This book deals with the emergence of nominal morphology from a cross-linguistic perspective and is closely related to Development of Verb Inflection in First Language Acquisition (ed. by D. Bittner, W. U. Dressler, M. Kilani-Schoch) both methodologically and theoretically. Each of the fourteen contributions studies the early development of the fundamental inflectionally expressed categories of the noun (number, case, gender) in one of the languages belonging to different morphological types (isolating, fusional-inflecting, agglutinating, root inflecting) and families (Germanic, Romance, Slavic/Baltic, Greek, Finnic, Turc, Semitic, Indian American). The analyses are based on parallel longitudinal observations of children in their second and early third year of life as well as their input. The focus lies on the transition from a pre-morphological to a proto-morphological stage in which grammatical oppositions and so-called "mini-paradigms" begin to develop. The point at which children start to discover the morphological structure of their language and the speed with which they develop inflectional distinctions of lexical items has been found to be dependent on the morphological richness of the input language on the paradigmatic as well as the syntagmatic axis of linguistic structure. The findings are interpreted within non-nativist theoretical frameworks (Natural Morphology, Usage-based theories).

Autorentext

Ursula Stephany, University of Cologne, Germany; Maria Voeikova, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Inhalt

Introduction
Ursula Stephany and Maria D. Voeikova

Early development of number in the Spanish noun
Carmen Aguirre and Victoria Marrero

The early development of Case and Number in Estonian
Reili Argus

Early phases in the development of Greek noun inflection
Anastasia Christofidou and Ursula Stephany

Early development of number in the Italian noun
Anna de Marco and Sabrina Noccetti

Early development of noun inflection in Russian
Natalia Gagarina and Maria D. Voeikova

Early nominal morphology in Turkish: Emergence of case and number
Nihan Ketrez and Ayhan Aksu-Koç

The early development of noun inflection in Polish
Dorota Kiebzak-Mandera

Relations between noun and verb plural development in two French-speaking children
Marianne Kilani-Schoch

The acquisition of number and case in Austrian German nouns
Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler

The acquisition of case, number and gender in Croatian
Melita Kovacevi , Marijan Palmovi? and Gordana Hrica

The acquisition of case and plural in Finnish
Klaus Laalo

The early development of number in Yucatec Maya
Barbara Pfeiler

The early development of number in Palestinian Arabic
Dorit Ravid

Personal pronouns and other forms of address in Lithuanian language acquisition
Ineta Savickiene