Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 114

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Randa Mulford
2.1 Compounds
These are primarily of the type Verb stem + connecting vowel +
maður (e.g. klifrimaður ‘climb-man’), although there were also oc-
casional Noun + maður compounds (e.g. boltamaður ‘ball-man’ in
response to grípa ‘to catch’). Compounding in general is an extremely
productive word formation process in the adult language, although
the types of Verb + maður/tæki compounds favored by the children
in this study are not highly productive in modern Icelandic for either
agent or instrument nouns. Some adult forms which might look to
children like examples of Infinitive Verb + maður/tœki compounds
(e.g. saumakona ‘seamstress’*‘to sew’+kona ‘woman’ or elda-
vél ‘stove’<e/dö *‘to cook’ + vél ‘machine’) are in fact formed of a
genitive plural noun (sauma<saumar, elda<eldur) plus -maður/tœki.
Such forms are apparently consistently interpreted by adult native
speakers as N + N compounds, but it is not clear whether young
children understand them as N + N or V + N.
2.2 No Change ofForm
In these cases, the child’s response was identical in form to the
verb infinitive that was part of the adult’s picture description. For
example, if the adult said: Hérna er mynd af manni sem er að klippa.
Hvað getum við kallað hannl ‘Here is a picture of a man who is cut-
ting. What could we call him?’, the child’s response would be klippa
‘cut’. Interpretation of such responses is problematic since at least
two reasonable possibilities exist. First of all, the child could be pro-
ducing a noun which is formally identical to the infinitive verb. Such
superficially identical pairs exist in adult Icelandic, especially for in-
strument nouns (e.g. lyfta ‘(to) Wlt'/lyfta ‘(an) elevator,’ greiða ‘(to)
comb‘jgreiða ‘(a) comb’). When noun-verb pairs of this type are dis-
cussed in English, they are said to be related by the process of ,,zero
derivation,“ whereby a word retains the same form although it is
grammatically reclassified from, for instance, a noun to a verb. Zero
derivation is a common lexical innovation process for both adult and
child English speakers (Clark and Clark 1979; Clark 1982). Although
zero derivation seems at first glance to relate Icelandic noun-verb pairs
like lyfta-lyfta in the same way as English pairs like cut-cut, adult Ice-
landic speakers tend to reject the analysis that there is a single word