Author Description

The acquisition of Lithuanian has not been studied comprehensively yet. The present book is the very first attempt to describe, in a possibly detailed way, one of the aspects of language development in a Lithuanian girl, viz. the emergence of verb morphology. The analysis starts at the point when the child studied was one year and seven months old, and is concluded at the age of two years and a half. Since relatively little empirical suitable data to be used in research on the acquisition of the Baltic languages have been collected until now (especially in comparison with the amount of data collected and analysed for the purpose of investigating the acquisition of Slavic, Germanic or Romance languages - to mention just a few branches of the Indo-European group), and since the corpus discussed here is relatively small, the aim of this book is, first of all, to present a general picture of the process of acquisition of the Lithuanian verb system. Contents: Preface; 1. The Acquisition of Baltic Languages: The State of the Art; 2. The Data; 3. The Lithuanian Verb System; 4. The Distribution of Verb Forms; 5. Tense; 6. Person; 7. The Imperative Mood and the Conditional Mood; 8. Non-Finite Forms; 9. The Development of Verb Structure; 10. Conclusions; Appendix; Summaries; References