“I puts it away”—early proto morphological ways of inflecting verbs in a child acquiring Saami

• Published in: Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühingu aastaraamat. Estonian Papers in Applied Linguistics
• Main Author: Johanna Ijäs
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English; Estonian
• Published: Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Ühing (Estonian Association for Applied Linguistics) 2010
• Subjects: bilingual first language acquisition; morphology; verb inflection; North Saami; Finnish; Philology. Linguistics; P1-1091; Finnic. Baltic-Finnic; PH91-98.5; saami
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.5128/ERYa6.06; https://doaj.org/article/4eaa4bd1f68d4f759c870af54d89ff71

In this article, some protomorphological ways of inflect verbs in the acquisition of Saami at age 1;8–3;0 are discussed. The main focus is the forms for first person singular present indicative. The child uses the adult-like forms during all the period since the emergence of first person singular at age 1;9–1;10 but in addition to the adult-like forms, there are three main ways to inflect verbs in the child’s language. Using the stem without the - n -suffix is a typical way of inflection at the age of 2;0–2;8. Almost at the same time, at 2;1–2;9, the forms for third person singular present indicative are used instead of the adult-like forms for first person singular. The third difference compared to adult language is the strong gradation of consonant centres in bisyllabic verbs. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/ERYa6.06