On the emergence of verb paradigms in one Spanish child

Abstract

This paper studies the acquisition process of Spanish verbal morphology in a monolingual child. The study focuses on the period of the first 50 verb lemmas. This covers the period from age 1;7 till 1;10. The data shows that the verb acquisition process of this Spanish child follows three main stages: 1. A lexical stage in which verbs are only acquired as a lexical element. 2. A syntactic stage in which the verb, still contemplated as a non-split word, becomes the main element in the development of thematic and semantic relations. 3. A morphological stage in which verb suffixes begin to be analysed separately. At this stage, the relationship between form and meaning starts and the functional categories linked to the verb (tense, aspect, agreement, mood... ) begin to be acquired. Just at this moment, the first miniparadigms appear, which suggests that the acquisition process of verb morphology has started. The first two stages are premorphological and cover in our child the period till 1;9. In the last stage, which begins at 1;10, the child enters the protomorphological stage.