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This monograph is the first study of the acquisition of Swahili as a first language. It focuses on the acquisition of inflectional affixes, with a particular emphasis on subject agreement and tense. Other inflectional affixes are also investigated, including object agreement and mood. The study surveys the adult dialect in question, Nairobi Swahili, discussing social, phonological, morphological and syntactic properties. Data, analyses and copious examples are presented of the naturalistic speech of four Swahili speaking children. The data are tested against six influential theories of child language, and the results show that processing and metrical theories of telegraphic speech fail to account for the observed patterns, while grammatical theories of child language fair significantly better. The data and analyses presented in this book are indispensable for linguists and psychologists interested in the acquisition of inflectional material and other cross-linguistic properties of child language.

Swahili language --- Children --- Kiswahili language --- Suaheli language --- Bantu languages --- Language development in children --- Interpersonal communication in children --- Language and languages --- Acquisition. --- Dialects --- Verb. --- Affixes. --- Language. --- Vocabulary

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Traditional grammars have stated that clitics are subject or object pronouns whose distributional features make them different from personal pronouns. This book focuses on the acquisition of personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as clitics with respect to determinative phrases in a variety of languages of the Romance family and several indigenous languages, such as Quechua. A particularly original aspect of the present volume is that it not only addresses syntactic issues, but also semantic and pragmatic questions that have been widely neglected in the literature. It also reports on...

Grammar, Comparative and general --- Pronoun. --- Clitics. --- Clitics (Grammar) --- Pronouns --- Accents and accentuation --- Tagmemics --- Function words --- Nominals --- Reflexives --- Romance languages --- African languages --- Language acquisition. --- Pronominals. --- Linguistics --- Philology --- Early Language Acquisition. --- Indigenous Languages. --- Romance Languages.