Emergence and Early Acquisition of the Adjective Inflection in Estonian

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Acknowledgements

The research in this article was supported by a grant from the Estonian Science Foundation (7492).

Notes

1. Quantity alternation in Estonian is based on syllable length (the contrast of short and long stressed syllables) and on syllable weight (the contrast of light and stressed syllables).

2. Estonian has 14 nominal cases: nominative, genitive, partitive, illative, inessive, elative, allative, adessive, ablative, translative, terminative, essive, abessive, and comitative.

3. For further information about Estonian adjectives, see Erelt (1986) Eesti adjektiivisüntaks. Tallinn: Valgus.

4. The recordings consisted of everyday dialogues between the children and their mothers; the utterances of fathers occuring in these dialogues are not analyzed here.

5. A mini-paradigm is defined by Bittner, Dressler and Kilani-Schoch (2003, p. xvi) ‘as corresponding to a non-isolated set of minimally three phonologically unambiguous and distinct inflectional forms of the same lemma produced spontaneously in contrasting syntactic or situative contexts in the same month of recordings’.

6. The part of the word that was not clearly pronounced in the child's speech is shown in round brackets.

7. Word order in Estonian is not so fixed as, for example, in English. The syntactic roles of subject and object are indicated by case marking, so the subject can occupy both clause-initial and clause-final position.

8. Unfortunately, there are no data available on the acquisition of adjectives in Finnish. Therefore the comparison with the acquisition of a closely related language is not currently possible.

9. It is interesting to note that the ratio was the same in the input language of both children – the input speech of Hendrik had 17.0 nouns per adjective, and in the input speech of Andreas the ratio was one adjective per 17.2 nouns.