engleski

The Acquisition of Croatian Masculine Noun Morphology in Croatian as Second Language

The Croatian noun system differs three genders, two numbers and seven cases and the complexity of the system is manifested in a great number of paradigms, which are the result of the morphophonological rules and morphological synonymy. Much time is needed for the acquisition of such a complex system even to speakers to whom Croatian is the first language. Research showed that some paradigms of masculine nouns, the gender with the greatest number of different paradigms, are sometimes not being acquired until the age of six. So far it hasn't been systematically researched how Croatian morphology is acquired by adults who learn Croatian as second or foreign language. Some researches focused only on the typical errors which occur during the acquisition of cases regardless of the part of speech and the gender. In order to describe the acquisition of masculine nouns a test has been made, whose purpose was to inquire into production of four forms of 50 masculine nouns in four cases, Nominative and Genitive singular and plural, which have 19 different paradigms. This paper deals with the acquisition of masculine nouns by learners of Croatian as L2. Also it will be shown what strategies learners use during the inflection of unknown masculine nouns.

morphology acquisition; noun morphology; morphophonological rules; Croatian as second language

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