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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
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