From emergence to acquisition
Developmental issues in Arabic interlanguage morphology
This paper concerns the emergence and development of agreement marking in Arabic interlanguage. It investigates the effect of competing structures (pragmatics, semantics and morphosyntax) on the development of Arabic subject-verb agreement morphology. It is hypothesised that Arabic Interlanguage morphology is constrained by the availability of processing strategies (Clahsen, 1986) and competing information structures (Bates and McWhinney, 1981; 1987) especially when dealing with complex agreement patterns. The results show that linguistic complexity (a) influences the types of processing strategies employed and (b) determines the order of acquisition of different agreement patterns. It is also revealed that when the three information structures compete for interpretation of speech, morphosyntax emerges as the least influential eventhough it seems that S-V agreement in Arabic, at least on the surface, is essentially a transfer of morphosyntactic features (person, number and gender) from the subject onto the verb.
https://doi.org/10.1075/aral.20.1.05man
References
Cited by
Cited by 2 other publications
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 06 january 2023. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.