From discourse to semantics: the development of verb morphology and forms of self-reference in the speech of a two-year-old

Abstract

Recent linguistic studies have proposed that verb morphology has evolved to serve particular functions inherent to discourse. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply this proposal to the development of verb morphology in the spontaneous speech of a child from 1;10. 16 to 2;0.2. The question asked was whether there were any aspects of the child's discourse which may have been in part responsible for her differential use of verb morphology. To answer this question, a distributional analysis is presented of the child's speech in two different speech contexts: dialogue vs. crib-monologue. Despite the exiguous amount of data in the corpus, the analysis yields striking patterns of co-occurrences involving verb morphology and forms of self-reference. The patterns were interpreted as provisional evidence that the child may have been sensitive to discourse factors in her selective use of verb morphology. The data is analysed into four developmental phases. It is suggested that the semantic-level meanings of Phase IV are due in part to the type of discourse use to which the morphology is put in the earlier phases.