ABSTRACT
Children acquiring Italian must learn a very rich system of verb inflections. Verbs never appear as unmarked forms but always bear inflectional affixes. It has been proposed (Jaeggli & Safir, 1989a, pp. 29–31) that inflectional paradigms in which all forms are always complex (that is, divisible into stem and affixes, as in Italian), or none of them are (as in Chinese), can be characterized as morphologically uniform. In contrast, mixed morphological paradigms in which some forms are inflected, and others correspond to the verb stem are not morphologically uniform. This is the case of English in which, for example, the third-person regular present-tense form is divisible into stem plus affix (speak-s), and the remaining present-tense forms correspond to the verb stem (speak). From a cross-linguistic perspective, the question arises whether, or to what extent, the developmental patterns observable in the acquisition of a morphologically rich and uniform language like Italian are comparable to those noted in the acquisition of other, morphologically impoverished and not uniform languages such as English.
