Linguistic Development Research Paper Page 23
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379 THE COMPLEX PERIOD
23
Morpheme
Example
Present Progressive: -ing
he is sitting down
Preposition: in
the mouse is in the box
Preposition: on
the book is on the table
Plural: -s
the dogs ran away
Past Irregular: e.g. went
the boy went home
Possessive: -’s
the girl’s dog is big
Uncontractible Copula be: e.g. are, was
Are they boys or girls
was that a dog?
Articles: the, a
he has a book
Past Regular: -ed
he jumped the stream
Third Person Regular: -s
she runs fast
Third Person Irregular: e.g. has, does
does the dog bite?
Uncontractible Auxiliary be: e.g. is, were
is he running?
were they at home?
Contractible Copula be: e.g. -’s, -’re
that’s a spaniel
Contractible Auxiliary be: e.g. -’s, -’re
they’re running very slowly
Table 6: Order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes.
beginning of the sentence, then inverting the order of the subject and the auxiliary verb. by applying
such rules we could change the statement “I was eating pizza” into “why was I eating pizza?”.
Other transformational rules allow us to generate negations (see below in table 7) imperatives,
relative clauses, and compound sentences.
“I was not eating pizza”
“eat the pizza!”
“I who hates cheese, was eating pizza”
“I was eating pizza and john was eating spaghetti”
As the child’s mean length of utterance rises above 2.5 they will begin to produce variations in the
declarative model. However, young children acquire the transformational rules in a step by step
fashion. If, in order to produce a certain kind of sentence such as a negated question (“why was john
not eating pizza?”), one had to employ both the wh-transformation and the negation-transformation.
But if one only knew the correct form of the wh-transformation then the result might seem a bit
strange.
“why not was I eating pizza?
“not why was I eating pizza?”
There are two main kinds of question; those which yield a yes/no answer, questions which ask
whether a declarative statement is true or false. In contrast wh-questions are asking respondents to
provide information other than a simple yes/no.
I early stages of the telegraphic phase the child will issue interrogatives by using a declarative
sentence with a raised inflection. wh-words are occasionally placed at the beginning of the telegraphic
sentences generating simple wh-questions such as “where doggy?” or “where doggy go?”. Later on
the children will use auxiliaries.
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