فئات الأفعال في لغة الطفل العربية: الآثار المترتبة على اكتساب اللغة الأولى

Abstract

The study presents some generalizations drawn on the basis of observations on an Arabic speaking child with regard to the production of verbs. The underlying motivation is to examine the emerging patterns of verb inflectional categories and to what extent the results discovered could be accommodated within the current theoretical accounts of first language acquisition. The data examined for the present study consists of the spontaneous production of verbs by an Arabic speaking child. The analysis covers the age range from 2;4-2;6, which corresponds to the proto-morphological stage in first language acquisition where the child starts detecting morphology and inflectional morphology for the verb categories become productive. The results of the study indicate that Arabic speaking children develop verb categories rather early due to the word-structure properties of their native language. The findings are examined in light of cross-linguistic research pertaining to the acquisition of verb morphology.