Marianne Kilani-Schoch

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.

Filler + Infinitive and Pre- and Protomorphology Demarcation in a French Acquisition Corpus

This paper presents a case study on the acquisition of grammatical morphemes via fillers, i.e., underspecified place holders, with particular focus on early structures made up of a filler followed by an infinitive. The path leading from fillers to French semi-auxiliaries and subject clitics is analyzed within the framework of Natural Morphology and constructivism which assumes that grammatical modules are not innate but are constructed by children. The evolution of fillers in the corpus studied is described as a grammaticization process of form and meaning through successive linguistic dissociations. Emphasis is put on the functional polyvalence of fillers and on their relation to the main phases in the construction of grammar.

The role of (explicit) contrast in adjective acquisition: A cross-linguistic longitudinal study of adjective production in spontaneous child speech and parental input.

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16–36 months) acquiring eight different languages. Adjectives in child speech and child-directed speech were coded as either unrelated or related to a contrastive term in the preceding context. Results show large differences between children in the growth of adjective production. These differences are strongly related to contrast use. High contrast users not only increase adjective use earlier, but also reach a stable level of adjective production in the investigated period. Average or low contrast users increase their adjective production more slowly and do not reach a plateau in the period covered by this study. Initially there is a strong relation between contrast use in child speech and child-directed speech, but this relation diminishes with age.

Towards naturalness scales of pragmatic complexity

Abstract This paper is an attempt to handle pragmatic complexity within the framework of Natural Linguistics. Specifically it aims at building two naturalness scales of the complexity of pragmatic inferences based on the naturalness parameters of trans-parency–opacity and of biuniqueness–ambiguity, illustrated mainly with French examples. The scales are complementary: transparency–opacity deals with hierarchized meanings, biuniqueness–ambiguity with exclusive alternative meanings. Pragmatic complexity is intended here as a function of the number and types of inferences or inferential steps included in the description of an utterance meaning. It is defined quantitatively and qualitatively and converges with cognitive complexity. The scales distinguish phenomena that are to varying degrees opaque or ambiguous (indirect, elliptic or non-literal) according to whether there is flouting or violation of a Gricean maxim and how this takes place. The number of cotextual and/or contextual dimensions as well as variable cog-nitive operations, modes of reasoning and meaning relations are taken as measures of pragmatic complexity. The paper also discusses the relation between complexity and markedness. This issue reveals a conflict between the perspectives of speaker and hearer.

Métathèse et conversion morphologiques en arabe tunisien

Zusätzlich zu einer morphonologischen Metathese (§ 2) kennt das Arabische von Tunis auch eine — in den Sprachen der Welt sehr seltene — rein morphologische Metathese bei der Bildung deverbaler Nomina actionis, die mit Konversion (§ 3), Affigierung und Ablaut (§ 4) komplementär verteilt ist. Auf die synchrone Beschreibung folgt die diachrone Ableitung von Metathese und Konversion aus klassisch-arabischen Ablautbildungen (§ 6). In einem explanativen Teil wird zunächst ein hoher Grad an morphologischer Unnatür lichkeit auf dem universellen Parameter der Diagrammatizität festgestellt (§ 8) und diachron mit Änderungen im System der arabischen prosodischen und segmentalen Phonologie in Zusammenhang gebracht (§ 9). Schließlich werden Prinzipien der systemabhängigen Natürlichkeit (§ 10—13) und der typologischen Angemessenheit (§ 14—15) bezüglich ihrer Erklärungskraft miteinander verglichen.