Contrast, the No Blur Principle, and the Acquisition of Zulu

Carstairs-McCarthy (1994) extended Clark’s Principle of Contrast (198 7, 1993) for learning words to address intriguing and difficult questions concerning the acquisition of inflectional morphology. Unlike lexical word forms, categories like gender do not present the language learner with a consistent semantic basis for distinguishing one form from another. The absence of obvious form-meaning correlations introduces an element of meaninglessness to gender that would appear to present a formidable acquisition task to the language learning child. Despite this, complex morphology, including gender, is observed to be acquired early in many languages (Levy, 1996).