Book Review: William Forshaw, The Acquisition of Complex Morphology: Insights from Murrinhpatha (Trends in Language Acquisition Research, Volume 30)

Abstract

The development of morphological complexity in child language acquisition has so far been investigated in relatively few (and mostly European) languages, so the author is right to start this book by stressing the importance of studying new genetically unrelated and typologically different non-European languages. Therefore, this book on a polysynthetic North Australian language (about which this reviewer was completely ignorant before reading this work) is highly welcome. After this short motivation for writing his book, Forshaw immediately starts to briefly describe the peculiar and complex classifier stem system of Murrinhpatha. Details of the system are dealt with in chapter 2 (which is a comprehensive overview of the whole verb system) and in the later respective acquisition chapters. The data come from five monolingual Murrinhpatha-speaking children, aged between 1;9 and 6;1 years, living in the town of Wadeye (Port Keats) near the western coast of Australia’s Northern Territory, which is one of Australia’s largest Indigenous towns (ca. 3000 residents). According to Forshaw, there is a wide range of competency in English in the Wadeye indigenous population. The author states (p. 7) that ‘the majority of indigenous children in Wadeye today grow up with Murrinhpatha as their first language. They typically have only a limited exposure to English before they commence education at the local school’, which is information that appears to guarantee the reliability of his data. In the following review, I will focus on brief summaries of the topics and interesting results of the book and on critical comments. However, I should first applaud the book for its rigorous coverage of the data and methods used, for all its many findings, and for the knowledgeable, cautious and self-critical stance of the author. Chapter 3 is dedicated to a (basically cross-linguistic) overview of the state of research concerning acquisition of verbs and especially of verb morphology. However, Forshaw’s claim (p. 30) that ‘the study of language acquisition generally and the acquisition of verbs and verb morphology continues to be dominated by findings from a small number of typically isolating languages’ is only partially true. It holds for lexical acquisition in rather isolating languages (particularly English), but not for the acquisition of verb morphology, as the literature he cites demonstrates. 1147793 FLA0010.1177/01427237221147793First LanguageBook review book-review2023