Dynamic aspects of German er-nominals: a probe into the interrelation of language change and language acquisition

The discussion of the interrelation of language change and language acquisition, which has been going on for more than a hundred years, has yielded a number of theoretical approaches but still lacks empirical substantiation. Theoretical positions range from parameter setting approaches that view children as the ultimate source of language change, to those approaches that stress correlations or similarities between language change and language acquisition without necessarily assuming a causal connection between them. Empirical studies that try to settle the issue are very rare, mainly for methodological reasons. In our article, we report on our research on the development of German -er-nominals. There are three tendencies to be observed in language change and language acquisition, namely a tendency toward more multilexemic versus monolexemic bases of the -er-suffix, a tendency toward more verbal versus nominal bases, and a tendency toward more PERSON concepts versus OBJECT concepts expressed by the -er-suffix. These tendencies have been corroborated on the basis of a corpus study of German newspapers between 1609 and 2000, a diary study of a monolingual German child (2;0-4;11), and four elicitation experiments conducted with 56 German preschool children between 3;0 and 6;5. The tendencies observed in the development of -er-nominals are discussed in terms of their morphological productivity that is constituted by a number of language internal and language external factors. It turns out that children strive for adaptation to the adult patterns of word formation that have developed historically. Reprinted by permission of Mouton de Gruyter