Learning to speak Greenlandic: a case study of a two-year-old's morphology in a polysynthetic language

Abstract

Child language acquisition data for Greenlandic Eskimo, a highly polysynthetic and morphophonologically complex language, promise to be the source of interesting evidence for general theories of the acquisition of morphological processes. The child in the pilot study here discussed appears already at the age of 2;3 to have mastered the use of a great number of derivational and inflectional affixes together with the morphohonemic patterns for their attachment to different stem types and to other affixes (up to at least four or five following the stem). This presents problems for traditional MLU calculations and calls for clearer criteria of morpheme productivity than may suffice for more analytical languages.

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