STRATEGIES FOR ACQUIRING ZULU CONCORD

Abstract

Transcripts of the speech of four two-year old Zulu children were analysed for insights they provided about the strategies children use to acquire the concord system. It was found that all children initially used a small subset of subject-verb-agreement (SVA) morphemes. Differences among the sets of data suggested that individual children focus on different aspects of the language they are learning. Individual focussing has implications for the initial hypotheses they make about the nature of Zulu concord. Determining children's strategies involved the consideration of several factors: the dual function of concord as agreement and pronominal markers and their respective domains, the sentence and discourse; the syntactic and phonological properties of Zulu concord, and nominal and pronominal styles of children's speech. Individual variation is discussed within the context of the general finding that concord originated as a pronominal element within a discourse framework.