Ineta Savickienė. “The Acquisition of Lithuanian Noun Morphology”

RECENZIJOS | 143 lietuvių irgi, studentų paverstu irgi, čia lyg ir nereikėjo dar platinti. Tarmių kėturpėsčia studen- tų ir čia „panaujinta“ — ketūrpėsčia. Žodyno autoriai kai ką labai keičia, pavyzdžiui, visus vienskiemenius tvirtagalės priegaidės žodžius keičia tvirtapradžiais: tos, Sitios, kuriūos, jie, tie ir kt. visame tekste, bet iš kur yra jiėjie, jiėjei, jiėje, juosiuos (bet ir jūosius) (žr. p. 569). Lyg ir labai apibendrintai teikiama vienoda žodžių sandūra. Buitiniame kalbésenos stiliuje jos būna dažnai, balsiai, dvibalsiai — ai ir a, e balsiai, bet -ai, -'ai ir -u, -o nesusilieja: atéiv'ei O:k'ieč'ei Žvr, acūrg'ei uzrick Bajoraičiai ir kt. Zanavykų šnektos žodynas yra svarbus daugeliu požymių — apimtimi, gražiais šnekamosios kalbos sakiniais. Dirbo daug žmonių nuoširdžiai, atsidavę. Žodynininkų darbas yra sunkus, reikalauja didelio kruopštumo, akylumo, pastovumo. Nebuvo nuolatinio žodyno rengėjų ko- lektyvo, jis vis kito, mainėsi vadovai, todėl ir yra svyravimų. Dėl to ir nepasekta to klausimo literatūros, net Antano Tatarės hipernormalizmų su veiksmažodžių priesagomis -yti ir -inti atsiradimo (ištirta prof. Zigmo Zinkevičiaus* ), o žodyno įvade iš esmės nepanagrinėta. Vytautas Vitkauskas Gauta 2004 04 21 Lietuvių kalbos institutas P. Vileišio g., 10308 Vilnius, Lietuva INETA SAVICKIENĖ THE ACOUISITION OF LITHUANIAN NOUN MORPHOLOGY Wien: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2003, 152 p., ISBN 3-7001-3138-0 (Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fiir Linguistik und Kommunikationsforschung, 28) The monograph under review“ is the very first attempt at describing the emergence of nominal grammatical categories in the speech of a Lithuanian child. Therefore it deserves particular attention and a somewhat more extensive summary, as every further study on the acquisition of nouns will have to refer to the pioneer work of Ineta Savickiené of Kaunas VDU University. The collecting and processing of data on the acquisition of Lithuanian was initiated by Prof. Magdalena Smoczynska (Jagellonian University, Krakow) in 1992, and it took over ten years to obtain an exhaustive description of the acquisition of morphology by one Lithuanian child’. Another scholar whose efforts greatly contributed to this research was Prof. Wolfgang U. 5 Zinkevičius, Z., Lietuvių kalbos istorija 1V, Vilnius, 1990, 202-203 (apie matindamas ‘matyda- mas’, suwalginsiu ir kt.). 8 The monograph is based on the doctoral dissertation: Ineta Savickienė, Lietuvių vaiko daiktavardžio morfologija, Kaunas, VDU, 1999. The acguisition of verbs was discussed on the basis of the same corpus of data by the author of this review (Pawel Wojcik, The Acquisition of Lithuanian Verb Morphology: A Case Study, Krakow: Universitas (Baltica Varsoviensia, 2). 144 | RECENZIJOS Dressler, the initiator and spiritus movens of the international “Crosslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition”. W.U. Dressler was also the editor of the reviewed monograph. The study consists of seven chapters (11-124), preceded by W. U. Dressler's brief presenta- tion of the project on pre- and protomorphology and of the monograph itself (7-8), and a preface (9-10). It is supplemented by a paper comparing the acquisition of noun morphology in Lithuanian and German (125-138). The first, introductory chapter (11-15) presents the empirical data being the object of the investigation. In her longitudinal study Savickienė analysed transcripts of conversations with a Lithuanian girl named Ruta, recorded and put down in electronic format by the girl's mother. The material analysed covered the period from 1 year and 7 months (1;7) till two years and six months 2:6. Over this period, almost 35 hours of conversation were recorded. Ruta’s and her parents’ utterances were coded according to CHILDES, a program commonly used by psycholinguists. After the presentation of the data, the author notes that the study was carried out within the framework of natural morphology and she gives brief descriptions of the first stages in the acquisition of morphology: premorphology, protomorphology and modularised morphology. She also points out that one of the goals of the study is to check whether the emergence of nominal categories in Rūta corresponds to the results of research into the acquisition of other languages, which shows that children first acquire diminutives, then number and, finally, case. In the second chapter (16-36), the acquisition of diminutives is presented. Savickienė makes a few observations on the meaning of diminutives in general, discusses the emergence of diminutive forms in Rūta, their usage by the girl and her mother, the semantics of diminutive forms used by the participants of the conversation as well as the pragmatics of diminutives. The results of the calculations carried out by the author show that diminutives started being used by the girl very early (already at the age of 1;7) and their frequency was high when compared with the overall number of nominal forms (the most frequent were forms denoting animals, toys and body parts). Diminutives were acquired by Rūta earlier than inflectional endings, and on the whole their usage was determined by pragmatic factors (e.g., in order to show affection, to relieve an unpleasant situation etc.), whereas the meaning of smallness was expressed by means of the adjective mažas (‘little’, ‘small’). The third chapter (37-48) is devoted to the category of number. First of all, the author explains how this category functions in contemporary Lithuanian and gives a survey of the results of research on the acquisition of number in other languages. Then a description of the emergence of the category in Rūta's speech is presented. Here Savickienė notes a very inter- esting fact: the girl perceived the difference between singular and plural very early (already at 1:7), but she continued to express the meaning of plurality by using interchangeably (often incorrectly) the numeral du ‘two’ and the adverb daug ‘many’. The first plural forms emerged at 1:8, and at 1;9 a spurt of plural forms was recorded, and the first oppositions of singular and plural forms were observed. In the most extensive chapter, which deals with the acquisition of the category of case (49- 90), Savickienė analyses the emergence and distribution of particular cases in Rūta's speech, providing also comments about the semantic and syntactic functions of the constructions they are used in. The first opposition noted by the author at the age of 1;8 was accusative/genitive RECENZIJOS | 145 singular vs. nominative singular. At the same time, nominative plural and vocative singular forms emerged. Singular forms predominated over the whole period studied, however, the number of plural forms increased conspicuously only after the age of two. As far as the meaning of cases is concerned, the girl first acguired the basic meanings, and only later on the peripheral ones, as was to be expected. The most freguently used cases were: the nominative in the function of grammatical subject, the possessive genitive and the accusa- tive used to encode the direct object. This order of acguisition of cases in Rūta corresponds to the findings in other languages. In this chapter, Savickienė also discusses the mistakes made by the child when producing nouns. For example, during the first months of the period studied (1;7—1;11) Rūta tended to replace endings with the ‘premorpheme’ -a (e.g. smélia instead of smėlis ‘sand:NOM’, bulia instead of bulvė ‘potatoe:NOM’, obuoliuka instead of obuoliuko ‘apple:DIM.GEN.SG’)%, and for a long time she used feminine dative endings for the nominative singular, e.g. Pauliukai instead of Pauliukui (proper name). The girl also made mistakes involving the use of cases, for exam- ple, up to the age of 2:3 several instances of lacking shift from accusative to genitive with negation (ausytZ nekauda instead of ausytės neskauda ‘the ear:piIM.ACC does not hurt’) were recorded. In the fifth chapter (91-104), the acquisition of declensional classes is presented. First of all, the author notes that there is no single, well-established classification of declensional classes in contemporary studies on Lithuanian grammar, and she proposes a new classifica- tion of nouns on the basis of the theory developed by Wolfgang Dressler. As a result, two macroclasses — masculine (I) and feminine (II) were distinguished, then seven microclasses were introduced within the first macroclass and four microclasses plus an isolated feminine paradigm (sesuo ‘sister’) within the second macroclass. The author provedes brief explanations of the notions of ‘microclass’ and ‘macroclass’, ‘inflectional productivity’, etc., but these descriptions could be more detailed. For example, what criteria were used in order to establish whether a microclass is productive or unpro- ductive? The productive classes are constituted by masculine nouns in -as (class 1.1) and -is, -ys (1.3) as well as feminine nouns in -a (IL.1) and -¢ (11.3). The author observes that nouns belonging to these classes were the most numerous in the corpus studied, and their declension was acquired first. The sixth chapter of the study (105-118) gives a brief overview of the acquisition of pro- nouns, with particular emphasis on the problem of self-reference and that of the ways of addressing the interlocutor. It was observed when studying different languages that during early conversations pronouns are infrequent both in child's and parents’ speech. Instead, proper names or kinship terms are used. The same was observed in Rita’s and her mother’s utterances. ® Similar phenomenon can be observed in verbs, where Rūta tended to use the neutral vowel -a or a reduplicated syllable instead of reflexive affixes or prefixes. However, I would rather use the term ‘filler’ for such substitutions, as it is difficult to judge unambiguously what the reasons underlying the use of such ‘empty’ syllables are. It well may be the child’s wish to preserve the prosodic shape of a word or phrase rather than to mark grammatical meaning. 146 | RECENZIJOS In the conclusions (119-124) Savickienė notes that having analysed Rūta's data one can distinguish three stages of morphological development: premorphology (1;7), referring to the stage in which the girl made extensive use of onomatopoeia, interjections, and words which meaning or form could not be unambiguously identified; the stage of protomorphology (1;8- 2;3), in which the first grammatical markers emerged, and the stage modularised morphology (2:4-2:5), in which the categories started to be used productively. After a brief summary of the results, the author notes that the process of acquisition of nouns by Rita corresponds to the results of studies on the acquisition of other languages. Similar conclusions were drawn on the basis of a comparison between the acquisition of nouns by Rūta and by an Austrian speaking boy called Jan, described in the paper supplement- ing the monograph (see footnote 3). Moreover, the data compared confirmed the thesis that children acquiring languages which are more complex with respect to their morphology detect and start using morphological distinctions earlier than children acquiring languages with a poorer morphology. Not many critical remarks can be made on the interpretation of facts or forms by the author. We find a somewhat surprising segmentation on p. 24, where the form trup-uc-iuk-q “a little’ is given as an example of a diminutive with double suffixation. Synchronically, the simplex of trupuciukaq is truput-j (even though formally and semantically it resembles a diminutive), thus trupuciukq cannot be presented as an example corresponding to Zmog-el-iuk-as ‘man:DIM’. I also would not be willing to agree with the contention that the reason why at an early age (especially at 1;7) Rūta omitted the first syllable when uttering her name (saying Tytė, Tele instead of Rūtytė, Rūtelė) were difficulties with the pronunciation of the sound /r/ (p. 27). The fact that a difficult sound occurs in a form does not mean that the whole syllable must be omitted — 1:7 alongside Tité, Telé one can find instances when the child used the form Utyté. In section 2.2.4. (p.20), Savickienė claims that Ferguson's statement about baby talk being a simplified register does not hold for Lithuanian. As an argument she adduces the fact that in their conversations with children parents tend to use many diminutives, which are longer and more difficult to learn than simplicia. In my opinion, this conclusion is too strongly formulated. Frequent use of diminutives is just one of ‘expressive processes’ (discussed also by Ferguson). Examples of simplifying and clarifying processes, to use Ferguson's terminol- ogy, are extremely numerous in speech directed to Lithuanian children — the utterances are shorter, forms, phrases or sentences are often repeated, numerous baby-talk lexemes are used, etc. As mentioned above, the interpretations of forms and facts, as well as the conclusions drawn by Ineta Savickiené are basically correct. A few comments should be made, however, with reference to the presentation of the empirical data used by the author, as well as of some calculations that were based on it. When presenting the empirical data Savickienė notes that citations, onomatopoeia and baby-talk forms were excluded from the investigation (p.12). Such an approach is correct, since these forms do not prove that the child has mastered a grammatical category actively. However, the author does not exclude forms directly modelled on adult utterances. It seems to us that the reasons why these forms were included in the investigated corpus should have been explained. Imitations may have some impact on the results of calculation, and not exclud- RECENZIJOS | 147 ing them may lead to certain misleading conclusions. It should be noted, however, that in the main part of the monograph the author does not forget this general rule and points out which nouns were not fully spontaneous. In the introduction, Savickienė does not provide information about the total number of nouns recorded during the conversations and used in analysis. In the body of the book one finds divergences between the results of the calculations, and it is not guite clear how many forms were actually analysed. In the table presenting the distribution of cases, the overall number of tokens used by the child seems to be 9,851 and the mother seems to have used nouns 12,869 times (p. 60-61), whereas in the table presenting the distribution of nouns with respect to their declension the numbers are 9,677 and 12,812 respectively. It has to be empha- sised that the discrepancy is insignificant and it does not have a negative impact upon the general results, as the author usually presents the data in form of percentages. Finally, certain inconsistencies can be observed in the section discussing the use of cases by Rūta and her mother. In table 4.2 (p. 54) the vocative is properly excluded from analysis and its forms are not calculated. However, in tables 4.3 and 4.4, showing the distribution of cases with respect to the feature of animacy, vocative forms are not shown in the tables but they are calculated (the percentages for the six cases do not sum up to give 100). This mistake affects the results of calculation, as vocatives are very rarely used with inanimate nouns. Moreover, the relative freguency of inanimate nouns in the vocative differs in the girl's and the mother's utterances. The above-mentioned remarks refer to minor mistakes, which do not diminish the value the exhaustive and carefully prepared monograph. The investigation has been carried out care- fully, and the conclusions are formulated only after a detailed discussion of the results of studies into the acguisition of other, related as well as typologically different languages. It should finally be mentioned that the book is carefully edited, and that the forms and fragments of conversations cited are provided with all the necessary grammatical information. The structure of the book is logical, major chapters are divided into smaller, numbered sec- tions. This makes it easy for the reader to find his way in the text. There can be no doubt that Ineta Savickienė's monograph will become a source of useful information not only for linguists or phycholinguists, but also for everybody interested in first and second language acquisition or developmental psychology. Pawel Wojcik Gauta 2004 06 08 Uniwersytet Warszawski Katedra Jezykoznawstwa Ogdlnego i Baltystyki Krakowskie Przedmiescie 26/28 PL-00-927 Warszawa