Scenes of the Child and Morphemes of the Language
Jorma Toivainen2009
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Abstract
Scenes that a child has in his /her mind are not the same as we adults have in the same circumstances but there is something in common between these observations. The morphemes which the child uses have often much in common with the speech of the parents. We don't pay attention to the child's articulations that we do not understand. After a few trials the child will utter a word which is correct enough for the parents to understand. Morphemes are the smallest parts of speech that have meaning. Often words are indivisible. Most Finnish words, however, include suffixes which have something-in fact, very much-to do with meaning. Traditional standard models of grammar, including generative and cognitive ones, separate in the language two types of morphemes and meanings, namely lexical and grammatical items and open class vs. closed class meanings. It follows that there are two types of acquisition. The acquisition of the meanings of grammatical items in a language is, in principle, a different sort of process than learning the meanings of lexical items. Grammatical meanings are sampled from a fixed and pre-specified list, while lexical meanings vary indefinitely. John Lyons (1968, p. 438) pointed out that "there seems to be no essential difference between the 'kinds of meaning' associated with lexical items and the 'kinds of meaning' associated with grammatical items in those cases where the distinction between these two classes of deep-structure elements can be drawn. The notions of 'sense' and 'reference' are applicable to both." Dan I. Slobin (1997; 1999) proposed an alternative approach for the standard model. According to him, grammatical meanings are not a privileged set of meanings. That is, there is not a pre-specified set of meanings to be mapped onto grammatical morphemes. There are "closed classes" within the "open classes." There is great crosslinguistic diversity in the meanings expressed by comparable sets of small-class items, both This article presents analyses of Finnish child language data. The author supported the view that the so-called grammatical meanings may be associated with "lexical" meanings, especially when speaking about the acquisition of Finnish inflectional morphology. The Finnish child begins with endings which include unstressed long vowels, e.g., partitive cases in nouns and 3rd person present verb forms. This markings more iconical than grammatical in nature at first.
