Suh, J. , Lee, S. & Jun, J.
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
This research investigates the comparative expressions to determine children's inflection development in English. Children acquire syntactic knowledge before they learn the concepts of morphological inflection (Moshe Anisfield, 1984). With various grammatical functions, 'more' is one of the most common words. The frequency and actual utterances of 'more + adjective' were categorized and contrasted with those of 'adjective + er,' which appear later and lower in frequency. Furthermore, it will be compared with the frequency of the mother and adjectives by itself. To examine the characteristics, the original data of CHILDES (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/) have been modified to extract the language use. This study deals with 3712 (USA: 2,357 files - 21,444 types, 1,726,002 tokens; UK: 1,355 files - 9,829 types, 753,225 tokens) files from children ages 1 to 7, which were tagged with morpho-syntactic information. So far most of the studies have focused on the inflectional verb development (Brown, 1973; Gleason & Ratner, 1998), but this concentrates on the patterns of comparatives and the developmental progression. The relation of overgeneralization in comparison are compared to Marcus et al.(1992)'s inflections on past tense verbs and the possible factors are discussed. It is expected that input frequency influences the development of irregular forms of comparatives in that children often misuse 'little' as 'littler' compared to 'more' and make more mistakes on using superlative than comparative.