Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1983, Page 118

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Randa Mulford
Table VII. Percentage ofAgent and Instrument Nouns Supplied by
Formation Type: English and Icelandic Compared
(% based on 480 responses, all age groups combined)
Noun Type Agents Instruments
English Icelandic English Icelandic
-er/-ari 78 81 64 62
Compound 8 4 5 3
Suppletive 4 2 13 3
No Formal Change -- 9 -- 23
Other Derived — 3 — 5
Total 90 99 82 96
4. Discussion
4.0
A major value of crosslinguistic studies of this type is that they
allow one to begin to tease apart language-specific factors in linguistic
development from potentially more general, and even universal, in-
fluences. They may also allow one to reflect on the possible effect
of different data collection methods on the results. Such methodologi-
cal effects are detectable to the extent that data collected by the same
method in different language communities resemble each other while
data collected by other methods pattern differently. I would like to
take up each of these factors in turn and consider how each may con-
tribute to the similarities and differences in the English and Icelandic
data reported here.
4.1 Methodological factors
Because the identical method was used in both studies, possible
methodological influences should be the same in the two language
groups. If the data collected in these studies are compared with those
available on children’s innovative agent and instrument nouns from
other sources (e.g. observations of children’s spontaneous coinages
in nonexperimental settings), there may be reason to attribute the
results in part to the data elicitation technique. Specifically, the chil-
dren produced large proportions of -erj-ari derived nouns (see Table
VII), proportions that seem out of line with observations of sponta-
neous coinages. This is particularly true for Icelandic. In the naturalis-