“I puts it away”—early proto morphological ways of inflecting verbs in a child acquiring Saami

Abstract

In this article, some protomorphological ways of inflect verbs in the acquisition of Saami at age 1;8–3;0 are discussed. The main focus is the forms for first person singular present indicative. The child uses the adult-like forms during all the period since the emergence of first person singular at age 1;9–1;10 but in addition to the adult-like forms, there are three main ways to inflect verbs in the child’s language. Using the stem without the -n-suffix is a typical way of inflection at the age of 2;0–2;8. Almost at the same time, at 2;1–2;9, the forms for third person singular present indicative are used instead of the adult-like forms for first person singular. The third difference compared to adult language is the strong gradation of consonant centres in bisyllabic verbs.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5128/ERYa6.06

Keywords

• bilingual first language acquisition
• morphology
• verb inflection
• North Saami
• Finnish