Inflectional diagrammaticity in Polish: A case study of Polish children

This paper constitutes an attempt to describe the early stages of morphological development of three Polish children on the basis of the language corpus collected in the form of parental diaries and audio recordings in the course of three-year-long longitudinal studies. The onset of morphological development is accounted for within the framework of Natural Morphology (Galeas 1998, Wurzel 1994, Dressler et al. 1987). It is suggested that the premorphological stage is followed by the protomorphological stage which marks the beginning of morphological productivity, which is characterized by a significant degree of constructional iconicity defined by parameters of morphological naturalness, such as diagrammaticity, morphosemantic transparency and transparency of encoding. It is amply demonstrated that the language of children is far more regular than the language of adults due to its tendency to avoid alternation, which goes in line with previous research into the nature of the acquisition of Polish (see e.g....