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Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 63–90

Chapter 3
Acquisition of nominal compounds in Russian

| | Russian Academy of Sciences

This chapter discusses early noun compound acquisition in the morphologically rich, but relatively compound-poor Russian language, reflected in lower frequency of compounds in CDS and CS. The results are based on longitudinal data of five typically-developing monolingual children and their caregivers, analysing first emergence, the development of different compound patterns, productivity, frequency, simplicity and transparency of compounds. Russian children start to acquire compounds quite early (at the beginning of the protomorphology stage), with productive and semantically transparent interfixed patterns (‘X+VERB’, later ‘X+NOUN’). The compound frequency in CDS depends not only on the target-system productivity of a pattern, but also on individual preferences and the topic of conversation. The simplicity of a pattern appears to have no impact on early acquisition.

Keywords: Russian compounds, frequency, productivity, transparency, simplicity, input-output relations
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Russian compounding: Main characteristics
      • 1.1.1Formation and usage
      • 1.1.2Semantics, structure and accentual features of compounds
      • 1.1.3Compound ‘candidates’ for early emergence in adult–child conversation
  • 2.The data and method
  • 3.Early development of compounds in Russian CS
    • 3.1Emergence of the earliest compounds
    • 3.2Development of compounding
    • 3.3Simplicity and transparency in compound acquisition
    • 3.4Individual features of compound repertoire in CS
    • 3.5Productive use of compounds
    • 3.6.Productivity and frequency in compound acquisition
      • 3.6.1Influence of target-language
      • 3.6.2Influence of ‘compound input’: Quantitative analysis
  • 4.Lexical typology
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.04kaz
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