engleski

Expansion of Verbal System in Language Acquisition in Croatian

Prior research of language acquisition in Croatian (Kovačević at al. 2006) has shown specific developmental trajectories in the acquisition of Croatian noun and verb forms. In Croatian, after the initial phase in language acquisition in which early vocabulary consists of approximately same number of nouns and verbs, expansion of verbs follows (this phase was labeled as verb spurt). In that phase the number of verbs increases much faster then the number of nouns. Verb spurt is explained typologically, identifying traits that could be found in other languages, as well. These features are identified as morphological richness, verbal independency and relatively free word order. It is claimed that these features not only explain verb spurt in Croatian, but also in other languages such as Yucatec Maya, a language that is typologically distant, but still sharing the relevant traits: morphological richness, verbal independency and free word order. The aim of the present work was to examine the explanatory power of the identified typological traits regarding the verb spurt in Croatian. This has been achieved by relating the increased number of tokens of certain verbs to a. increased number of morphological categories of the verb b. increased number of syntactic reductions in utterances c. increased number of syntactic forms with free word order We used Croatian Corpus of Child Language (Kovačević 2002), as a part of the word bank of child language CHILDES (MacWhinney 2000). We also used Frequency dictionary based on the Corpus. Ten most frequent verbs common to all children from the Corpus were extracted (auxiliary and modal verbs were excluded). Every appearance of these verbs in Corpus was indexed in order to establish morphological features and syntactic environment. By analyzing the data from the Corpus, we have shown the developmental trajectories of the morphological features for every verb and all syntactic forms in which the verb has appeared.

language acquisition; verbal system; morphology; syntax

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