ERGATIVITY IN BASQUE - A PROBLEM FOR LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION

The present paper studies the acquisition of an ergative language, Bas que, by a bilingual child, Mikel, between the ages of 1;07 and 4;00. T he main observation is that verb morphology was acquired before case m orphology as concerns ergativity. With regard to the noun phrase, the child had little difficulties with the absolutive (being the unmarked case), and with the absolutive plural which is morphologically marked in the same fashion as some ergatives. In contrast, the proper use of the ergative caused problems throughout the studied period. As for the verb phrase, we observed the following phenomena: a targetlike person marking except in some past forms, a targetlike auxiliary selection, and some target-deviant verb forms in the past that correspond to a re gular verb paradigm without split ergativity. Several issues will be d iscussed: agentivity, INFL, and the relation of noun and verb morpholo gy to argument structure can possibly bias or influence the acquisitio n of ergativity. We conclude that the different developmental patterns observed in noun and verb morphology can be accounted for by the diff erent relation of verb and noun morphology to the argument structure o f the verb.