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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. 209–230

Chapter 9
The acquisition of compound nouns in North Saami

| Sámi University of Applied Sciences

This chapter examines the acquisition of compound nouns in one Saami-speaking child at age 1;8–2;11. Saami compounds are mainly subordinate endocentric words. They are composed of a non-head and a head, the former preceding the latter. In the non-head, there is substantial morphological and morphophonological variation. The child’s compounds were mainly semantically and morphosemantically transparent. Opaque compounds were mostly pragmatically important words. The most common morphological types of compound nouns appeared in the child’s language before age 2;6. The frequency of various non-heads in child-directed speech corresponds with the order of appearance of different types of compounds in the child’s language. This also correlates well with the amount of different types of compound words used by the child.

Keywords: North Saami, word formation, compound, morphophonology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Types of nominal compounds in Saami
  • 3.The data
  • 4.The emergence and early development of compounds in Saami child language
    • 4.1The emergence of compounds
    • 4.2Lexical typology
    • 4.3The non-heads
    • 4.4Contrastive forms of compounds
    • 4.5Recursivity
    • 4.6Neologisms
    • 4.7Semantic transparency of the non-head and head
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.10ija
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