Grammatical morphemes are used to modulate word meanings and to link words in constructions. They consist of inflections, usually suffixes, added to words, and free-standing function words (prepositions and articles). Different language-types make different uses of these, including cases added to each noun, tense and aspect markers added to each verb, and agreement markers linking nouns, adjectives, and determiners. Children have to identify each inflection, its meaning, and where it is used on each word class. They start to add modulations to their words as soon as they start to combine words (and may understand some of them before this). They use regular forms as their starting point and over-regularize irregular forms. They show some consistency in the order of acquisition for different modulations, depending on the semantic complexity of each grammatical morpheme. Semantic complexity, formal complexity, and frequency all play a role here. Children may initially rely on filler-syllables, and only later produce the relevant form. Word class plays a role here, since the choice of grammatical morphemes depends on this. Initial use of grammatical morphemes may be limited to specific words and only later extended. The same holds for agreement in gender and number.

Children’s first words are remarkably consistent over languages and over time: They first talk about people (dada, mama), food (juice), body-parts (eye), clothing (sock), animals (dog), vehicles (car), toys (ball), household objects (key), routines (bye), and activities (uhoh, up). Their first productions emerge between 12 months and 24 months, and they attain some 50 words in production about 6 months later. Earlier claims about a vocabulary spurt may rather reflect increased motor skill that aids production. Do children learn to produce nouns before verbs? The proportions of nouns and verbs differ by context, e.g., toy play versus book reading. Spontaneous speech samples and parental checklists of vocabulary often differ. Overall, production lags behind comprehension. This leads to communicatively driven overextensions in production until 2;6 or so, as well as reliance on general purpose terms (do, go, that). As children add more words, they stop using earlier overextensions. Early word meanings are based on children’s existing conceptual and perceptual categories, based on their experience of the world so far. And as they take different perspectives, they begin to use of different words for the same referent (animal, dog, pug; do, mend).

Loanwords are divided into cultural borrowings and core borrowings, then categorised into semantic fields to allow typological comparisons. Fewer borrowings come from Roman political and military power (i.e. fall into semantic fields connected to law, government, and the army) than was previously thought. An analysis by parts of speech shows that nouns predominate but adjectives and verbs were also borrowed. Two loanwords related to identity, ‘Roman’ and ‘Christian’, are given more detailed consideration in the context of the imperial and late antique world.

In this unit students learn how to describe places and talk about accommodation. They practise prepositions of place, the differences between ser and estar, and study nouns, adjectives and articles, gender and number. Modifiers are explained, as is the use of hay to mean there is/there are.

In this unit students learn how to describe places and talk about accommodation. They practise prepositions of place, the differences between ser and estar, and study nouns, adjectives and articles, gender and number. Modifiers are explained, as is the use of hay to mean there is/there are.

This chapter uses data from a range of Romance languages to illustrate the different definitions of the notion of suppletion in the linguistic literature, and to offer a typology of suppletion (notable the difference between ‘incursive’ and phonologically induced suppletion). Suppletion may be most usefully viewed simply as an extreme contrast between unity of meaning, on the one hand, and disunity of the forms expressing that meaning, on the other. The typology and distribution of Romance suppletions is described, for example, from the numeral system, from the system of marking comparatives in adjectives, from the inflexional morphology of personal pronouns, from the inflexional morphology or verbs, nouns, and adjectives. While the Romance languages provide cross-linguistically typical illustrations of suppletion in its different manifestations, the Romance data are particularly thought-provoking with regard to, among other things, (i) the particular role of synonymy between lexemes in determining the emergence of incursive suppletion in diachrony; (ii) the role of existing abstract patterns of alternation in providing ‘templates’ for the paradigmatic distribution of suppletive alternants; and (iii) the role of phonological resemblance as a determinant of incursive suppletion.

The increase in nouns as premodifiers in noun phrases (e.g. the stone church) is a well-known aspect of densification in Late Modern English. The corpus analysis shows that both common and proper nouns become more frequent as premodifiers. While newspapers represent the most advanced usage, the general increase in the frequency of this feature and the fact that women use it more than men in letters indicate that there may be two separate developments underway: a general increase in premodifying nouns in the communal language as a change from below and a separate trend towards additional usage as part of the densification of informational writing. Semantic analyses show that most semantic relationships between common nouns as premodifiers and their heads were already present by 1800, though some tendencies towards more opaque combinations could be found in genres where a high frequency of the feature was noted; as regards proper nouns as premodifiers, the increase in frequency was coupled with a trend towards more animate referents. Overall, the results provide clear evidence of densification in, above all, newspaper language.

This chapter gives an introductory overview of the patterns of reference and nominal syntax in the languages of mainland Southeast Asia. The chapter begins with the principles by which head nouns are modified, for example by adjectives or relative clauses, or in possessive constructions. Many languages of the area have systems of nominal classification, especially numeral classifiers and class terms. Personal pronoun systems range from extremely simple, such as in certain varieties of Chinese, to extremely complex, such as in the systems of Thai, Burmese, or Cambodian, whose systems of pronouns show elaborate distinctions in social-hierarchical structure and politeness. Demonstrative systems of the area span the range of complexity, ranging from two-term systems to systems with eight or more distinctions.