Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This is a collection of papers focusing on the early stages of the development of nominal case and number morphology, following in most cases the constructivist (non-nativist) theoretical framework of pre- and protomorphology. The introduction by Ursala Stephany and Maria D. Voeikova discusses how the papers in the volume document the transition from a premorphological to a protomorphological stage.

F. Nihan Ketrez and Ayhan Aksu-Koç discuss the emergence of nominal inflection categories in Turkish and provide evidence for three periods of morphological development. Klaus Laalo examines the same inflectional paradigms in Finnish using diary data and finds rote-learned words very early on. An increase in the number of nouns in the output results in individual case-marking patterns, showing early creativity in the production of morphological patterns.

Barbara Pfeiler provides data from Yukatec Maya, a language with optional plural marking affected by animacy restrictions, with regard to whether plural marking is acquired in the same way as in better studied languages with obligatory plurals. Reili Argus focuses on the early development of case and number in Estonian. Rote-learned words with variations in marking appear at around 1;0, as well as patterns of deletion during a trochaic stage. Melita Kovačevoć, Marijan Palmović, and Gordana Hržica focus on the emergence of the nominal inflectional system in Croatian. Children show similar patterns of case development very early, mostly in restricted contexts of use.

The discussion moves to Russian, with Natalia Gagarina and Maria D. Voeikova, who establish criteria for statistical measures of development and especially the establishment of developmental stages. Ursula Stephany and Anastasia Christofidou show that children construct different inflectional paradigms for different gender classes of Greek nouns. Number distinctions develop first within each noun subclass. Nominal inflection starts with unmarked final vowels, but as the children seem to learn them as frames within specific contexts, the authors consider them uninflected. Katharina Korecky-Kröll and Wolfgang U. Dressler discuss the acquisition of number and case in Austrian German nouns and show that the frequency of inflectional units in the input plays an important role in the early stages of morphological development. The emergence of nominal number in Italian is discussed by Sabrina Noccetti, who shows that children go through four stages of morphological development.

Carmen Aguirre and Victoria Marrero discuss the acquisition of Spanish number morphology and show that plural paradigms develop first in nouns, then in adjectives and determiners. Marianne Kilani-Schoch focuses on the development of fusional number marking (e.g. liaison and portmanteau forms) in French nouns and verbs. Finally, in one of the few studies of the acquisition of Arabic, Dorit Ravid and Rola Farah deal with plural marking in early Palestinian Arabic. Arabic plurals can appear in two patterns, a linear affixal pattern and a nonlinear root-template pattern, which the authors show are acquired in a non-uniform way subject to frequency effects.

Those who are interested in language development or in morphology and its emergence as a grammatical system will gain numerous insights from the papers in this collection.