engleski

The Acquisition of Reflexive Clitics in Croatian

The group of reflexive verb constructions in Croatian encompasses semantically and syntactically diverse verbs: intransitive verbs with obligatory reflexive marker, intransitive verbs that have reflexive marker only in some constructions, and subgroup of transitive verbs that can be accompanied by reflexive marker if it marks either intransitivization of the verb or co- reference of the arguments, i.e. reflexive/reciprocal meaning. Given the diversity of reflexive constructions, children acquiring them in Croatian have a rather difficult task. In order to examine this process, reflexive constructions in linguistic production of three children aged 1 ; 2-3 ; 2 were studied. The data were extracted from Croatian corpora in CHILDES database using CLAN software. Reflexive constructions from children's utterances containing proper usage, overgeneralizations and omissions of reflexive marker were analyzed in terms of the verb's argument structure (one- vs. two-argument verbs) and the semantic and/or syntactic role that reflexive marker carries in a specific construction. The results give insight into the chronological aspect of the acquisition of verbs relative to their argument structure in Croatian, and demonstrate the process of learning to express semantically specific concepts, such as reflexivity and reciprocity.

linguistic production; verb acquisition; reflexive marker; verb argument structure; reflexivity

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