Therese Landh: Productive patterns in the L1 acquisition of Swedish simple past-tense inflection

Abstract

The most common type of past-tense inflection in Swedish is weak inflection, using a dental suffix /de/ for the simple past; this is sometimes considered the only productive way of inflection. While weak inflection is the only productive pattern for loans and neologisms in contemporary Swedish, strong inflection, using vowel alternation, has been productive historically, where some strong patterns have gained several new members. Previous studies on Swedish child language have also reported cases of overextension of vowel alternation. In short, this thesis examines the Swedish simple past tense from three complementary perspectives: first language (L1) acquisition, linguistic productivity and language change. 

The present study examines the productive use of different patterns for Swedish simple past-tense inflection. Two elicitation tasks, one using real Swedish verbs and one using nonce verbs modelled on real Swedish verbs, were administered to 99 children aged 6 to 11 acquiring Swedish as their L1. The tasks include verbs belonging to patterns that have proven particularly sensitive to change diachronically, in order to examine not only which patterns are used productively, but also to what extent the forms produced by the children mirror diachronic patterns in Swedish past tense inflection. In addition, the study tests the Tolerance Principle, a principle for linguistic productivity, asking to what extent it correctly predicts the forms produced by the children.

The results from the study show that while the dental suffix is the most frequently extended pattern, strong inflection is also productive under certain structural conditions, largely matching strong patterns that have gained members historically. The productive use of strong inflection is more common in the older children, increasing in use as mastery of the strong verbal class increases. The evaluation of the Tolerance Principle indicates that it can to some extent account for the productivity of these strong patterns, but the issue merits further investigation. The thesis thus contributes to the study of Swedish verb morphology and the acquisition of Swedish as L1 in particular, and linguistic productivity and language acquisition more generally.