The Acquisition of Lithuanian Noun Morphology

This monograph by Ineta Savckiene (incl. a joint chapter with Klampfer, Korecky-Kröll and Dressler) presents the emergence and development of Lithuanian nominal morphology in the child Ruta from 19 through 30 months of age in a comprehensive and detailed way. The introduction gives a histroy of research, the data and methodology of this longitudinal case study. The second chapter deals the acquisition of diminutives (Lithuanian is not only the most conservative living Indo-European language, but also the wealthiest in diminutives). This is done for suffixation, semantics and pragmatics, and as always in strict comparison with the maternal input. Chapter 3 covers plural acquisition, which is facilitated by the extensive use of diminutives. Chapter 4 is devoted to the acquisition of the 7 cases of Lithuanian in singular and plural with its complex acquisition sequences in form and function. On the bases of chapters 2 to 4, the fifth chapter.comprehensively explores the rise of inflection classes, focussing on selection and emergence of the first mini-paradigms and their successive filling-up and expansion, incl. overgeneralisations in relation to degrees of productivity in the target language. Chapter 6 fleshes out the acquisition of personal pronouns, incl. their relations and substitutions with names for speaker and interlocutor (Ruta and Mother). The conclusions (chapter 7) are followed by the joint chapter 8, which systematically compares the detection of nominal morphology in the transition from pre- to protomorphology by the Lithuanian and a Viennese child and thus contrasts Lithuanian and German grammar acquisition in this decisive transition phase. With this pioneering work the so far little-described first language acquisition of Lithuanian becomes one of the best described in nominal morphology, due to the welath of data and their precise and consistent description and to the high methodological standards: those of trasncription and morphological coding of the international CHILDES project and analysis of the international "Corsslinguistic Project on Pre- and Protomorphology in Language Acquisition" of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. In this framework this is an exemplary case study, also as a first model of a characterological typologogy of a single language and of a contrastive analysis, including the new emasure D of lexical diversity..