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The perfective past tense in Greek child language*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2008

STAVROULA STAVRAKAKI  and
HARALD CLAHSEN
STAVROULA STAVRAKAKI
Affiliation:
University of Thessaloniki
HARALD CLAHSEN*
Affiliation:
University of Essex
*
Address for correspondence: Harald Clahsen, Department of Linguistics, University of Essex, Colchester, C04 3SQ, UK. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

This study examines the perfective past tense of Greek in an elicited production and an acceptability judgment task testing 35 adult native speakers and 154 children in six age groups (age range: 3 ; 5 to 8 ; 5) on both existing and novel verb stimuli. We found a striking contrast between sigmatic and non-sigmatic perfective past tense forms. Sigmatic forms (which have a segmentable perfective affix (-s-) in Greek) were widely generalized to different kinds of novel verbs in both children and adults and were overgeneralized to existing non-sigmatic verbs in children's productions. By contrast, non-sigmatic forms were only extended to novel verbs that were similar to existing non-sigmatic verbs, and overapplications of non-sigmatic forms to existing sigmatic verbs were extremely rare. We argue that these findings are consistent with dual-mechanism accounts of morphology.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , January 2009 , pp. 113 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

*

We thank Gaberell Drachman, Claudia Felser, Despoina Papadopoulou, Ursula Stephany, Evangelia Thomadaki and two anonymous JCL reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. We are also grateful to Anna Anastasiadi for discussions on Greek verb morphology, Giorgos Orfanos for letting us have access to the Neurosoft corpus and João Verissimo for statistical advice. Thanks also go to Nikoletta Dalatsi and Eleni Vletsi for helping us count the verb lemmas in the Neurosoft corpus, and to the undergraduate students of the Department of Speech and Language Therapy at the Technological Educational Institute of Epirus in Ioannina who collected the data for the present study under the supervision of the first author.

References

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