Other Languages, Societies, and Cultures Commons^™

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 …