Barbara Pfeiler

On the role of morphological richness in the early development of noun and verb inflection

This study proposes a new methodology for determining the relationship between child-directed speech and child speech in early acquisition. It illustrates the use of this methodology in investigating the relationship between the morphological richness of child-directed speech and the speed of morphological development in child speech. Both variables are defined in terms of mean size of paradigm (MSP) and estimated in a set of longitudinal spontaneous speech corpora of nine children and their caretakers. The children are aged 1;3–3;0, acquiring nine different languages that vary in terms of morphological richness. The main result is that the degree of morphological richness in child-directed speech is positively related to the speed of development of noun and verb paradigms in child speech.

A universal cue for grammatical categories in the input to children: Frequent frames

Highlights • Data from typologically diverse languages shows common distributional patterns.• Discontinuous repetitive patterns in the input provide cues for category assignment.• Morphological frames accurately predict nouns and verbs in the input to children.

Maintenance of Kaqchikel ritual speech in the confraternities of San Juan Sacatepéquez, Guatemala

Abstract Syncretism has been a profound influence on Guatemalan society of which it has been a part since early Spanish colonization in the 16th Century. Both the incorporation and application of Spanish borrowings, as well as notions of Catholic doctrine in ritual Kaqchikel speech can be seen as a permanent process of religious, cultural, economic and social contact. The spiritual concepts of Kaqchikel traditionalist believers and their representative confraternities in San Juan Sacatepéquez have been transmitted and preserved during these five centuries through their prayers. The prayers are characterized by a high rhetorical style of formal language, a wide variety of invocations to the Christian God and Catholic saints and use of Spanish borrowings, none of which have apparently eclipsed this indigenous oral traditional genre. Certain literary figures typical of Mesoamerican ritual speech, such as parallelism, diphrasism and other types of repetitions, continue to appear in the prayers. In the present study, we analyze this ritual speech form from its literary and linguistic aspects, as well as the “inner view” of the confraternity members of San Juan Sacatepéquez. We focus on syncretism in the prayers to better understand how the confraternities have conserved their indigenous spirituality despite pressure from the Catholic Church.