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Part of
Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 165–189

Chapter 7
Acquisition of noun compounds in Estonian

| | Tallinn University

The main objective of the chapter is to identify the relevant factors in the acquisition of Estonian noun compounds on the basis of a corpus study of three monolingual Estonian children between 1;3 and 3;1. The results indicate that Estonian children acquire noun compounds early, starting with the most transparent and productive patterns. The importance of productivity can be seen in the recurrence of compounds and their members as independent words, as well as in the coining of novel compounds which occurred with relative frequency.

Keywords: Estonian noun compounds, word formation, early acquisition, novel words
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overview of noun compounds in Estonian
  • 3.Development of noun compounds in Estonian
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Emergence of the first compounds
    • 3.3Emergence of longer compounds
    • 3.4Structure and productive patterns of compound nouns used by Estonian children
    • 3.5Productive usage of compounds
    • 3.6Morphosemantic transparency of compounds
    • 3.7Frequency effects (input vs. output)
  • 4.Lexical typology
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.08arg
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