Paweł Wójcik. „The Acquisition of Lithuanian Verb Morphology“

ACTA LINGUISTICA LITHUANICA XLIV (2001), 251–258 REVIEWS Reviews Paweł Wójcik, The Acquisition of Lithuanian Verb Morphology. A Case Study. Kraków: Universitas, 2000, 152 p. The young scholar Paweł Wójcik wrote the monograph The Acquisition of Lithuanian Verb Morphology. A Case Study¹ on the basis of his doctoral dissertation, prepared in the Department of General Linguistics and Baltic Studies at the University of Warsaw (the dissertation was defended in 1998). The monograph differs from the dissertation mainly in its restructured organization, which is more coherent but divided into too many short chapters. P. Wójcik’s work is undoubtedly pioneering in Lithuanian studies. It is the first attempt to describe the acquisition of verb morphology by a Lithuanian child (a girl named Rūta) from the age of 1;7 to 2;5; it is also the first book on Lithuanian children’s language. Incidentally, the acquisition of noun morphology by the same girl has also been studied: in 1999, Ineta Savickienė defended her doctoral dissertation “Lithuanian Child’s Noun Morphology” at Vytautas Magnus University. Thus, the two studies together will make it possible to form a fairly comprehensive picture of how a Lithuanian girl acquires the morphological system. P. Wójcik’s monograph consists of ten short chapters (pp. 11–128), a brief preface (pp. 9–10), an appendix (pp. 129–137), summaries in Polish (pp. 138–143) and Lithuanian (pp. 144–148), and a bibliography (pp. 149–152). The preface states that the empirical basis required for research into the acquisition of Baltic children’s language is small, including the data processed by the author himself; therefore, the book’s main aim is “to present an overall picture of how the Lithuanian verb system is acquired” (p. 9). P. Wójcik particularly emphasizes the specific nature of the subject of the monograph: it investigates the language of a single child. Although even in such cases certain universals of language acquisition can be discerned (drawing on the eminent psycholinguist D. T. Slobin), the process of language acquisition should nevertheless be regarded as a highly individual phenomenon, conditioned by various factors (ibid.). For this reason, P. Wójcik is reluctant to draw far-reaching conclusions about the acquisition of the Lithuanian verb system 1 The book was published in the “Baltica Varsoviensia” series (vol. 2), founded and edited by Professor Wojciech Smoczyński; its first volume was a collection of Tamara Buch’s works on Lithuanian studies (T. Buch, Opuscula Lithuanica, Warszawa, 1998). The monograph’s author, P. Wójcik, who teaches Lithuanian studies at the University of Warsaw, studied Baltic studies at the universities of Warsaw and Vilnius. He wrote a master’s thesis on the language Lithuanian adults use to communicate with a two-year-old child (based on recordings made in one family); see P. Wójcik, Charakterystyka mowy skierowanej do 2-letniego dziecka litewskiego. Master’s thesis. University of Warsaw, 1994; idem, Some characteristic features of Lithuanian Baby Talk, in Linguistica Baltica 3, 1994, 71–86. 252 | RECENZIJOS overall. This sober understanding of the subject of research and its possibilities is a commendable quality, not often found in a scholar taking their first steps. The first chapter of the monograph, as is fitting, is a history of the topic (pp. 11–17). It introduces research on Baltic children’s language, beginning with the work of V. Rūķe-Draviņa, which assembled a wealth of data on how her two children acquired Latvian, including its verb morphology. P. Wójcik understandably devotes a section to the latter topic (pp. 13–14), focusing mainly on the order in which verb categories are acquired (there does not seem to have been such a subsection in the dissertation). The chapter then surveys research on Lithuanian children’s language, which began very late—in 1992, when, at Magdalena Smoczyńska’s initiative, systematic recordings of Eglė’s speech began, followed a year later by recordings of Rūta’s speech. Eglė’s language development proved highly distinctive and unlike the standard language development of a two- to three-year-old child; consequently, only Rūta’s audio recordings were selected for research into the acquisition of Lithuanian 2. In the second chapter (pp. 18–21), the author introduces the research material—the audio recordings of Rūta—and explains how they were collected, transcribed, and analyzed using CHILDES, a system well known in psycholinguistics worldwide. A total of 38,500 utterances were coded, containing more than 26,000 verb forms that were identified and analyzed (about 10,000 were produced by Rūta, and the rest by the adults who spoke with her, primarily her mother). The third chapter (pp. 22–36) is a concise description of the Lithuanian verb system (that is, the adult-language model acquired by children). Without questioning the author’s competence in matters relating to the Baltic verb, I would like to draw attention to several questionable details. For instance, some reflexive forms are interpreted incorrectly, with the reflexive allomorph -is identified in forms such as kelk-is (= kelki-s), kels-is (= kelsi-s), p. 32 (elsewhere, in the table on p. 36, the forms are already segmented as sùp-ki-s, sùp-si-s). The segmentation of the forms sùptume, sùptute, sùptumėme, sùptumėte as sùp-tume, sùp-tute, sùp-tumėme, sùp-tumėte (p. 36) is incomprehensible. What are -tume, -tute, -tumėme, -tumėte morphologically? Such vowel alternations as lėkti, lekia, lėkė; karti, karia, korė (p. 31) would synchronically be better termed mixed (the author classifies the first as quantitative and the second as qualitative; this is already a diachronic interpretation). Diachrony also surfaces in the remarks on the category of gender, where it is claimed that adjectives, numerals, and participles can have neuter forms (p. 30, n. 20). In the subsystem of inflected nominals (excluding nouns), which vary for number and case, gender should synchronically be understood primarily as an opposition between agreeing and non-agreeing forms. The latter forms are distinct with respect to the categories of gender, number, and case, so the term “genderless forms,” proposed by some Lithuanian scholars, is also ill-chosen. The fourth chapter (pp. 37–42) gives an overall picture of the distribution of verb forms in the speech of both Rūta and the adults who communicated with her (“input”). It notes that the age of one year and nine months (1;9) marks a highly significant threshold in the acquisition of verb morphology: this is when the future and past (simple) tenses began to be distinguished, and vocabulary expanded considerably. The next three chapters describe how Rūta acquires the grammatical categories of the verb. The discussion begins with tense (Chapter V, pp. 43–59), followed by an analysis of the emergence and development of person (Chapter VI, pp. 60–80) and mood forms (Chapter VII, pp. 81–88) in Rūta’s speech. The eighth chapter (pp. 89–93) discusses non-finite forms—infinitives and participles—while the ninth (pp. 94–117) examines the development of verb structure. The tenth chapter (pp. 118–128) presents the conclusions. It highlights the formation of the verb’s morphological categories and structure 2 P. Wójcik used Eglė’s audio recordings to study adult speech directed to children (child directed speech); see footnote 1. RECENZIJOS 253 the most general regularities in Rūta’s speech, and the similarities and differences between Rūta’s speech and adult (“input”) speech. The acquisition of verb morphology in Rūta’s speech is compared with Latvian data presented in V. Rūke-Draviņš’s works. In the monograph’s appendix (pp. 129–137), we find transcribed and coded material, adverbs of time, third-person forms, participles, and other examples. P. Wójcik’s study is based on nearly a year’s worth of audio recordings of a child’s speech, processed, as noted, according to the CHILDES system. Thus, the material compiled by the monograph’s author is reliable and verifiable, and all scholars who study child language according to CHILDES principles can use it and the study’s findings. On the other hand, the regularities observed by the researcher will also be of interest to psycholinguists who do not use the CHILDES system (cf. the works by Draviņš cited in the work under review). In short, all those interested in the acquisition of Lithuanian by children will seek out the work of P. Wójcik (and I. Savickienė), since there are simply no others. The work of these young scholars will serve as a point of reference for linguists who choose Lithuanian-speaking children as the subject of their research. The fact that only one child is studied raises certain problems (cf. the points made in the monograph’s preface); for example, it is unclear which phenomena should be considered individual features of Rūta’s speech and which are characteristic of Lithuanian-speaking children in general. Nevertheless, even such a study makes it possible to identify universal or more general, as well as individual, features of the development of Rūta’s speech, when findings from studies of children speaking other languages are brought to bear. In drawing his conclusions, P. Wójcik compares facts about Rūta’s speech primarily with corresponding data on Latvian-speaking children. A much broader range of studies of children speaking other languages could have been used for comparison, including the work of participants in W. U. Dressler’s project “The Acquisition of Pre- and Protomorphology.” It would have been interesting to learn whether the material on Rūta’s verbs makes it possible to distinguish the stages of premorphology, protomorphology, and modularized morphology posited by proponents of natural morphology. In general, the author could have drawn more on generally accepted principles of general linguistics in interpreting the facts, thereby demonstrating his linguistic erudition. Among the generalizations made in the monograph, I would particularly like to note P. Wójcik’s finding concerning the order in which the various morphological categories of the verb are acquired—a sequence which, I have little doubt, is characteristic of the acquisition of Lithuanian verb morphology in general. First (at about 1;8), present-tense and imperative forms appear; a month later, past- and future-tense forms and participles; and finally, conditional forms. This order more or less corresponds to the structural and statistical3 markedness of the categories. If we compare the time required to acquire verb and nominal categories, Rūta acquired the latter somewhat more quickly. The dominance of so-called third-person forms throughout the period under study is symptomatic. This would support the view that in the Baltic languages “third person” falls outside the system of person categories and is not, in fact, a person (cf. V. Žulio’s works). The facts are presented precisely in the monograph, whose exemplary technical presentation is worth noting. Proofreading errors are relatively rare; I noticed only a few in the English text: paticiples (= participles) p. 14, 19 lines from the top4; situtation (= situation) p. 24, n. 14; dipthongs (= diphthongs) 3 When making generalizations about the acquisition of verb morphology in Rūta’s speech, P. Wójcik also takes into account, incidentally, statistical data on the use of verb forms in standard Lithuanian, presented in V. Žilinskienė’s works. 4 Here and below, v. means “(line) from the top,” ap. means “(line) from the bottom.” 254 | RECENZIJOS p. 32, 2 lines from the bottom. There are more errors in the Lithuanian section—not only proofreading errors, for example: Aurelia (= Aurelija) p. 16, 10 lines from the top, n. 6; busimasis (= būsimasis) p. 25, 8 lines from the top; lekti (= lėkti) p. 31, 8 lines from the top; pusti, putė (= pūsti, pūtė), žadžia (= žaidžia) p. 31, 13 lines from the top; baigiai (= baigei) p. 34, 6 lines from the bottom; the works by Lithuanian accentologists mentioned in n. 27 on p. 34 are not included in the bibliography; mok+tė-s ir mok+ė-me-s (p. 35, 2,3 lines from the bottom) should be switched; tečiu (= tečiu) p. 58, 12 lines from the bottom; biški (= biški “a little”) p. 92, 3 lines from the bottom; it is not true that the form šokinti does not exist in Lithuanian (p. 103, n. 64); krenta (= krinta) p. 115, 15 lines from the bottom (the mother’s speech krenta is not a standard-language form); MFTYTI (= MĖTYTI) p. 117, 1 line from the top; {tevelis} (= tėvelis) p. 133, 13 lines from the bottom; tetis (= tetis {tėtis}) p. 134, 10,13 lines from the top. The errors listed here “disappear” among the many impeccably presented examples and do not catch the eye. The Lithuanian summary is less satisfactory—its language, style, and punctuation need substantial editing. It is regrettable that many errors in the Lithuanian text have been carried over from the dissertation. This suggests that the preparation of the monograph was rushed. Perhaps haste also explains why “dissertation” slipped into the book’s text in place of “monograph,” for example: “In this dissertation, I shall refer to problems of accentuation” (p. 34, n. 27). In concluding this review, I would like to say that, despite the shortcomings and errors noted, P. Wójcik’s monograph is a substantial work that has broadened the horizons of Lithuanian studies through research on child language. The book under review and the articles would not have appeared without the efforts of many people: the audio recordings were made and transcribed by Rūta’s mother, the Lithuanian scholar Aurelija Kaškelevičienė (this work was supported in part by a grant from the Austrian Academy of Sciences, secured by Prof. W. U. Dressler; the Open Society Fund Lithuania also contributed by purchasing a computer, a tape recorder, and cassettes); the data were coded and analyzed, of course, by P. Wójcik, with the advice and full support of the well-known psycholinguist Prof. M. Smoczyńska, whose initiative launched research on Lithuanian child language; the dissertation was supervised through its writing and defense by the Balticist Prof. Axel Holvoet. The author himself aptly highlights the help of these and other people in the book (p. 7), but the principal hero of this new branch of Lithuanian linguistics is the author himself, a professionally trained psycholinguist and Lithuanianist who, I have no doubt, will continue his successful research in Lithuanian studies. Bonifacas Stundžia Department of Baltic and General Linguistics Vilnius University 5 Universiteto St., 2734 Vilnius, Lithuania [email protected] Received 2001 08 17 PIETRO U. DINI, The Baltic Languages. A Comparative History. Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos institutas, 2000, 540 p. Pietro U. Dini’s introduction to Baltic philology Le lingue baltiche has already received many positive reviews in the linguistic press. Translations into Lithuanian and Latvian testify not only that it fills a gap in Baltic studies literature, but also to the positive qualities of the book itself. The book’s special editor, Bonifacas Stundžia, made considerable efforts to ensure that the Lithuanian edition retained all these qualities of the original. His meticulous work made it possible to avoid man-