Establishing a Schema: Children's Construals o f Verb-Tense Marking  

Oleh:

Berman, Ruth A.

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Sciences (Full Text) vol. 5 no. 1 (1983), page 61-78.
Fulltext: 05_01_Berman.pdf (917.39KB)

Isi artikel

Over-extension of prefixal m- marking on certain classes of verbs by Hebrewspeaking children at the stage of early morpho-syntax is analyzed in relation to the learner's task in acquiring a wide range of verb inflections to encode, inter alia, distinctions of tense (present, past, future) and mood (imperative, infinitive). Children's widespread, although shortlived, use of such forms as *rni-zaher 'take care' versus normative nizhar, *mi-kanes 'go in' versus nixnas might be due to over-generalization of a specific morphological pattern-cf, li-kanes 'to go in', rni-cayer 'draws' (Berman 1981b). However, in morphological terms, this usage occurs only in those verb-classes which make no overt distinction between past and present tense in the unmarked 3rd masculine singular (nixnas means 'goes in' or 'went in', shar 'is singing' or 'sang'); and semantically, it is confined to verbs referring to current or ongoing activities. This indicates strongly that children initially adopt prefixal m- as a unique marker of present-tense, a feadble strategy since most Hebrew verb-pattern conjugations do, in fact, have m- initial prefixes in present tense. Implications of these findings are considered in terms of (1) the nature and role of children's "interim schemata" en route to productive rules subject to adult constraints, (2) the interpretation of "errors" in child language studies, and (3) the relation between children's construals and grammatical description-in this case, concerning the precedence of verb-tense over verb-pattern binyan systems in both language development (Berman 1980) and linguistic theory (Bolozky 1979).

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