Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 115

Learning about -ari
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involved with two grammatical funtions (Höskuldur Þráinsson, per-
sonal communication). Instead, they see distinct noun and verb forms
related by a common stem (e.g. lyft-) plus their appropriate suffixes,
either an infinitival -a or a weak feminine singular nominative -a.
These two suffixes happen to be identical. While there is no evidence
in this study that Icelandic children recognize the internal structure
of the noun and verb forms in the same way adult speakers do, there
is also no evidence that they do not. Thus it is unclear whether their
,,no change of form“ responses can be equated with the zero-deriva-
tion process common in English, even if such responses are intended
to be nouns.
The second possibility is that children are simply repeating the in-
finitive verb used in the adult’s description. If, during the experiment,
we suspected that children were automatically repeating the verbs that
the experimenter used, we tried to encourage them to produce differ-
ent responses. Sometimes they changed to another kind of noun (e.g.
with -ari), but often they persisted in giving infinitive-like responses,
especially for instruments. Since there was no consistently reliable way
(e.g. use of a deteminer with intended nouns) to distinguish between
true, infinitive-like (zero-derived?) nouns and simple repetitions of
the verb, I have included all responses of this type in ,,No Change
of Form“ category.
2.3 Other Derived Forms
This category represents other innovative nouns that are somehow
formally related to the stimulus verb. Many of these verb-noun pairs
are modelled in the adult language, although it is not always clear
that the derivational processes involved are currently productive in
adult Icelandic. (See Mulford 1980 for more discussion.) Some exam-
ples from this category include: að drekka 'to drink'<drekki ‘one who
drinks’ (cf. adult pairs like að bursta ‘to brush’cbursft' ‘brush’), að
hoppa ‘to hop'<hopp ‘one who hops’ (cf. adult að loka ‘to close’</oA:
‘lid’), and að grípa ‘to catch’<gnpu ‘something that catches’ (no adult
model).
2.4 Suppletives
These are cases where children used an existing word, morphologi-
cally unrelated to the verb, to name new instruments or agents. For
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