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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. 191–207

Chapter 8
Acquisition of compound nouns in Finnish

| | | | University of Tampere | Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies | University of Helsinki

This study first presents a general overview of compounding in Finnish and analyzes the compounds in child speech and child-directed speech in the recordings of two Finnish-speaking children from both quantitative and qualitative perspectives. The development of compound production is compared with the development of inflectional morphology. The first compounds are used at the same age as the language development proceeds to a new phase in grammatical development characterized by active use of suffixes (protomorphology). The compound neologisms of the two children are examined in the light of both the recordings and diary data. The first neologisms are based on transparent CDS models; later the children produce diversified innovative compounds which are transparent and thus easily understood.

Keywords: compounds, Finnish, child language, protomorphology, neologism
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Compounding in Finnish
    • 2.1 N+N compounds
    • 2.2Other types of noun compounds
  • 3.Types of compounds and their frequencies in Finnish CS and CDS
  • 4.Compound neologisms in child language
  • 5.Lexical typology
  • 6.Conclusion
  • References
  • Author query
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.09laa
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Amiridze, Nino, Rusudan Asatiani & Zurab Baratashvili
2019. Compounds or Phrases? Pattern Borrowing from English into Georgian. In Language, Logic, and Computation [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11456], ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Laalo, Klaus
2021. Chapter 10. Derivation in Finnish child speech and child-directed speech. In The Acquisition of Derivational Morphology [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders, 66], ► pp. 238 ff. DOI logo

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