The Acquisition of Shona Grammatical Morphemes

This book explores children''s acquisition of Shona morphology, in particular the acquisition of grammatical morphemes. The book describes how the morphology of Shona-speaking children develops. Of key interest is how they acquire inflections and the strategies they adopt. The findings of this study show that nouns and verbs are first produced in the form of content words without the grammatical morphemes (GMs) then they occur with a vowel that is part of the target GM. The final stage of the development of GMs is when children produce words that are similar to adult words. There is evidence of overgeneralisation of the plural morpheme (ma-). This book also reveals the order of acquisition of some GMs. A noteworthy feature of the children''s speech is the number of productive GMs that they could handle. The findings in this book contribute to the areas of morphology and child language acquisition of Bantu languages in general and of Shona in particular. The data that are gathered in this book could also be used in studies of other aspects of the acquisition of Shona such as that of syntax.