L3 - inflectional morphology - outlining theory perspectives

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  • Created by: BKW
  • Created on: 10-01-20 16:14
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  • L3 Inflectional morphology the two theories
    • what is it?
      • Inflection = marking words for grammatical features eg tense, person, number
      • Morphology = The study of these changes
      • English uses 2 types of inflectional morpheme
        • Suffixes - markers on end of words - play vs plays
        • Auxillaries - whole word changes eg is playing vs are playing vs will play
      • In English we virtually never use person/number marking
        • In the present tense we only use 2 suffixes and 3 auxillaries
    • Generativist account
      • when children use verbs like plays,played, is playing the verb&inflectional morphemes are stored separately- these categories are nnate
      • When a child produces an utterance they retrieve the relevant verb, correct tense and combines them using a 'rule'
        • This rule acts on any verb or morpheme the child knows  eg if they can do it with play+s they can do it with other verbs and morphemes eg walk+ed
      • children should be equally as good at 1. adding -s to all the different verbs they know 2. adding all the different morphemes they know to a particular verb
        • Full productivity
          • claim 3 key things
            • 1. child may not always add -s to a verb when required butshould be equally good at doing it with different verbs
            • 2. child may not always supply agreement-marking morphemes when required but should be equally goof at supplying all the different morphemes they know
            • 3. Child may not always supply agreement markng morphemes but provided they have learned the right one they should never supply wrong one
      • children go through phase where they think inflectional morphemes are optional
        • root infinite errors
    • Constructivist account
      • Inflection does not occur via a rule - child stores whole verb forms eg plays/played including auxillary verb combinations eg is playing
        • when enough have been stored the child schematizes across them to form morphological construction
          • this can happen at 3 levels 1. single words 2. auxillary+verb combos, 3. whole utterances
      • children would not predict full productivity because...
        • the child may simply have rote-learned eg plays and doesnt yet have the relevant slot/frame so if they havnt learned walks they have no schema to produce it
        • the child may have a verb+s pattern so can produce pays/walks but not a verb+ed, am verb+ing, is verb+ing

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