engleski

Semantic or grammatical primacy of prepositions? An example from acquisition of Croatian

An important aspect of language acquisition is related to the acquisition of spacial representations which are in many languages expressed by prespositions. Despite the language structure diversity and/or individual differences, a number of studies reported on quite a consistent developmental picture. Studies showed that there were regularities in the order and age of the acquisition of prepositions. Childrens verbal representations of space and undoubtedly learned at predictable ages and in predictable order. Conceptualization of different types of space, as e.g. functional space, proximate space or projective space and their linguistic features are formed at different stages of early development. In addition to that, a vast number of studies have supported the notion that verbal and nonverbal spatial cognition were strongly correlated. Although there were times and tendencies of neglecting crosslinguistic differences, or minimalizing their influence, and despite the presence of high level of consistency among the data, it would not be justified to conclude about the uniformity among languages, when considering the acquisition of prepositions. First, languages vary semantically to a certain degree, and secondly, the semantic concepts can be expressed with a number of grammatically different structures. Croatian is a morphologically complex language and the acquisition of spatial relations is inevitably related to the acquisition of grammatical structures. In order to express spatial relations properly, children need to become responsive to similarities and differences in both grammatical and semantic nuances. In this paper we will show the longitudinal data of two children, gathered from spontaneous speech samples. The analysis of the order of appearance of prepositions along with the acquisition of adequate grammatical marking will be presented. The proposed analysis, together with the analysis of the input data will serve as a basis for a discussion which will question what influences the spacial schemes that a child develops.

prepositions; language acquisition; semantics of prepositions; grammatical morphology

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