Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 107

RANDA MULFORD
On the Acquisition of Derivational
Morphology in Icelandic:
Learning about -ari*
0. Introduction
Although the development of inflectional morphology has received
a great deal of attention from child language researchers (see, for
example, Slobin 1973 and studies cited there, and Slobin, in press),
far less attention has been paid to the acquisition of derivational mor-
phology. There has been little systematic study to date of how children
master the devices available in their native languages for forming new
words (see Clark 1981b). How, for example, does an Icelandic child
learn that he can add the suffix -ari to a verb stem to create an agent
or instrument noun (e.g. kenna ‘to teach’—>kennari ‘teacher’) or add
the prefix ó- to a noun or adjective to produce its contrary (e.g. dýr
‘expensive’—>ódýr ‘cheap’)? Are there general principles which govern
the development of derivational morphology among different lan-
guage communities, comparable to the principles that Slobin (1973)
proposes for the development of inflectional morphology? Can such
principles account for differences as well as similarities in patterns
of development?
Clark (1981a) begins to address this neglected area of language de-
velopment by proposing several general principles which may be
involved as children learn about word formation in their native lan-
guages. These principles include:
* This research was supported by a NATO—NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship and by
a grant from the Icelandic Science Foundation (Vísindasjóður). I wish to thank the chil-
dren and staffs of Arnarborg and Fálkaborg nursery schools for their enthusiastic participa-
tion, and my research assistants Margrét Pálsdóttir and Pétur Pétursson, without
whose patient cooperation this study would not have been possible. I am also grateful
to Eve Clark and Höskuldur Þráinsson for their comments on an earlier version of
this paper.