engleski

The Acquisition of Verbs in Croatian : The Aspect

The focus of the paper will be the acquisition of the Croatian system of verbal morphology. With seven tenses, two aspects and a complicated system of seven verbal classes with a lot of subclasses it seems complicated for adults too. However, children manage to acquire basic elements of verbal morphology earlier than one could expect. The course of development of verbal morphology will be briefly presented and the most common errors will be pointed out. Special emphasis will be put on the acquisition of aspect due to its cognitive importance as well as the relevance for crosslinguistic studies. In Croatian the aspect is expressed with rather complicated morphological rules (prefixes, infixes and their combination). Do they represent a constraint for Croatian children or do children find out strategies to overcome the difficuties?The analysis is based upon a longitudinal study of a Croatian girl, Antonija. The transcriptions and analysis were conducted according to the CHILDES system (CHAT format of the transcripts and CLAN programs for analysis).

acquisition; verbs; aspects

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