Morphosyntactic simplification in children’s short stories

Abstract EN

It is often thought that the first year of life has no significant achievement on the linguistic level and that most people think that babies do not start talking until they are about one year old.

Despite that, babies do have some gradual advancement on the linguistic level starting with the iconic cries, symbolic cries, cooing, babbling, single word level, and multi-word level.

Adults, in dealing with children, try to create bonds through the simplified speech as in using diminutive forms of the words, repetitive style, and in expanding the child’s reduced utterances.

The analysis of the three short stories chosen for the study shows that the syntactic simplification manifested through the use of the simple sentences is heavily relied on.

The morphological simplification is also used but with a lesser extent i.

e.

simple words are used as a means of simplification.

The results of the analysis also show that there is a conscious avoidance of a certain type of words i.

e.

compound words because their interpretation requires a higher level of cognitive processes than that of the children’s.