Morphosyntactic features of Lithuanian adjective acquisition

This paper investigates morphosyntactic (agreement) features of Lithuanian adjective acquisition. Although some researchers of Lithuanian language development have dealt with the acquisition of morphology (Balčiūnienė 2005a, 2005b; Savickienė 2000, 2003, 2006a, 2006b, 2007; Savickienė et al. 2009; Wójcik 2000; Wójcik & Smoczyńska 1997), this study is the first attempt to describe the emergence of morphosyntactic features of adjectives. Analyzing the acquisition of adjectives is a rather new and interesting endeavor, whereas the acquisition of more frequent parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs, has been a favorite area of many Lithuanian and non-Lithuanian scholars. Meanwhile, word classes that modify meaning of other words, as a rule, are not analyzed so extensively. This is due to the fact that it is much more difficult to analyze the acquisition of modifying words as they are used less frequently than words performing other functions. Consequently, any analysis of adjectives will require more linguistic data. This study of the acquisition of Lithuanian adjectives is based on a large quantity of linguistic data (i.e. the corpus of four children) compiled according to the method of longitudinal observationLituanistikos katedraVytauto Didžiojo universiteta