Neologisms in early Serbian child language

Abstract

The occurrence of neologisms in a child’s spontaneous language production is an indicator of important developmental processes. It reveals that a child: a. recognizes a meaning as appertaining to a certain class of words, b. wields some knowledge on structural regularities in her mother tongue, c. uses the regularities in her efforts of a new word formation. Neologisms reveal the connection between the form and function at a moment of its emergence. Innovative solutions that a child opts for display the regularities known to a child, and features of grammar that are still missing in the system at the moment of a word composition. The study aimed at an exploration of instances of verbal neologisms in the Serbian Corpus of Early Child Language (SCECL). The transcripts of spontaneous language production of 8 children longitudinally recorded at 16 age levels (18-48 months) were searched for verbs and innovative verbal forms. Their prevalence at different age levels was explored, as well as structural regularities that can be found in word formation. An approximate estimation was made that 2.8% of all children’s word types in the corpus are neologisms. In addition, 6.8% of all verbal types are neologisms, which reveals that verbs are particularly fruitful ground for innovative word formation in Serbian. Verbal neologisms exhibit a large variety of occurrence across age levels and between individual children. Some examples are prone to appear in the language of different children, and their total frequency in the corpus reach 20 (e.g. hoćem, možem, bide). Others are rare (2 or 3 incidences only in the production of one child). The largest number of neologisms are hapaxes (freq = 1). An exploration of their derivational and inflectional properties revealed 3 major kinds of regularities in their formation: a. Morphological overgeneralization: adding of an inappropriate inflectional suffix to a verb root guided by analogy with the suffixes appropriate for some other class of verbs (hoćem/ hoćam instead of hoću, možem/ mogam instead of mogu, ljubaju instead of ljube). The verbs susceptible to this kind of innovation deviate from the verb paradigm in Serbian language and their suffixes are less frequent than the overgeneralized suffixes. b. Overgeneralization of a stem of another verbal form of the same verb: The morphological paradigm of the newly formed verb obeys typical inflectional suffixes for a particular verb form, but the deviation happens at the stem level (donesti instead of doneti, uzmo instead of uzeo). c. Change in derivational word formation: The change in prefixation and/or suffixation (ključaj instead of zaključaj, crtavati instead of crtati, zapravim instead of pravim). The results indicate that neologism formation in Serbian appears to be highly developed, and follows several formation patterns, which suggests that given types of neologisms should not be treated as mere production errors, but rather a typical step in language development.