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Learning To Construct Verbs In Navajo And Quechua, Ellen H. Courtney, Muriel Saville-Troike

Ellen H Courtney

Navajo and Quechua, both languages with a highly complex morphology, provide intriguing insights into the acquisition of inflectional systems. The development of the verb in the two languages is especially interesting, since the morphology encodes diverse grammatical notions, with the complex verb often constituting the entire sentence. While the verb complex in Navajo is stem-final, with prefixes appended to the stem in a rigid sequence, Quechua verbs are assembled entirely through suffixation, with some variation in affix ordering.

We explore issues relevant to the acquisition of verb morphology by children learning Navajo and Quechua as their first language. Our study …

Child Acquisition Of Quechua Causatives And Change-Of-State Verbs, Ellen H. Courtney

Ellen H Courtney

This paper uses data concerning the acquisition of Quechua causatives to explore the development of morphological features that reflect variation in argument structure: (1) case-marking on the causees of morphological causatives and (2) transitivity permutations for change-of-state verbs. Quechua speakers assign to the causee varying degrees of volitional control through use of different case inflections. As to Quechua change-of-state verbs, those corresponding to verbs that participate in the causative alternation in other languages, such as English break and boil, pose a particular challenge. According to Levin and Rappaport Hovav (1994, 1995), these verbs tend to be basically transitive across languages, …