engleski

"Lexical bootstrapping" : a mechanism of child language acquisition in Croatian

Bootstrapping is usually defined as a mapping from form to meaning or vice versa. Syntactic bootstrapping is usually viewed as a language-internal mechanism that facilitates lexical acquisition providing cues for lexical categories (e.g. the word after the definite article in English is usually a noun). This enables children to predict the meaning of a word from the syntactic structure in which it appears. On the other hand, semantic bootstrapping is viewed as a language-external mechanism that maps meaning to form helping children to acquire grammatical categories (e.g. to treat names as count nouns). We propose another bootstrapping mechanism that seems to be language-internal, but not syntactic. It facilitates lexical acquisition providing cues for word meaning, but not using any syntactic structure. This mechanism takes advantage of derivational transparency, a prominent feature of Croatian morphology (while in English words like 'learn', 'apprentice' and 'university' are in no derivational relation, in Croatian they are built from the same root). On the other hand, no language-external mechanisms (such as general cognitive notions for 'things' or 'actions') are involved. Children take advantages of the lexical cues provided by the roots and meanings of the derivational suffixes not only to detect the new meanings of the derived words, but also to categorize it into appropriate lexical categories. It can be predicted that this mechanism will describe the process of lexical acquisition in any language that has a high degree of derivational transparency (e.g. it will fit better German than English data).

lexical bootstrapping; language acquisition; syntax; semantics

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