earticle

영어

Jun, Jongsup & Sun-Young Lee. 2016. English-Speaking Children’s Acquisition of Derivational Morphology Based on the Affix Level in the Affix Ordering Hierarchy: Analyses of the CHILDES Database, Korean Journal of Linguistics, 41-3, 521-543. English derivational morphology has been a big issue in theoretical linguistics. In the field of language acquisition, however, it has been something that cannot be sufficiently investigated despite its importance in vocabulary acquisition. One problem is that L1 English-speaking children do not produce enough number of derivation types for researchers to find out meaningful generalizations. The goals of this paper are two-fold. One is to investigate distributional properties of English-speaking children’s use of derivational morphology by analyzing the 4.8 million-word speech transcripts of 1,220 L1 English-speaking children in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney & Snow 1985, 1990). The other is to find out whether English-speaking children learn derivational morphology with reference to the affixation levels in Kiparsky’s (1982, 1983) Level Ordering Hypothesis in lexical phonology. The results of the study indicate that more than half the 2,000 derived word types produced by 1,220 English-speaking children are derivatives of -al, -ous, -tion, -er/or, -ly, and –y, that Level 2 suffixes are acquired earlier than Level 1 suffixes, that Level 1 derivatives are produced far less frequently than statistical expectation before age 3, and that -ly, though a member of Level 2 suffixes, patterns with Level 1 suffixes in the course of vocabulary acquisition. Finally, we present a comprehensive list of the derived word types of -al, -ous, -tion, -er/or, -ly, and -y in the Appendix, which must serve as the starting point of future research for the acquisition of English derivational morphlogy. (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies & Cyber Hankuk University of Foreign Studies)