Children's acquisition of inchoative constructions in Korean
Résumé
This study aims to explore the development of the Korean inchoative morpheme '-eci' on inherently stative predicates and inherently inchoative predicates. In particular, this study experimentally investigates whether or not Korean children know two ways of forming inchoatives: morphological inchoatives derived by application of the morpheme '-eci' (i.e. stative predicate+'-eci') vs. lexical inchoatives which cannot be marked by '-eci' due to the morphological blocking effect (i.e. bare form of inchoative predicate). To address this question, a forced-choice preference task was conducted with thirty Korean monolingual children aged from four to six. Our results across age groups revealed a continuous development pattern for morphologically-derived inchoatives and interestingly, a U-shaped development pattern for lexical inchoatives.