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Lexical Polycategoriality: Cross-linguistic, cross-theoretical and language acquisition approaches
Edited by Valentina Vapnarsky and Edy Veneziano
[Studies in Language Companion Series 182] 2017
► pp. 443–466

The acquisition of action nouns in Yucatec Maya

| Centro Peninsular en Humanidades y en Ciencias Sociales, UNAM

The fact that ergative-absolutive inflectional morphology applies to nouns as well as to verbs in Yucatec Maya obscures the boundary between nouns and verbs, and makes it difficult for children to acquire the distinction between them. Acquisition is particularly difficult for the category of action nouns which can be used as either nouns or verbs in Yucatec. The analysis of the spontaneous speech of two Yucatec monolingual children from 1;9 to 2;3 shows that the most frequent action noun ‘play, toy’ is used as both a noun and a verb in the children’s corpus. The children preferred the nominal use of other action nouns when referring to concrete objects. The frequency of action noun use in the adult speech, the discourse context and rephrasing affected the children’s use of action nouns to different degrees. Research on the acquisition of language-specific lexical categories is essential to understanding how children acquire language.

Keywords: language acquisition, Yucatec Maya, action nouns
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Structure of nouns and verbs in Yucatec
    • 2.1Action nouns
  • 3.Acquisition of nouns and verbs
    • 3.1 The acquisition of nouns and verbs in Mayan languages
  • 4.Acquisition of action nouns in Yucatec
    • 4.1 Data
    • 4.2 Nouns and verbs in the child speech
    • 4.3Action Nouns in the child speech
    • 4.4Action nouns in the input and child speech
    • 4.5 Discourse behavior
  • 5.Conclusion
    • 1.Arguments for action nouns being developed first as verbs
    • 2. Arguments for action nouns being developed first as nouns
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix: List of Abbreviations
Published online: 1 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.182.15pfe
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