Melvatha Chee, University of New Mexico
Acquisition of Navajo Verbs
This paper explores how Navajo children acquire Navajo verbs. In the Navajo language, the verb contains most of the information of the sentence, expressing temporal and spatial adverbial concepts in addition to person and number of subject, object, and oblique object. A single Navajo verb complex can contain up to 17 prefixes preceding the verb stem. The stem itself can have up to 15 forms depending on the mode and aspect of the verb. When the morphemes come together in a verb there are interactions which may change the sounds at their boundaries. How do Navajo children acquire these complex constructions?
There have been few studies of the acquisition of polysynthetic languages (e.g., Mithun 1989) and only one other study on the acquisition of Navajo verbs (Saville-Troike 1996). Saville-Troike found that Navajo children first acquire the verb stem then begin adding prefixes moving from right to left. Her older subjects, including the youngest at 2 years and 11 months, were all using “the full range of prefix positions in the verb complex” (142). Her findings suggest that parts of the Navajo verb structure are learned as a unitary lexical item, a chunk, while other components of the verbal complex are learned as separate prefixes. The verb stem is the first element of the verb complex to be acquired; verb stem alternation and some prefixes appear to be learned in relation to specific verbal roots, combinations that seem to be chunks.
In this paper, I hypothesize that this principle of learning verbs as semantically relevant chunks is central to the acquisition of the Navajo verb. This is consistent with work by Tomasello (2003), for example who says that children learn constructional schemas, one verb at a time. Children, he says, learn meaningful constructions in a process that is gradual, piecemeal, and context-sensitive. More frequent verbs are the ones that become tied to schemas earlier. I propose a method for examining this theory in the acquisition of Navajo, and open the discussion for audience feedback on this proposal.
Mithun, Marianne. 1989. The Acquisition of Polysynthesis. Journal of Child Language; 16, 2, June, 285 312.
Saville-Troike, Muriel. 1996. “Development of the inflected verb in Navajo child language.” In Eloise Jelinek, Sally Midgette, Keren Rice, and Leslie Saxon (Eds.) Athabaskan Language Studies: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Young. Albuquerque: UNM Press. 137-92.
Tomasello, M. 2003. Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
