engleski

A crosslinguistic study on the acquisition of person agreement in Croatian and Yukatek Maya

The aim of this research was to explain the crucial factors relevant for the acquisition of person marking in Croatian and Yucatec Maya. Previous studies on the acquisition of verbs have shown a dominance of the usage of verbal morphology in the one-word and two-word utterances (Kovačević et al. 2008). In this study we focus on how, in these two typologically different languages, subject participants emerge in children’s speech. Longitudinal data from child language corpora of both languages were analysed in a comparative way. Despite the fact that the target entities are not equivalent in these languages, person is acquired in a similar manner ; both are marked by verb inflection and periphrasis. We tested several factors which could influence the development of person verb marking: position, alignment, morphological transparency and prosodic saliency. Position has been shown to play the crucial role in the acquisition of person marking in this research since suffixation was identified as the most important factor for early person marking in both languages. In Croatian and Yucatec Maya children use the verb inflection in the obligatory context and also for different persons. In both languages person is marked in a periphrastic structure on the auxiliary in perfect and future tense in Croatian and in Yucatec in the transitive sentences in all aspects and in intransitive verbs in incompletive aspect. We compared the use of the Croatian auxiliary in verbs in perfect tense with the ergative marking on the auxiliaries of the Yucatec Maya verb complex. In both constructions person can be fused with the auxiliary. The results corresponds to the line of research singling out the importance of position in morphological acquisition (short overview: Dryer and Haspelmath 2013).

language acquisition; acquisition of person; Croatian; Yukatek

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