Acquisition of Estonian: some typologically relevant features

Abstract

Abstract Most previous approaches to the acquisition of morphology have focused on the acquisition of inflectional morphology of some Indo-European language; there are fewer studies on the acquisition of languages with a rich morphological system, in-cluding the Finno-Ugric languages. Among the Finno-Ugric languages the acquisition of Estonian has been a largely neglected area. The article discusses the impact of the typological peculiarity of a language on the acquisition of the inflectional morphology of Estonian. At first some assumptions will be made concerning the impact of the general richness of the Estonian morphological system on the speed of the acquisition of inflectional morphology followed by the analyses of the acquisition of individual typologically relevant features. The article discusses the acquisition of inflectional and analytic means of expression, the acquisition of gradation as a typologically relevant feature of Estonian, the acquisition of the lexical aspect of Estonian, and the acquisition of the case of the object as the principal means of expressing the aspect. The conclusions are based on the data from the previous articles by the author and the Estonian subcorpus of Vija, Argus, and Triplets in CHILDES.