KHAWLA ALJENAIE - Verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic–speaking children   

The implementation of verb inflections in Kuwaiti Arabic was investigated in both  present and past tense contexts.  In a morphologically rich language like Arabic, verbs  always bear inflectional affixes and consistently agree with their subject in person,  number and gender. Spontaneous production speech of three children at the age of 2;0  for a period of six months was analyzed for accuracy and error types in using these  morphemes. We used the computer program SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language  Transcripts) developed by Miller & Chapman (1993), which provides frequencies and  general measures like mean length of utterance (MLU).

             The results indicate that verb inflection was used inconsistently: correctly  inflected verbs appeared interchangeably with incorrect forms in the spontaneous  productions of the three children.  Further, error analysis reveals that when an error in  verbal inflection occurred, the substituted form was usually a default form, namely the  imperative.  Examination of the properties of subject-verb agreement (person and  gender) indicates that first person singular was more accurate than the third person  singular.  The masculine form for all the persons was used with greater accuracy than  the feminine counterpart.  The masculine was substituted for the feminine and first  person for third but the reverse pattern was uncommon. The substitution errors show  that errors in agreement diverged from the target by a single feature.  For example, 2 nd  person singular masculine morphemes was used in stead of second person singular  feminine (that is gender feature is affected while person and number were intact).  

            The findings of the study are discussed in the light of Optional Infinitive (OI)  stage argued by Harris and Wexler (1996) and Wexler (1994, 1996, 1998) that  children at some stage between 1;10-2;7 produce finite and non-finite forms. The  cross-linguistic data proves that the OI stage does not appear in all languages  including Italian, Spanish, Tamil, Catalan and Polish (Wexler 1998).  Consistent with  this, Garman, Schelletter & Sinka (1997) conclude that there is no OI stage in Latvian.  Wexler relates the OI stage to null-subject properties and states that  “children in a  language go through an OI stage if and only if the language is not an INFL-licensed  null-subject language” (Wexler 1998:56). He argues that Hebrew allows OI only in  the part of the inflectional paradigm which does not license a null subject.  In Arabic,  the root consists of three consonants (triconsonantal) that carry the primary lexical  meaning.  The root cannot stand alone and there is no infinitival form.  Therefore, the  infinitival form or bare stem found in the crosslinguisitc data, as mentioned above,  should not be possible for Arabic-speaking children. The current study reveals that  children substitute the imperative form for inflected one.  Abdullah (2003) found  similar behaviour in Saudi Arabic.  The fact that imperative in non-tensed form makes  this type of substitution consistent with the OI.