Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 108

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Randa Mulford
(1)1 SEMANTIC TRANSPARENCY — known elements with one-to-
one matches of meanings to forms are more transparent
for constructing and interpreting new words than elements
with one-many or many-one matches.
2 FORMAL SIMPLICITY — simpler forms are easier to acquire
than more complex ones, where simplicity is measured by
the degree of change of form. The less a word form changes,
the simpler it is.
3 REGULARIZATION — the paradigms (word sets) of a language
are regular in form.
4 PRODUCTIVITY — those word formation devices used often
by adults in word innovations are the most productive in
the language for constructing new word forms.
Clark formulated these principles on the basis of a large corpus
of children’s spontaneous lexical innovations in English, French and
German (see Clark 1982). She and her colleagues have also tested
some of the predictions which follow from the general principles in
experimental studies of agent and instrument noun formation in English
(Clark and Hecht 1982) and Hebrew (Berman, Hecht and Clark 1982).
The main objective of these studies has been to collect comparable
data on children’s word formation processes from several language
families (e.g. Germanic, Romance, Semitic) with the ultimate goal
of discovering how these principles, and perhaps others, interact to
account for general (universal?) patterns and language-specific facts
noted in the development of derivational morphology and related
word formation processes such as compounding.
I will report here on an experimental study of Icelandic children’s
use of the agentive/instrumental suffix -arí. The -arí suffix functions
in many ways like -er in English. It can be added to verb stems to
form both agent and instrument nouns. For example, someone who
paints (að mála) can be called málari, while a machine which mixes
things together (að blanda) can be called blandari. After describing
the experiment and its results in general terms, I will compare the
Icelandic data with the results of the analogous study conducted with
American children (Clark and Hecht 1982). Then I will discuss several
factors that may contribute to the similarities and differences in ac-
quisiton patterns noted for the two language groups.