Initial observations on complex predicates in Qaqet children’s language

Abstract

This article focuses on complex predicates in Qaqet, a Papuan (Baining) language of Papua New Guinea, spoken by 15,000 people and still being acquired monolingually in remote areas. A large part of the Qaqet verb lexicon is compositional, consisting of simple verb roots that combine with prepositions or particles/suffixes, jointly contributing to the overall meaning of the expression. While patterns can be discerned, the resulting meanings are only partly transparent, thus presenting challenges to the language learner. This article is a first study tracing the distribution of these complex expressions in Qaqet children’s speech, drawing on a subset (31 hours) of a longitudinal corpus of children aged 2–6 (with a focus on the ages 2–4). The Qaqet complex verbs are reminiscent of West Germanic prefix and particle verbs (such as uncover and cover up), and this study therefore takes Heike Behrens’ pioneering study as its point of reference.