Morphology and Language Acquisition
نویسندگان
چکیده
Morphology is language specific and must be acquired on the basis of particular linguistic data. This chapter addresses three central issues for the understanding of morphological acquisition: the distributional properties of morphology, the mechanisms of learning from data, and the developmental patterns and trajectories in child language. First, corpus studies of child directed language reveal a systematic pattern of data sparsity: in general, only a (small) fraction of possible morphological forms will be attested in the acquisition data. The child learner, then, must be able to form wide ranging generalizations from early on, and on very partial corners of the morphological paradigm. Second, we review evidence from morphological development, especially the study of English past tense, and draw two broad conclusions: (a) morphologically complex forms appear not memorized by association but are learned in relation to their morpho-phonological classes, lexicalized or otherwise, and (b) as far as child language is concerned, morphological productivity appears categorical, where children often over-use productive processes but almost never commit analogical errors. Third, we situate morphological learning models in the context of language acquisition, where psychological considerations pose additional challenges and constraints. The child must proceed in an incremental and unsupervised fashion, which deprives them of assumptions (such as stem and derived pairs) that are taken for granted in theoretical analysis. Along the way, we discuss how language acquisition may provide useful insight for the theoretical study of morphology.
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