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NOUN AND VERB CATEGORIES IN THE ACQUISITION OF FRENCH

2. Studying the emergence of word categories

In this connection, this paper analyzes two aspects of French language develop-
ment: the emergence of free grammatical morphemes and that of linked verbal mor-
phology. Indeed, in French, nouns are in general preceded by determinants (at the
level of „immediate syntax” Lazard, 1984, p. 31) and, in oral language, they are most
often invariable. Verbs, instead, may be produced alone at the beginning of sentences
(in the imperative form), or may be preceded by pronouns, auxiliaries or prepositions,
and, orally, they vary in their final part due to obligatory verbal linked morphology
indicating properties like person, time and aspect. Moreover, the words of the two
categories have different distributional properties in a sentence (e.g. Tyvaert, 2002).

Given these properties, evidence of differential use of free grammatical morphemes
and of linked grammatical morphemes would provide a clear index of categorial differen-
tiation between words in the child’s own system. Such evidence is relatively easy to find
when the child’s production is sufficiently elaborated. However, theoretically, it is crucial
to determine whether categorial distinctions of this type are present early or whether the
notion of word categories, based on formal distinctions of the type described above, is
constructed at the same time as the child goes along in language learning.

Is it possible to look early on for indices of word categories in the child’s produc-
tion? Recent work on language acquisition enables us to give a positive answer to this
question as well as to look for early signs of differentiation among words at a time
when children are still essentially single-word speakers. Indeed, it has been noted that
children, usually in the early period of acquisition, start adding to their word-like
productions monosyllabic, often vocalic or nasalized, elements, in front of words that
the child used earlier, and may continue to use, without such elements. For example,
the sound /ə/ in /ədog/ and, for French, in /əpɛ/ for ‘pain’, ‘bread’. These sounds,
observed in several languages (already by Gregoire, 1937, for French-acquiring chil-
dren) have been recently referred to by the term fillers (Peters & Menn, 1993; see
Peters, 1997, for a review). Fillers have been considered, at least starting at a given
moment in development, as early forms of grammatical morphemes (e.g., Bottari,
Cipriani & Chilosi, 1993/1994; Dolitsky, 1983; Kilani-Schoch & Dressler, 2000; Pe-
ters & Menn, 1993; Veneziano, Sinclair & Berthoud, 1990; Veneziano & Sinclair,
2000). If different kinds of fillers were found in prenominal and in preverbal posi-
tions, such a differentiation would provide evidence for the onset of nouns and verbs
and, at the same time, of protomorphemes (Veneziano, 2001a). Indeed, one criterial
definition of grammatical morphemes in French is their differential production as a
function of the grammatical category of the word they precede and/or follow.

The second aspect of children’s language production that is bound to provide early
evidence for a differentiation between words concerns the phonomorphologically rel-
evant (PMR) variations distinguishing French verbs from French nouns. Indeed, PMR
variations occurring for the same verb-word (for example, /’turn/ ‘turn(s)’, and /’tur’ne/
‘to turn, turned’) and produced only for words that are verbs in the language, provide
another indication of an emergent differentiation between words that are nouns and
words that are verbs.

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