Morphological development in PT The original version of PT (Pienemann,1998,2005a) hypothesizes learners’ sequence of morphological

development by utilizing the concept of feature unification from LFG. Learners have to combine certain grammatical features in the course of language processing before they can be considered to have acquired the particular structure. Language acquisition from the PT perspectives is a hierarchical process; learners have to go through each stage of development before proceeding to the next stage. Table 3.2 summarizes the universal sequence in the development of morphology in PT as proposed by Bettoni and Di Biase (2015) after Pienemann (1998, 2005a);

Table 3.2

Hierarchy of processing procedures in PT, morphological development (from Bettoni and Di Biase, 2015, p.56) Stage T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 S-Bar Procedure - - - - Interclausal information exchange Sentence Procedure - - - Interphrasal information exchange + Phrasal Procedure - - phrasal information exchange + + Category Procedure - lexical form variation + + + Lemma access words and formulas + + + +

As in Levelt (1989) speech processing model and LFG, the lexicon plays a central role in PT. Words have to be added to the learners’ lexicon before the word can be assigned its grammatical category. At the lemma access stage, learners are unable to activate any grammatical procedure because words are learned as a whole without further analysis. At the following stage, learners begin to annotate the lexicon, and this process activates the category procedure and the process of “syntacticisation” (Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015, p.56). At the phrasal procedure stage, as it name implies, phrasal morphology emerges. At this stage, learners are able to exchange information (i.e., feature unification) between the head of the phrase and its modifier. At the next stage (sentence procedure), learners are now able to exchange information across phrases of different kinds (e.g., across NPs and VPs). Finally, at the last morphological stage, learners activate the subordinate clause procedure. Learners are now able to exchange information between elements in different clauses that are related by subordination. For example, in the sentence the doctor suggests that Kim eat less; the clause marked as subordinate (Kim eat less) blocks the subject-verb agreement which characterizes, instead, the main clause the doctor suggests (Bettoni & Di Biase, 2015).

The difference between the original Pienemann (1998,2005a) and Bettoni and Di Biase (2015) is that the latter authors limit this schedule to morphological development while syntax is handled differently. For instance, the schedule does not include Pienemann’s ‘simplified’ s-procedure in coincidence with the categorical

stage, to account for the ability of learners of e.g., English L2, to construct acceptable SVO sentences even though they have not yet acquired the morphological resources to mark Subject-Verb agreement. Bettoni & Di Biase (2015) do not require such ‘simplified’ procedure because syntactic development is handled separately, even though the morphological procedures are fundamental resources developing in parallel to syntax in languages where morphological agreement has a role. Malay does not display morphological agreement processes; hence this study follows Bettoni and Di Biase (2015), in the separation of morphological and syntactic development. In postulating an implicational hierarchy it is clear that PT regards language development as a process of accumulation of rules; learners begin with words, then they learn to annotate the words for category and features, and afterward they learn to construct phrases according to the syntactic category annotated in the lexicon (to construct NP, VP, PP etc.) and to combine such different phrases into clauses.

For the child’s morphological development in Malay and English, based on the above summary description, I hypothesize the linguistic outcomes of the PT stages for Malay based on the universal hierarchy in Table 3.2. The subordinate clause structure is not included (the top stage hypothesized for English morphology in PT) as I believe the child is unlikely to reach that stage within the age range of the study. The hypothesized structures of Malay and English predicted to emerge sequentially in morphological development are summarized in Table 3.3 and Table 3.4.

The sequence for English acquirers is well-established in the PT literature hence I will follow the hypotheses formulated for morphological development in Pienemann (1998, 2005) and Di Biase, Kawaguchi & Yamaguchi (2015); the structure for English is summarized in Table 3.4. However, this is the first study attempting to apply PT to the Malay language. So, on the basis of PT’s universal schedule, I hypothesize the developmental stages of Malay morphological development as summarised in Table 3.3. In working out the hypothesis for Malay PT sequence, I follow in particular the guide given by Bettoni and Di Biase (2015, p.74), “the best choice for a diagnostic structure on an untried language should fall on a structure that displays possibly the clearest one-to-one relationship between form and function, or the most representative, or default, structure of a stage in a particular schedule, the one with the most transparent conceptual meaning”.

Table 3.3

Morphological development: Hypotheses for Malay (based on Pienemann, 1998, 2005a; Di Biase, Kawaguchi & Yamaguchi 2015)

Processing procedures Linguistic processes Malay Structure Example Interphrasal Procedure Clause marking Passive morphology

kucing kena kejar dengan anjing

cat KENA (PASS) chase by dog ‘the cat is chased by the dog’ Phrasal Procedure Phrasal unification

NP

VP

a) dua ekor kucing hitam Two tail (CL) cat black ‘Two black cats’

(definite quantifiers with classifiers) b) banyak kucing

many cat ‘many cats’

(plural marking with indefinite quantifiers) (V + V and AUX + V).

a) nak makan want eat ‘(I) want to eat’ b) boleh main can play ‘ (I) can play’ Category procedure Lexical morphemes

(No unification)

Suffix -an marking of grammatical category of words e.g. main ‘play’(V) mainan ‘toy’(N), makan ‘eat’ (V) makanan ‘food’ (N) minum ‘drink’ (V) minuman ‘beverage’ (N).

Reduplication, kucing ‘cat’ vs kucing-kucing ‘cats’

anjing ‘dog’ vs anjing-anjing ‘dogs’

Word/Lemma access Words, formulas (No unification)

kucing ‘cat’, anjing ‘dog’, apa khabar? ’how

Table 3.4

Morphological development: Hypotheses for English (based on Pienemann, 1998, 2005a; Di Biase, Kawaguchi & Yamaguchi 2015)

Processing procedures Linguistic processes English

4. S-Procedure Interphrasal morphemes SV agreement e.g. Peter loves rice 3. Phrasal procedure Phrasal morphemes NP Plural e.g. many cats, many dogs

AUX + V e.g. they have jumped, you can

go, I am going

2. Category procedure Lexical morphemes Past -ed e.g He jumped Plural -s e.g. my brothers Possessive -s e.g. Mary’s car Verb -ing e.g. he jumping

1. Word/Lemma access Words cat, dog.

For Malay PT development, at the first stage, the child will begin with learning single words. At the category procedure stage, the child will need to differentiate out at least one lexical category from others. For instance, she learns to distinguish a word such as main ‘to play’ (denotating a process, a verb-like word) and mainan ‘toy’ (denotating an individuated object, a noun-like word). Adding the suffix -an, helps distinguish objects from processes and this can be the basis for mentally annotating and marking nouns to distinguish them from (unmarked) verbs. Another form of marking nouns, as distinct from verbs, is that they can be reduplicated to mark plurality, e.g. developing from kucing ‘cat’ to kucing-kucing ‘cats’.

At the next PT stage, i.e. the phrasal procedure stage, the child is predicted to produce NP-like constructions such as banyak kucing ‘many cat’, and VP-like construction such as nak makan ‘want (to) eat’. At the sentence stage, I predict that to reach that stage, the child must be able to produce numeral classifiers such as dua ekor kucing ‘two tail (CL) cat’ and passive verb morphology in sentences such as kucing kena kejar dengan anjing ‘the cat is chased by the dog’ (cf. Nomoto and Abd.Wahab (2012) for the discussion of kena passives in Malay).

After discussing the general PT-based morphological development for Malay, the following section will elaborate specifically on the plural development based on the PT perspective.

3.8.4 Plural development in PT. There are several studies that investigate the