"Many theories of language acquisition struggle to account for the morphological complexity and diversity of the world's languages. This book examines the acquisition of complex morphology of Murrinhpatha, a polysynthetic language of Northern Australia. It considers semi-naturalistic data from five children (1;9-6;1) collected over a two-year period. Analysis of the Murrinhpatha data is focused on the acquisition of polysynthetic verb constructions, large irregular inflectional paradigms, and bipartite stem verbs, which all pose interesting challenges to the learner, as well as to theories of language acquisition. The book argues that morphological complexity, which broadly includes factors such as transparency, predictability/regularity, richness, type/token frequency and productivity, must become central to our understanding of morphological acquisition. It seeks to understand how acquisition is impacted by differences in morphological systems and by the ways in which children and their interlocutors use these systems"--.

• The Acquisition of Complex Morphology
• Editorial page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Table of contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1. Setting the scene
  • 1.1 Historical and sociolinguistic context
  • 1.2 Research questions and monograph outline
• Chapter 2. Grammatical background
  • 2.1 Phonology and orthography
  • 2.2 Verbs
    • 2.2.1 Complexity in use
    • 2.2.2 Prosodic structure of verbs
    • 2.2.3 Bipartite stem verbs
    • 2.2.4 Inflectional patterns of classifier stem paradigms
• Chapter 3. Acquisition of verbs and verb morphology
  • 3.1 Crosslinguistic study of language acquisition
  • 3.2 Early verb production
    • 3.2.1 Phonological and prosodic accounts
      • 3.2.1.1 Perceptual salience
      • 3.2.1.2 Prosodic licensing model
    • 3.2.2 Morphosyntactic accounts
      • 3.2.2.1 Perceptual salience and grammar
      • 3.2.2.2 Root infinitives and analogue hypotheses
  • 3.3 Verb lexicon in acquisition
    • 3.3.1 Semantics of early verbs
    • 3.3.2 Verbs and pragmatic development
      • 3.3.2.1 Speech act development
  • 3.4 Acquisition of inflectional morphology
    • 3.4.1 Nativist/generativist approaches
    • 3.4.2 Usage-based approaches
    • 3.4.3 Protomorphology
    • 3.4.4 Morphological complexity
    • 3.4.5 Quantifying morphological development
  • 3.5 Acquisition of bipartite constructions
• Chapter 4. Methodology
  • 4.1 Relationships
  • 4.2 Focus children
  • 4.3 Recording
  • 4.4 Transcription and coding
• Chapter 5. Early verbs
  • 5.1 Structure of bipartite stem verbs
    • 5.1.1 Prosodic licensing account
      • 5.1.1.1 Monosyllabic verbal PWord targets
      • 5.1.1.2 Disyllabic verbal PWord targets (ˈσ σ)
      • 5.1.1.3 Trisyllabic verbal PWord targets (σ ˈσ σ)
      • 5.1.1.4 Tetrasyllabic verbal PWord targets (σ σ ˈσ σ)
      • 5.1.1.5 Developmental stages of verbal PWords
  • 5.2 Semantics and pragmatics of early verbs
  • 5.3 Summary
• Chapter 6. Acquisition of classifier stem paradigms
  • 6.1 Development of CSP cell diversity
  • 6.2 Development of CSP cell diversity in a matched sample
  • 6.3 Errors of commission and the development of diversity
    • 6.3.1 Future precedes non-future
    • 6.3.2 Closely related CSPs
    • 6.3.3 Singular subject person supra-inflection classes
  • 6.4 Discussion
• Chapter 7. Acquisition of bipartite stem verbs
  • 7.1 Analysing contrastive CSP use
  • 7.2 Contrastive CSPs
    • 7.2.1 Semantically opaque contrastive CSPs
    • 7.2.2 Semantically transparent contrastive CSPs
      • 7.2.2.1 ‘On’ alternation
      • 7.2.2.2 ‘Close’ alternation
      • 7.2.2.3 Reflexive/reciprocal alternations
  • 7.3 Non-standard bipartite stem combinations
    • 7.3.1 Learning ‘to find’
    • 7.3.2 Learning ‘to throw/fish’
  • 7.4 Development of bipartite stem verbs
• Chapter 8. Discussion
  • 8.1 Structure of early verbs
  • 8.2 Semantics and pragmatics of early verbs
  • 8.3 Acquisition of complex verb paradigms
  • 8.4 Acquisition of bipartite stem verbs
  • 8.5 Reflections and future directions
• Appendix. Murrinhpatha classifier stem paradigms
• References
• Index