Re: Polysynthetic question

Duke (of the Keenans) wrote:

> Polysynthetic words are composed of roots that get strung together to
> form "words" My question is do native speakers know the meaning of all
> the roots or do they just learn the meaning of the "words"
Marianne Mithun addresses your question in _The Languages of Native North
America_: "Speakers are generally aware of the meanings of whole words, but
they are often not conscious of the meaning of individual morphemes nor the
boundaries between the morphemes." (pg. 38)

[doing a little re-arranging]
> How do native speakers of polysynthetic languages learn them?
I personally don't have much of an idea; however, there has been some work
on this, you might want to check out Mithun's article on that:

Mithun, Marianne. 1989. The acquisition of polysynthesis. Journal of Child
Language 16: 285-316.

(Warning: I've never read the above article, so I can actually say how good
or useful to you it might be)

You may want to check out a couple of the other sources I've found, although
I don't know how helpful they might be (especially since I've only read a
small part of the second and none of the first):

Fortescue, Michael & Lise Linnert Olsen. 1992. The acquisition of West
Greenlandic. _The cross-linguistic study of language acquisition_. D. Sobin,
ed. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum. 3: 111-219.

Allen, Shanley. 1996.  _Aspects of argument structure acquisition in
Inuktitut_. Philadelphia : John Benjamins Publishing.


> So I'm thinking that I'm going to have to start a whole vocabulary of
> poly-words as opposed to the vocabulary of 'just the roots' that I have
> now. because my instinct tells me that people learn the 'words' rather
> than all the roots.
Well, if I were you, I would have a vocabulary of roots like you already
have and then add any words that aren't compositional (i.e. words that
aren't the sum of their parts) in your vocabulary as well. Think of it not
modeling what a native speaker knows, but what a language-learner would need
to know.

Doug Ball
http://tsketar.tripod.com/skerre/
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