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The Acquisition of Swahili Verbal Morphology Kamil Ud Deen UCLA

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The Acquisition of Swahili Verbal Morphology Kamil Ud Deen UCLA The Acquisition of Swahili Verbal Morphology Kamil Ud Deen UCLA Abstract (1) a. Zahne putzen b. Thorstn das haben Recently, much attention has focused on the so-called teeth brush-inf. Thorstn that have-inf Root Infinitive(RI) phenomenon, where children in ' (Someone) brushes ' Thorstn has that .' languages such as German use infinitival verbs in root (his) teeth.' context, seemingly optionally. English has been c. Papa schoen wassen d. Ik ook lezen argued to be an RI language (Wexler 1994), though daddy shoes wash-inf. I also read-inf. English speaking children use bare stems instead of ' Daddy washes (the) ' I also read .' infinitives. Languages such as Italian, however, have shoes.' been shown not to exhibit RIs in early child language. I e. Michel dormir là f. ‘Tasha ouvrir present results from a study of Swahili, a Bantu Michel sleep-inf there Natasha open-inf. language with rich agglutinative morphology. Swahili ‘Michel sleeps there’ ‘Natasha is opening/ is an SVO language in which the verbal clause has the going to open/wants following order of morphemes in an affirmative to open it.’ indicative sentence: Subject Agreement – Tense/Aspect – (Object Agreement) – Verb Root – (derivational Wexler (1994) argues that English children also suffixes) – Mood Vowel. If we assume that the linear produce RIs, just like their German, Dutch and French order of morphemes is a reflection of the hierarchical counterparts. He shows that although they do not order of heads (Baker’s (1985) Mirror Principle), then produce infinitives per se, they produce bare verbs (2), the morphology of Swahili allows us to test various which are missing all obligatory inflectional affixes. theories of the dropping of functional morphemes. The Wexler argues that these forms are the English speech of four Swahili speaking children ranging in age corollary of RIs. from 1;8 to 3;1 was recorded in Kenya, transcribed in the CHAT format and coded. The results show that (2) a. Teddy cry b. Eve sit floor Swahili children do not produce RIs, but do omit Agr ‘Teddy is crying’ ‘Eve is sitting on and T/A markers. Thus the verb may surface with a the floor’ Person agreement marker alone, a T/A marker alone, or neither Person nor T/A. In the latter case the verb Interestingly, children acquiring Italian (or Spanish or appears as a bare stem, analogous to what we find in Catalan) do not to go through this stage (Grinstead English. These results are discussed in the light of 1998; Guasti 1993/1994). Instead, Italian children, for various theoretical analyses of RIs, specifically the example, seem to converge on the adult grammar Metrical Omission Model (Gerken, 1991), the Small extremely early with respect to this phenomenon. This Clause Hypothesis (Radford 1986; Radford 1990), is surprising since Italian, unlike English, does have a Rizzi’s (1994) Truncation hypothesis, Wexler’s (1994) true infinitive. Thus European languages can be underspecification of tense theory, Hoekstra & Hyams’ classified into two groups: root infinitive languages and (1998) underspecification of number theory, and non-root infinitive languages. Root infinitive languages Schütze & Wexler’s (1996) ATOM model. The basic can further be divided into true RI languages and bare clause typology is found to be most compatible with verb languages. Note that the only well-studied ATOM, although ATOM fails to account for many of language that fits into the bare verb category is English. the details in the data. (3) 1. Introduction Root infinitive languages Non-root-infinitive Children acquiring certain European languages go languages through a stage in which they use infinitival verb forms True RIs Bare Verbs in root context. This stage, called the Root Infinitive German, Dutch, English Italian, Spanish, Stage, or the Optional Infinitive Stage, is characterized French, Swedish, Catalan, etc. by the optional use of utterances such as the those in Russian, etc. (1). This phenomenon has been heavily studied in several languages, most notably German (1a. and b., from Poeppel & Wexler (1993)), Dutch (1c. and d., This typology of languages is a problem in our field. from Weverink (1989)), and French (1e. and f., from What is the cause of this typology and how do other Ferdinand (1996)). languages fit into this typology? Part of the problem is that relatively little is known about children acquiring non-European languages. The goal of this paper is to The verb is embedded within a verbal complex, the broaden the inventory of languages that is used in structure of which is given in (6). I will briefly describe developing acquisition theory, and show that limiting each element in this complex, except for the optional our focus to the well-known European languages leads derivational suffixes, which are not relevant to this to conclusions which do not truly reflect the constraints discussion. on child language. I will present results from a longitudinal study of four Swahili speaking children. I (6) Subject ± Tense ± Object ± Verb±suffixes± Mood will first outline some important features of Swahili, Agr. Agr. and then present results showing how Swahili children (SA) (T) (OA) (V) (M) use verbal morphology. I will show how Swahili fits into the typology in (3), and discuss the difficulties Subject agreement marks person and number as shown these data pose for several influential theories of early in (7), and there are several tense/aspect markers, given child language : the Metrical Omission Model, the in the table in (8). Small Clause Hypothesis, the Truncation Hypothesis, the Underspecification of Number Hypothesis, the (7) SA Paradigm1 Underspecification of Tense Hypothesis, and ATOM (mimi) nilianguka 1st, Singular © I fell .© (Agr-Tense Omission Model). I will show that while (wewe) ulianguka 2nd, Singular © You fell .© the data are most compatible with ATOM, the (yeye) alianguka 3rd, Singular © He/She fell .© complexity of the Swahili data can not be accounted for (sisi) tulianguka 1st, Plural © Wee fll.© by any single theory proposed thus far. (ninyi) mulianguka 2nd, Plural © You all fell .© (hawa) walianguka 3rd, Plural © They fell .© 2. Swahili Swahili is an eastern Bantu language spoken primarily (8) in Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and neighboring areas. Morpheme Meaning The dialect of Swahili in this study is that spoken in and li past perfective around Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. It is an SVO na present on-going/habitual language; the subject and the object may be optionally ta Future null. The verb occurs in a verbal complex which contains inflectional material as well as grammatical ka Narrative function changing suffixes. me present perfect sha present perfect completive (4) Subject - Verbal complex - O bject ki habitual, conditional Optionally Contains Optionally ng/nga hypothetical null inflectional and null ku infinitival derivational material. Object agreement also marks person and number, but unlike Subject Agreement, is optional. The optionality Most verb roots in Swahili are monosyllabic and of Object Agreement is dependent on the intended contain a single vowel, but as the table in (5) shows, interpretation of the direct object ± if the direct object is other verb root structures are not uncommon. The final specific, Object Agreement is obligatory, and if the vowel in the examples in this table are the obligatory Direct Object is non-specific, Object Agreement is final vowel in Swahili, without which the verb cannot obligatorily absent. Because of this optionality and the surface. Each example has the indicative final vowel. complications it poses, I will only discuss Subject Agreement, Tense and Mood in this paper. (5) Mood is marked as a suffix, and is always the final C p-a to give vowel in the verbal complex. This final vowel VC iv-a to become ripe, mature alternates three ways between the indicative [a], the CVC pig-a to hit subjunctive [e] and the negative [i]. The indicative CVCC shind-a to win final vowel occurs with on-going actions/states, present VCVC azim-a to borrow, lend habitual actions, past actions/states, future actions/ VCC imb-a to sing states, imperatives, etc. The subjunctive is used to express desires, possibility, necessity, requests, etc. VCCVC anguk-a to fall Primary stress in Swahili is on the penultimate syllable of any multisyllabic word (Ashton 1947; Maw and Kelly 1975; Myachina 1981; Vitale 1985). Thus in a disyllabic verb, the stress falls on the first syllable of (11) AgrSP the stem, as in (9). Furthermore, secondary stress AgrS’ usually falls on the subject agreement marker. SA TP T’ (9) ni - li-m-fuat-a nìlimfuáta T AgrOP SA- T-OA-V – IND AgrO’ ‘I followed him’ OA MoodP Mood’ Examples are given in (10). (10a) is a transitive Mood VP indicative sentence. The subject is Juma and the object V’ V is Mariam, both proper names. The verbal complex shows 3rd person singular subject agreement with Juma, contains the past tense ‘li’, and 3 rd person singular 3. The Data object agreement with Mariam. The verb root ‘fuat’ is Turning now to the acquisition data, the data collection followed by the Indicative final vowel ‘a’. was conducted over a period of 11 months in Nairobi, Kenya. Biweekly recordings were made of naturalistic (10) speech in the homes of four children of differing ages. a. Juma alimfuata Mariam The data were audio recorded and transcribed using Juma a – li – m – fuat – a Mariam CHAT format (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). Because Juma SA -past-OA -follow-IND Mariam 3sg 3sg of various social and economic difficulties, it was not ‘Juma followed Mariam’ possible for all four children to remain in the study for the duration of the project. The table in (12) provides b. Tafadhali nipatie kalamu the basic descriptive facts about each child. Tafadhali ni – pat – i – e kalamu Please OA -give-applic-SUBJ pen 1sg (12) ‘Please give me a pen’ Child Age range No.
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