Cover not available
Part of
The Acquisition of Derivational Morphology: A cross-linguistic perspective
Edited by Veronika Mattes, Sabine Sommer-Lolei, Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 66] 2021
► pp. 85–108

Chapter 4
Emergence and early development of derivatives in Danish child language

| University of Southern Denmark
| University of Southern Denmark

This chapter is a first attempt to describe and characterize the development of derivational morphology in monolingual Danish-speaking children’s early spontaneous speech. It introduces the Danish derivational system and gives an overview of the most common derivational types in Danish, emphasizing the interaction between derivation and prosody. It analyses derivatives in a corpus of parent-child-interactions and discusses factors impacting early development of derivatives. The results show that conventional derivatives appear from age 1;3–1;7. The most frequent derivatives and derivational patterns in child speech are also among the most frequent in child-directed speech. Only a very small inventory of derivational patterns has emerged up to age 3;11, and only vague traces of an emerging knowledge of productive derivation are found.

Keywords: input-output relations, frequency, prosody, conversion, mini-paradigm criterion of potential productivity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Danish derivational morphology
    • 2.1Root changes
    • 2.2Derivation versus inflection
    • 2.3Derivation versus compounding
    • 2.4Prosody of Danish derivatives
  • 3.Derivational affixes relevant for Danish child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS)
    • 3.1Noun derivation
      • 3.1.1Prefixes
      • 3.1.2Suffixes
      • 3.1.3Implicit derivation
      • 3.1.4Conversion
    • 3.2Verb derivation
      • 3.2.1Prefixes
      • 3.2.2Suffixes
      • 3.2.3Implicit derivation
      • 3.2.4Conversion
    • 3.3Adjective derivation
      • 3.3.1Prefixes
      • 3.3.2Suffixes
      • 3.3.3Conversion
    • 3.4Operationalization
  • 4.Hypotheses
  • 5.Data basis
  • 6.Distribution of derivatives in CS and CDS
    • 6.1Noun derivation
    • 6.2Verb derivation
    • 6.3Adjective derivation
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 10 November 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.66.04kja
References
Ambridge, B., Kidd, E., Rowland, C. F. & Theakston, A.
2015 The ubiquity of frequency effects in first language acquisition. Journal of Child Language 42(2): 239–253. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Basbøll, H.
2005 The Phonology of Danish. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
2018 Danish imperative formation: A problem for the phonology/morphology interface. Scandinavian Philology 16(2): 219–244.Google Scholar
2019 Danish word-structure, the Non-Stød Model, and some comments about Norwegian tonal word accents. In Fonologi, sosiolingvistikk og vitenskapsteori. Festskrift til Gjert Kristoffersen (Phonology, sociolinguistics and theory of science. Festschrift to Gjert Kristoffersen), J. K. Hognestad, T. Kinn & T. Lohndal (eds), 47–64. Oslo: Novus.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H., Bleses, D., Cadierno, T., Jensen, A., Ladegaard, H. J., Madsen, T. & Thomsen, P.
2002 The Odense language acquisition project. Child Language Bulletin 22: 11–12.Google Scholar
Basbøll, H.
Forthcoming. A general model of word-structure and its application to Danish, emphasizing the interaction between morphology and prosody. In Inflection vs. Derivation, W. U. Dressler ed. Vienna Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften
Basbøll, H., Kjærbæk, L. & Lambertsen, C.
2011 The Danish noun plural landscape. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 43(2): 81–105. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauer, L.
2011 IE, Germanic: Danish. In The Oxford Handbook of Compounding, 2nd edn., R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds), 400–416. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Berko, J.
1958 The child’s learning of English morphology. Word 14(2–3): 150–177. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bleses, D.
2000 Transparens og produktivitet i danske børns tilegnelse af verbers præteritum (Transparency and productivity in Danish children’s acquisition of past tense verbs). Nydanske Studier og Almen Kommunikationsteori (NyS) 26–27: 165–196. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bleses, D., Vach, W., Wehberg, S., Faber, K. & Madsen, T. O.
2007 Tidlig kommunikativ udvikling (Early communicative development). Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag.Google Scholar
Booij, G.
2006 Inflection and Derivation. In Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2nd edn., Vol. 5, K. Brown (ed), 654–661. Oxford: Elsevier. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bybee, J.
1995 Regular morphology and the lexicon. Language and Cognitive Processes 10: 425–455. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Christensen, L. H. & Christensen, R. Z.
2019 Dansk Grammatik (Danish Grammar), 2nd edn. Odense: University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V.
1993 The Lexicon in Acquisition. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2014 Acquisition of derivational morphology. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds), 424–439. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Clark, E. V. & Hecht, B. F.
1982 Learning to coin agent and instrument nouns. Cognition 12(1): 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Den Danske Ordbog
(The Danish Dictionary). Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab & Gyldendal. [URL]> (30 April 2021).
Derwing, B. L. & Baker, W. J.
1986 Assessing morphological development. In Language Acquisition: Studies in First Language Development, 2nd edn, P. Fletcher & M. Garman (eds), 326–338. Cambridge: CUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Diderichsen, P.
1946 Elementær Dansk Grammatik (Elementary Danish Grammar). Copenhagen: Gyldendal.Google Scholar
Dressler, W. U., Lettner, L. E. & Korecky-Kröll, K.
2010 First language acquisition of compounds with special emphasis on early German child language. In Cross-Disciplinary Issues in Compounding [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 311], S. Scalise & I. Vogel (eds), 323–344. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dressler, W. U., Sommer-Lolei, S., Korecky-Kröll, K., Argus, R., Dabašinskienė, I., Kamandulytė-Merfeldiene, L., Ljäs, J. J., Kazakovskaya, V. V., Laalo, K. & Thomadaki, E.
2019 First-language acquisition of synthetic compounds in Estonian, Finnish, German Greek, Lithuanian, Russian and Saami. Morphology 29: 409–429. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gregersen, F. & Kristiansen, T.
2009 Dansk sproglære (Danish language learning). Copenhagen: Dansklærerforeningens Forlag.Google Scholar
Hansen, E. & Heltoft, L.
2011 Grammatik over det danske sprog I (Grammar of the Danish), Vol. 1–3. Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab.Google Scholar
Herslund, M.
2001 The Danish s-genitive: From affix to clitic. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 33(1): 7–18. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2002 Danish [Languages of the World 382]. Munich: Lincom.Google Scholar
Jespersen, O.
1923 Börnesprog (Child Language). Copenhagen: Gyldendal.Google Scholar
Katlev, J.
2000 Etymologisk ordbog (Etymological Dictionary). Copenhagen: Politikens Forlag.Google Scholar
Kilani-Schoch, M. & Dressler, W. U.
2005 Morphologie naturelle et flexion du verbe français (Natural Morphology and French Verb inflection). Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar
Kjærbæk, L.
2013 Tilegnelse af bøjningsmorfologi: En undersøgelse af substantivernes pluralisbøjning hos normaltudviklede danske børn i alderen 0–10 år (The acquisition of inflectional morphology: A study of noun plural inflection in typically developing Danish children in the ages of 0–10 years). PhD dissertation, University of Southern Denmark.
2015 Danske børns tilegnelse af bøjningsmorfologi – udviklingen af substantivernes pluralisbøjning i alderen 0–10 år (Danish children’s acquisition of inflectional morphology – the development of noun plural inflection in the ages of 0–10 years). Nydanske Sprogstudier (NyS) 48: 106–138. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kjærbæk, L. & Basbøll, H.
2015 Testing hypotheses on frequency effects – Noun plural inflection in Danish children. In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Monolingual and Bilingual Speech 2015, E. Babatsouli & D. Ingram (eds), 168–181. [URL]> (30 April 2021).
2016 Interaction between input frequency, transparency and productivity in acquisition of noun plural inflection in Danish. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics 52(4): 663–686. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 Compound nouns in Danish child language. In Nominal Compound Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61], W. U. Dressler, F. N. Ketrez & M. Kilani Schoch (eds), 39–62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 Competition in the acquisition of Danish noun plural markers. In Nordic Child Language, L. Kjærbæk & A. Esbensen (eds). RASK – International Journal of Language and Communication 49: 25–48.Google Scholar
Kjærbæk, L., dePont Christensen, R. & Basbøll, H.
2014 Sound structure and input frequency on noun plural acquisition: Hypotheses tested on Danish children across different data types. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 37(1): 47–86. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Korecky-Kröll, K., Sommer-Lolei, S. & Dressler, W. U.
2017 Emergence and Early Development of German Compounds. In Nominal Compound Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61], W. U. Dressler, F. N. Ketrez & M. Kilani-Schoch (eds), 19–37. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laaha, S., Kjærbæk, L., Basbøll, H. & Dressler, W. U.
2011 The impact of sound structure on morphology; An experimental study of children’s acquisition of German and Danish noun plurals focusing on stem change. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 43(2): 106–126. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laws, J.
2019 Profiling complex word usage in the speech of English preschool children: frequency patterns and transparency characteristics. First Language 39(6): 593–617. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lieber, R.
2004 Morphology and Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: CUP.Google Scholar
Lippeveld, M. & Oshima-Takane, Y.
2014 The effect of input on children’s cross-categorical use of polysemous noun-verb pairs. Language Acquisition 22: 209–239. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 Nouns to verbs to nouns: When do children acquire class-extension rules for deverbal nouns and denominal verbs? Applied Psycholinguistics 36: 559–588. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacWhinney, B.
2000a The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. 1: Transcription Format and Programs. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
2000b The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk, Vol. 2: The Database. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Madsen, T. O., Basbøll, H. & Lambertsen, C.
2002 OLAM – et semiautomatisk morfologisk og lydstrukturelt kodningssystem for dansk (OLAM – a semiautomatic morphological and phonological coding system for Danish). Odense Working Papers in Language and Communication 24: 43–56.Google Scholar
Olsen, S.
2014 Delineating derivation and compounding. In The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, R. Lieber & P. Štekauer (eds), 26–49. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar
Ordbog Over Det Danske Sprog
(Dictionary of the Danish Language). Copenhagen: Det Danske Sprog- og Litteraturselskab & Gyldendal. [URL]> (30 April 2021).
Paulin, M. N. & Beckman, M. S.
2004 Danske børns tilegnelse af nominalmorfologi – Undersøgelse af substantivernes pluralisbøjning hos førskolebørn (Danish children’s acquisition of nominal morphology – Study of noun plural inflection in preschool children) Unpublished examination paper. University of Southern Denmark.Google Scholar
Peters, A. M.
1997 Language typology, prosody, and the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. In The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition, Vol. 5, D. I. Slobin (ed.), 136–197. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.Google Scholar
Plunkett, K.
1985 Preliminary Approaches to Language Development. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.Google Scholar
1986 Learning strategies in two Danish children’s language development. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology 27: 64–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rajnik, E.
2011 Wortbildung des Substantives im Dänischen – explizite und implizite Derivation (Noun derivation in modern Danish – affixational and affixless derivation) [Seria Filologia Skandynawska 13]. Poznan: Adam Mickiewicz University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I.
1973 Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In Studies of Child Language Development, C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (eds), 175–208. New York NY: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar