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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. 39–62

Chapter 2
Compound nouns in Danish child language

| | University of Southern Denmark
|

This chapter presents a study of the development of compound nouns in Danish children and gives an introduction to compounding in Danish. We examine the compound nouns in child directed speech (CDS) and child speech (CS) in recordings of four Danish children from the first occurrence (at the ages of 1;7, 1;7, 1;7 and 1;10) up to the ages of 2;5, 2;5, 2;11 and 3;11, respectively. We found that the vast majority of compounds are endocentric N+N compounds. The development goes from prototypical compounds to more complex compounds. In general, we see very much the same picture in CS as in CDS.

Keywords: Danish, compounds, first language acquisition, prosody, word-formation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Compounding in Danish
  • 3.Compound nouns in Danish
    • 3.1Endocentric compounds
    • 3.2Exocentric compounds
    • 3.3Coordinative compounds
    • 3.4Morphosemantically opaque compounds
  • 4.Data and method
  • 5.Results: Compound nouns in Danish CS and CDS
  • 6.Summary and further analyses
    • 6.1The first compound contrasts
    • 6.2Morphosemantically opaque compounds
    • 6.3Swapped elements
    • 6.4As substitute for a conventional word
    • 6.5Innovative compound nouns (neologisms)
  • 7.CDS versus CS
  • 8.Lexical typology
  • 9.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Author query
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.03kja
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