Abstract

KOVAčEVIć, Melita; PFEILER, Barbara Blaha  and  PALMOVIć, Marijan. Red thread of Croatian and Yucatec Maya: what could be common in the two languages?. Península [online]. 2007, vol.2, n.2, pp.33-50. ISSN 1870-5766.

This study includes a comparison of the acquisition of nouns and verbs between two typologically different languages, Croatian and Yucatec Maya. Both languages, the Croatian, a highly inflective Slavic language and the agglutinative Yucatec Maya, which is spoken in the southeast of Mexico, show similarity in the path of acquisition. Verbs are used at early age, no noun explosion is registered. This fact is explained through the complex morphology and verbal transparency along the relative poor overt marked nouns in Yucatec Maya and the rather obscure nominal morphology in Croatian.

Keywords : language acquisition; nouns and verbs; pre- and proto-morphology; Croatian; Yucatec Maya.

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