphasis is put on verbs 
and not nouns. The discussion around nouns is too brief and is 
summarised to the extent where details which would provide crucial 
information to the reader are omitted. The author notes that ''verbs 
are learnt early, there is no prior noun explosion registered'' (p.77) but 
concludes that ''early vocabulary is characterised by nouns and only 
later by verbs'' (p.80). It is not clear, consequently, what the case is in 
Yucatec Maya. The full form of MLU could have been provided.   

Laalo, Klaus
Acquisition of case in Finnish: a preliminary overview (pp. 83-103)
Laalo discusses the acquisition of case in Finnish. He observes that 
Finnish children use nouns in only one form (nominative singular) in 
the very early stages. The first inflectional forms are the genitive and 
the accusative ones which also signal the beginning of the 
protomorphological phase. Local case suffixes are first used with 
deictic adverbs and gradually develop. Finally, plural case suffixes are 
first observed with partitive and nominative. 

The paper gives a short summary of the morphological case system in 
Finnish adult language and offers rich illustrations of each point 
before turning on to the acquisition of the system by children. Each 
case is discussed and explained in detail and exemplified with more 
than one example. The conclusion is clear and concise.

Savickiene, Ineta
The emergence of case distinctions in Lithuanian (pp. 105-114)
The chapter by Savickiene discusses the emergence of case patterns 
in Lithuanian in a simple and straightforward way. She observes that 
the morphological forms are acquired early, whereas the meaning of 
cases gradually. Although the discussion is interesting, it would have 
been nice to see clearly how these patterns relate to theoretical 
problems as far as language acquisition is concerned.  

Voeikova, Maria and Gagarina, Natalia 
MLU, first lexicon and the early stages in the acquisition of case forms 
by two Russian children (pp. 115-131)
In the present chapter, the acquisition of nominal case forms by 
Russian children is examined. The authors conclude that syntax and 
morphology, on one hand, as well as morphology and lexicon, on the 
other, are interdependent with language acquisition. They find that 
there is a correspondence between MLU and PBF. Noun production 
occurs before the onset of verb use.    

The chapter has a theoretical scope. It is an interesting paper which 
presents the data in a clear way, guides us through the processes 
followed in the analysis of the data and summarises the main points. It 
is the first paper in which cross-referencing is made and the reader 
can actually see how it relates to other works in the volume as well 
works which contribute to the project. Examples are well-presented 
(examples with glosses and translations).   

De Marco, Anna
The development of diminutives in Italian: input and acquisition (pp. 
133-151)
De Marco observes that the acquisition of diminutives occurs during 
the early stages of the development. The pragmatic meaning emerges 
sooner than the semantic one. When both diminutives and simplicia 
are used in the same speech event, a pragmatic use of the 
diminunitivised word is highlighted. She also observes a parallelism 
between the production of diminutives in the child's and mother's 
speech.  

Marrero, Victoria, Albalá, Maria José and Moreno, Ignacio
Use of diminutives by children and adults in Spanish: a preliminary 
analysis (pp. 153-162) 
This is a short paper which presents the results of the quantitative 
analysis concerning the use of diminutives in children and adult 
speech. The authors guides the reader through the methodology 
followed and summarise the results, although it would have been 
interesting and far more comprehensible if the results had been 
discussed in detail. They attempt to highlight some theoretical 
implications but they only devote the last couple of paragraphs to 
them. This does not permit the discussion to be either clear or 
complete and consequently convincing.  

Aguirre, Carmen
The acquisition of tense and aspect morphology: a key for semantic 
interpretation (pp. 163-176) 
Aguirre offers an interesting approach to the acquisition of tense and 
aspect morphology brining data from Spanish. She adopts the 
prototype theory to interpret the acquisition of tense and aspect. She 
further suggests that the key to the understanding of meaning of 
aspect and tense as well as to the establishment of their functional 
positions lies on verbal morphology. She observes that when children 
enter the protomorphological stage in verb morphology, agreement 
and tense marking emerge in Spanish. 

The present paper offers an interesting discussion on the acquisition 
of tense and aspect by presenting different theoretical approaches 
and frameworks. The main points of each theory are briefly but 
concisely presented, whereas Aguirre provides a comprehensive 
background of tense and aspect morphology in Spanish. It is a nicely 
laid out paper which raises interesting questions and is easy to read. 

Jelaska, Zrinka, Kovacevic, Melita and Andel, Maja 
Morphology and semantics: the basics of Croatian case (pp. 177-189) 
The paper discusses the morphology and the semantics of case in 
Croatian. They observe that there is a parallel between the 
characteristics of the words shared by both the input language and 
the child's language. Moreover, the number of tokens in child as well 
as input languages concentrates around the prototypical members. 

This work presents some interesting results which nevertheless 
should be incorporated within a wider theoretical context.  

OVERALL EVALUATION

The volume presents some interesting findings on child language 
acquisition. There are papers which clearly report on findings, 
whereas others which discuss the theoretical implications of the data 
and the results. The length of the papers varies which may also affect 
their value.  

Leaving aside the merit of the contributions, it is not clear how and if 
each paper is linked to the rest within the volume. It is not clear how 
the book is organised or why it is organised in this way. (The chapters 
are not organised in alphabetical order. The acquisition of case is 
discussed in chapters 2, 6, 7, 8, 12.) It would have been nice to see 
cross-referencing within the contributions, especially once there are 
papers which examine the same morphological patterns in different 
language sets, eg. the acquisition of case. This creates a feeling of 
incompleteness to the reader and does not make the volume as user-
friendly as it might have been expected to. The main problem is that it 
is not clear how the twelve papers all blend together. Based on the 
way they are arranged, it could be taken that they are individual works 
which have not been developed under the light of the ''Crosslinguistic 
project of Pre- and Protomorphology''. These issues could have been 
avoided, if the editors had explained the order in which contributions 
appear.   

The differences in the layout, omissions and typos - which are 
summarised in what follows - further suggest that the volume does not 
have a unified character.   

Stephany: 
The header is wrong. Instead of ''Early development of grammatical 
number -- a typological perspective'', it appears as ''The acquisition of 
case in typologically different languages'', the title of the next 
contributions. 

Voeikova: 
Footnote (1) corresponds to two separate parts in the text. In the first 
instance, the number of the footnote comes before the fullstop, 
whereas in the second one after the fullstop. 

Kilani-Schoch and Dressler: 
- All footnote numbers come before the fullstop in this paper, despite 
the fact that their numbering precedes punctuation marks both in 
general and throughout this book.
- p.45/55: parts of the paragraphs are not fully justified, as the 
remaining of the text. 
- p.56: A reference is missing for sign-based morphology. 

Klampher and Korecky--Kröll
- p.61: the number of sections in this chapter begins with (0) and not 
(1) as in the previous papers.  
- p.62: Problems with the use of punctuation mark after number of 
footnote (3) in the text.
- p.65: Unjustified paragraph.    

Pfeiler: 
- p.75: not all paragraphs are fully justified. 
- p.80/81: problems with the use of punctuation marks. 
- p.81: In the references, Peters (1996) appears before Peters (1983). 
Also page numbers appear before the publishers' information, contra 
the formatting following in the remaining papers.  

Laalo: 
- p.83: paragraph is not fully justified. 
- p.83: ''plural suffix --t'': this should have been in italics. 
- References section: books do not appear in italics. In edited works, 
editors are not cited following the conventional pattern. (Ed.) does not 
appear in brackets after the names of the editors.  

Savickiene:
- The layout of this paper is completely different to the one followed in 
the remaining of the book as far as the numbering and the headers of 
the sections as well as the line breaking are concerned (headers are 
not separated from the body of the sections, they proceed it on the 
same line. Empty lines separate the paragraphs.).
- An abstract is provided with this paper. Not all papers include one. 
- Age is given in boldface. This is not the case everywhere else. 
- References section: Not all book titles appear in italics. In edited 
works, the names of editors appear after the book title and before the 
publishers' information (eg. Dressler and Karpf 1995).       

Voeikova and Gagarina: 
- In this paper, sections are not numbered. 
- Kiebzak appears as (1999) in the text, whereas as (2000) in the 
references section. 
- p.117: ''poexal'' should have been given in italics. 
- p.118: ''consists in'' instead of ''consists of''. 
- p.119: Dressler et al. (1995-1996) in text but Dressler et al. (1996) in 
references. 
- p.119: footnote number appears before punctuation mark. 
- p. 121: Krasil'nikova (1993) in text but Krasil'nikova (1990) in 
references. 

De Marco: 
- One page abstract is given in this case. 
- The numbering of figures appears on top of the figures which is not 
common practise in the rest of the papers, as for instance in Voeikova 
and Gagarina's.
- In the references section, page number may be given after the 
booktitle and before the publishers' information or at the very end.  
- References section: ''and'' is missing from De Marco, A., L. Tonelli. 

Marrero, Albalá, Moreno: 
- Sections are not numbered. 
- Tables and figures are not numbered. 
- pp.159-160: Unjustified paragraphs. 

Aguirre: 
- p.166: When examples are given within the text, it is common 
practise they appear in italics. They do not, though, throughout the 
present work (p.166 versus p.167). 
- p.166: ''... to be a present perfect form1.'': (1) is probably a typo. 
- p.169: footnote number appears before the punctuation mark. 
- p.172, footnote (3): Aguirre 2002, the date should have been in 
brackets. 

Jelaska, Kovacevic and Andel:
- An abstract is included in this chapter.
- The numbering of sections begins with (0) and not (1). 
- p.189: References are given on a separate page. This practice is not 
followed throughout the rest of the volume. 

REFERENCES

Berman, R. (1986). A step-by-step model of language acqusition. In I. 
Levin (Ed.) Stage and structure. Norwood: Ablex. pp. 191-219. 

Dressler, W. U. and A. Karpf. (1995). The theoretical relevance of pre- 
and protomorphology in language acquisition. In G. Booij and J. van 
Marle (Eds.) Yearbook of morphology 1994. Dordrecht: Kluwer 
Academic Publishers. pp. 99-122.  

Peters, A. N. (1983). The units of language acquisition. New York: 
Cambridge University Press.  

_____. (1996). Strategies in the acquisition of syntax. In P. Fletcher 
and B. MacWhinney (Eds.) The handbook of child language. Oxford: 
Blackwell Publishers. pp. 462-482. 

Radford, A. (1990). Syntactic theory and the acquisition of English 
syntax. Oxford: Blackwell. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Alexandra Galani is a member of the Department of Language and 
Linguistic Science at the University of York (England). She has been 
working on the morphosyntax of tense and aspect in Modern Greek 
within Distributed Morphology. Her main research interests are: 
syntax/morphology interface, morphology/phonology interface, 
allomorphy, suppletion, the lexicon and the acquisition of morphology.





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