Mayan telegraphese: Intonational determinants of inflectional development

Data collected from the Mayan language Quich6 suggests that considerable differences may exist across languages in the form of children's first words. Several classes of Quiche words, including the verbs and the positional element k'o:{lik), take 'terminations'. Al-though the termination does not encode a simple semantic or syntactic meaning, the children used it correctly in over 86 % of their first verbs. The syllable structure and stress rules conspire in Quiche to promote the early acquisition of terminations, sug-gesting the primacy of intonation in morphological development.* One of the most striking characteristics of children's early speech is its 'tele-graphic ' quality. As Brown (1973:75) says, 'the sentences the child makes are like adult telegrams in that they are largely made up of nouns and verbs (with few adjectives and adverbs) and in that they generally do not use prep-ositions, conjunctions, articles, or auxiliary verbs. ' These last are called 'gram-matical morphemes ' by Brown, who states: 'like an intricate sort of ivy, [they] begin to grow up between and upon the major construction blocks, the nouns and verbs, to which Stage I is largely limited ' (249). This characterization of child language has remained a major paradigm for research on languag