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The study argues the imperative as a Root Infinitive Analogue (RIA), supporting evidence for early reliance on non-finite forms across language development.",{"@graph":14,"@context":73},[15,34,56],{"@type":16,"itemListElement":17},"BreadcrumbList",[18,23,27,31],{"item":19,"name":20,"@type":21,"position":22},"https://docshare.wps.com","Home","ListItem",1,{"item":24,"name":25,"@type":21,"position":26},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/","Document",2,{"item":28,"name":29,"@type":21,"position":30},"https://docshare.wps.com/document/research-report/","Research & 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show in early development?","Question",{"text":63,"@type":64},"They go through a stage equivalent to the Root Infinitive stage found in non-null subject languages, even though YIA lacks an infinitive construction.","Answer",{"name":66,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":67},"How common are verbal inflections in the children’s spontaneous speech?",{"text":68,"@type":64},"Verbal inflections appear in 85–90% of contexts in the two YIA children’s spontaneous speech.",{"name":70,"@type":61,"acceptedAnswer":71},"What do imperative forms indicate when they replace tensed forms?",{"text":72,"@type":64},"Imperative forms occur in place of tensed forms in a few cases and indicate modal irrealis interpretation, supporting the Root Infinitive Analogue 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2490-4198  \nVol. 2, No. 1, January 2017, 1-19 © The Authors  \n[http://www.arjals.com](http://www.arjals.com)  \nArabic: Two case studies 1  \nFawaz Qasem2 and Shruti Sircar3  \nAbstract  \nThe paper shows that children acquiring Yemeni Ibbi Arabic4 (henceforth referred to as YIA) go through a stage equivalent to the Root Infinitive (RI) stage found in non-null subject languages in spite of the fact that YIA is a null subject and does not have an infinitive construction. Spontaneous speech of two YIA children (2;1-2;11) showed presence of verbal inflections in 85-90% contexts. However, in a few cases, imperative forms occur in place of tensed forms, and indicate modal irrealis interpretation. We argue that the imperative form is therefore a Root Infinitive Analogue (RIA) . The paper also provides evidence for a universal tendency to use non-finite forms in early stages of language development.  \nKeywords:Acquisition of verbal inflection, the imperative form, root infinitive analogue, Yemeni Ibbi Arabic  \nBackground to the Study  \nThe paper attempts to contribute to the discussion of early morphosyntactic development in children by providing data from two children learning Yemeni Ibbi Arabic in a monolingual context in Yemen. The two children are from two different age bands: the first child from 2;01 to 2;06 and the second child from 2;06 to 2;11, however, there were significant similarities in their linguistic behaviour, with respect to verb morphology. The  \n1This paper is based on Qasem’s (2014) doctoral research. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 19th SALA Roundtable Conference on Language Development (2014) held in University of Hyderabad, India. We would like to thank the audiences for their comments. Thanks also to K A Jayaseelan, R Amritavalli, and Rahul Balusu for insightful discussions. Many thanks go to Fauzia Abdalla for helpful comments on the first author’s PhD dissertation. All errors are however ours.  \n2Assistant professor, Department of English, Bisha University, Al-Namaas, Saudi Arabia.  \n3Associate Professor, Department of Linguistics & Contemporary English, EFL University, Hyderabad, India  \n4YIA is a dialect spoken in central Yemen mostly in Ibb governorate and some parts of Taiz.  \nsecond goal is to extend the root infinitive analogue hypothesis found in languages like Italian (Salustri & Hyams, 2003) and Spanish (Gathercole, Sebastian & Soto, 1999) to the acquisition of Yemeni Ibbi Arabic that has a different morphological structure.  \nUnlike English whose acquisition has been extensively studied, Arabic with high syncretism and a rich morphology, has received far less attention. Unlike in agglutinating languages like Tamil and Turkish (Ekmekci, 1982), in Arabic affixes do not typically express one function each, i.e. tense, person, number, gender, but a bundle of these functions are expressed by a single morpheme, as discussed in section 3 of the paper. Also, unlike English and many European languages, Arabic does not have an infinitive bare form (Fassi Fehri, 1993) .  \nEarly Grammars and Root Infinitive  \nIn non-null subject languages like English, French and German around 1; 5 children are found to produce root infinitives in finite contexts, called the Root Infinitive Stage, as shown in English, Dutch and French among others in (1-3) .  \n(1) a. Eve sit floor (1;7) (English) (Brown, 1973)  \nb. That truck fall down (2;0) (Sano & Hyams, 1994)  \n(2) Peter bal pakken (2;1) (Dutch) (Blom & Wijnen, 2000)  \nPeter ball get-INF  \n‘Peter (wants to) get the ball.’  \n(3) Dormir petit bébé (1;11) (French) (Guasti, 2002)  \nsleep-INF little baby  \n‘A little baby sleeps.’ (as cited in Murasagi et al, 2010 p.1)  \nDutch and French have infinitive forms with distinct morphology (-en in Dutch, and –ir in French) and it is these forms that get used by children in early stages in place of finite forms. However","cbCaivXtuUYIoz2v","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCaivXtuUYIoz2v","pdf",510635,"English","# Background to the Study\n## Early Grammars and Root Infinitive\n## Non-finite form and Irrealis","[{\"question\":\"What stage do children acquiring Yemeni Ibbi Arabic show in early development?\",\"answer\":\"They go through a stage equivalent to the Root Infinitive stage found in non-null subject languages, even though YIA lacks an infinitive construction.\"},{\"question\":\"How common are verbal inflections in the children’s spontaneous speech?\",\"answer\":\"Verbal inflections appear in 85–90% of contexts in the two YIA children’s spontaneous speech.\"},{\"question\":\"What do imperative forms indicate when they replace tensed forms?\",\"answer\":\"Imperative forms occur in place of tensed forms in a few cases and indicate modal irrealis interpretation, supporting the Root Infinitive Analogue claim.\"}]","Imperative as Root Infinitive Analogue in Yemeni Ibbi Arab | PDF",1792072839,48]