Working Papers 4, 2000
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Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 Department of Linguistic Science The University of Reading 2000 Contents Vol 4, 2000 Preface v The emergence of tense and agreement in Kuwaiti children speaking Arabic 1 Khawla Aljenaie Opacity and sympathy theory 25 Photini Coutsougera Dissociated lexical and grammatical development in children with specific language impairment 47 Richard Ingham ‘Salience’ as an explanatory factor in language change: evidence from dialect levelling in urban England 63 Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams Caste and class: reassessing their significance in investigating sociolinguistic variation and change in urban India 95 Sonal Kulkarni Testing Social Network Theory in a rural setting 123 Jonathan Marshall Early verbs in bilingual acquisition: a lexical profiling approach 175 Indra Sinka, Michael Garman and Christina Schelletter 2 Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 Preface We are pleased to present the fourth volume of Reading Working Papers in Linguistics. It represents work being done in the Department of Linguistic Science as of the current academic year 1999-2000, and includes contributions from staff and students in the fields of phonology, sociolinguistics, bilingual and monolingual language acquisition and language impairment. Richard Ingham Paul Kerswill Reading, Summer 2000 Our thanks are due to Michalis Georgiafentis for preparing the text for the Web (May 2001) Address for correspondence: Linguistic Science Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences The University of Reading Whiteknights PO Box 218 Reading RG6 6AA e-mail: [email protected] [email protected] 3 The emergence of Tense and Agreement in Kuwaiti children speaking Arabic Khawla Aljenaie Department of Linguistic Science, The University of Reading Abstract. This paper investigates the emergence of tense and agreement in Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). Arabic is a highly inflected language and FCs are highly parameterized. Tense has a regular paradigm of person, gender, and number formatives. The discussion is set in the context of Chomsky’s principles and parameter model of Universal Grammar (UG). According to Chomsky, parameterization is limited to Functional heads like Comp (complementizer), Inf (inflection), and Det (determiner). There is debate over the availability of UG. On one hand, the Continuity Hypothesis claims that all principles of UG are available from the start. On the other hand, Maturation Hypothesis asserts that UG principles emerge according to an innately specified maturation schedule. A study of morphosyntactic development in KA should provide: interesting insight into acquisition and development of KA; a test of whether UG principles are available to Kuwaiti children from the earliest stages; a study of the pattern of appearance and development of tense and agreement in Kuwaiti children. Two Kuwaiti children (age range 2;0-2;6) were audio recorded in free speech setting (45 minutes session fortnightly). The analysis was run in SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language Transcript, Miller & Chapman, 1993). The results reveal a variety of distinct inflections from the earliest recording and development is rather gradual. Within the tense paradigm, present is the most extensively represented. Individual differences are noted across the two paradigms and within the same morphological paradigm. 1. Introduction Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG) has stimulated both psycholinguists and linguists to search for rules of grammar that explain a child’s acquisition and development of language. The question that evokes debate is “when do principles of UG become available to the child?” A variety of positions emerge in the recent literature. There are two distinct hypotheses, the Continuity Hypothesis and the Maturation Hypothesis. The former postulates that all principles of UG are available to the child from the start (Pinker 1984). The latter claims that UG principles emerge according to an innately specified maturation schedule (Borer & Wexler 1987; Radford 1990; Wexler 1990). These hypotheses are established on only a few languages, and thus Arabic provides a useful 1 K ALJENAIE testing ground. To what extent are UG principles available to an Arabic- speaking child from the early language production? And what developmental patterns characterise the acquisition of Arabic? The acquisition of western languages has been intensively studied. The acquisition of Arabic has received a very little attention. There are two studies that could be mentioned here: Omar (1973) studied the acquisition of Egyptian Arabic of 37 children (ranging in age from 6 months to 15 years) which mainly focussed on the nominal and adjectival morphology besides syntax and phonology. One of the major findings related to this paper is the fact that Egyptian children enter the multiword stage between 2;6-3;0. Second, morphology emerges at the age of 2;6. The second study was conducted by Abdu & Abdu (1986) on the acquisition of Palestinian Arabic of their two children. The data reveals early appearance of grammatical inflections before the age of 2;0 as well as individual differences in the developmental order and the time of appearance. Unfortunately, the previous studies lack quantitative measures of frequency and productivity. 2. The Arabic language and Kuwaiti Arabic (KA) The Arabic language, which belongs to the Semitic group of languages is classified as Classical Arabic (CA), Modern standard Arabic (MSA) or Modern Literary Arabic, and Colloquial Arabic. Classical Arabic is the language of the Quraan (the Holy book of Muslims). MSA is a written form of the language and it is used in the media (radio, newspaper, and television), education, legal and formal texts. The grammar or morphology of Classical Arabic still applies sufficiently to MSA. However, MSA differs from Classical Arabic mainly in vocabulary and stylistic features (Fischer 1997). The expansion of the mass media has led to the popularity of the MSA (Bulos 1965). Colloquial Arabic dialects are used primarily for ordinary oral communication and each country in the Arab world is characterized by its own dialect (Beeston 1970; Bulos 1965; Fischer 1997). Arabic is a synthetic language and the inflectional markers are realized in suffixes, prefixes and infixes as well. Often two or three of these markers combined together. For example: prefixes ma-ktab ‘office’, infixes in-t-aqala ‘transferred or moved’ and suffixes !ammr-a ‘red-F’ (Owens 1997). The characteristic feature of Semitic languages is their basis of consonantal roots (CCC), which mostly consist of three consonants (triliteral) (Beeston 1970). The triliteral root is the most common type in the language (Erwin 1963). There are some 2 EMERGENCE OF TENSE AND AGREEMENT quadriconsonantal roots and also a limited number of biconsonantal roots. A variation in shade of meaning is obtained first by varying the voweling of the simple root, and secondly by the addition of the prefixes, suffixes, and infixes. By the combination of the root + vowel pattern a stem is attained which make up word classes (Bakall 1979; Erwin 1963; Jensen 1990; Lyovin 1997; Mitchelle 1962; Owens 1997). Various words with the same root share same meaning through their association with that root (Bakalla 1979). For example, daras ‘he studied’, madrasa ‘school’, modarris ‘male teacher’ etc, are related to the triliteral root drs which means ‘studying’. Erwin (1963) categorizes triliteral roots into two types. The first type is the strong root (CCC; C stands for a consonant) which includes sound roots (second and third radical are not identical), e.g. ktb ‘write’ and double roots (second and third radical are identical such as skk ‘close’). The second type is the weak root where one or more radical element is unstable with either ", w or y or it may be represented by vowel length. Examples of the second type are "kl ‘eat’, rwV ‘show’ and yVV ‘come’ (the V stands for the weak radical). It is important to emphasize that the root and pattern are “theoretical abstractions” and not pronounceable in their own realization (Beeston 1970; Jensen 1990). 2.1 The Verb Arabic has its own system of derived stems into which triliteral verbs fall into and most Arabic dialects maintained. MECAS (1965:110) describes the verb derivation: “the system of derived or increased forms is one by which modification to the First Form of a verb are accompanied by modification in the meaning”. Within that system there are 10 derivational Classes (Template or Forms) (Erwin 1963; Kaye & Rosenhouse 1997; MECAS 1965). For the purpose of this paper, the main focus is on three Classes only. 1. Class 1: Mostly simple verbs belong to this Class like taa! ‘fall’. Both transitive and intransitive verbs belong to this Class which has no particular meaning. 2. Class II: is the class to make transitive verbs from other forms and the most frequent meaning of the verbs in this Class is causative. Verbs in this Class are characterized by a double middle radical. The conjugation of the Class I verb taa! ‘fell’ is tayya! ‘fell/drop’ intransitive causative verb since verb taa! ‘fell’ is a weak middle root tV!, the y in the 3 K ALJENAIE causative form is basically the weak radical of that root as elaborated above. 3. Class V: is often considered a reflexive counterpart of Class II, where prefixes t- to Class II verb or sometimes from Class I. For example sabba! ‘to give a bath’ and the conjugation of that verb is tesabba! ‘to take a bath’. Class V renders the intransitive equivalent of the Class II. 2.2 Tense Tense is a complex issue; grammarians have used terms like perfect (which denotes completed action) and imperfect (which denotes incomplete action) (Bulos 1965; M.E.C.A.S. 1965; Mitchelle 1962). It is not easy to know whether there is an aspectual or tense distinction in Kuwaiti Arabic. Holes (1990) acknowledges that there is an overlap between past tense and perfect aspect. Lyovin (1997) also indicates that perfect is used for the past, while imperfect is used for both present and past, that is for ongoing actions where there is no certain end.