The volume deals with the emergence of verb morphology in children during their second and early third year of life from a cross-linguistic perspective. It covers 15 contributions - each analyzing one single language - based on parallel longitudinal investigations of children with parallel methodology and macrostructure in representation. The main question addressed is: How do children detect morphology and construct first subsystems of verbal inflection? The focus lies on the transition from a premorphological phase to a protomorphological phase. The main proposal consists in the concept of miniparadigms and of their relation to morpho-syntactic developments in early first language acquisition.
Introduction
Dagmar Bittner, Wolfgang U. Dressler, and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
Early verb development in one Spanish-speaking child
Carmen Aguirre
Early verbal morphology in Turkish: Emergence of inflections
Ayhan Aksu-Koç and F. Nihan Ketrez
The emergence of verb inflection in two German-speaking children
Dagmar Bittner
Early phases in the development of Greek verb inflection
Anastasia Christofidou and Ursula Stephany
The early verb development and demarcation of stages in three Russian-speaking children
Natalia Gargarina
A case study of the early acquisition of verbs in Dutch
Steven Gillis
Early development of verbal morphology in an English-speaking child
Insa Gülzow
Early verb development in one Croatian-speaking child
Antigone Katičič
Early verb inflection in French: An investigation of two corpora
Marianne Kilani-Schoch
Emergence of verb paradigms in one Austrian child
Sabine Klampfer
Early verb developmentin Finnish: A preliminary approach to miniparadigms
Klaus Laalo
Acquisition of verb morphology in Italian: A case study
Sabrina Noccetti
Early acquisition of the verbal complex Yucatec Maya
Barbara Pfeiler
Early verb inflection in Lithuanian
Pawel Wójcik