Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Page 56

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Bergljót Baldursdóltir
of spontaneous speech, except for three months of the year 1982, when
it was mostly in the form of diary notes. During the tape-recordings
Baldur is normally aware of the recording taking place. Some acting, in
the form of showing off, can therefore be noticed during the first record-
ings. This study is an initial analysis of this data. For the present pur-
pose, two tapes, one 60 minutes long and the other 90 minutes long,
were analyzed with noun declension and code-switching in mind.
These tapes were recorded at two very different points in Baldur’s
development. One was recorded in February 1982, and contains five of
the first recordings, where he is making up a story, talking about his
school and telling a story from a picture book. Part of the tape is a
monologue but the majority is a dialogue between me and him. The
second tape is a recent recording in April 1984. It is 90 minutes long
and consists of five recordings of dialogues between me and him. It will
be noticed, when these two tapes are compared, that phonological
changes have occurred. On the first tape Baldur’s pronunciation is Ice-
landic, with the exception of the English loan words. On the second
tape (April 1984) his Icelandic is spoken with a strong English accent.
Before continuing to present the results, some consideration of Baldur’s
language acquisition till the age of 3 is essential.
2.3 Icelandic and language acquisition
The evaluation of Baldur’s restructuring of the Icelandic noun de-
clension system has to be done in the light of his Icelandic language ac-
quisition. This is so that it can be seen how his incomplete acquisition
of the noun declension combines with the characteristics of the lan-
guage to stimulate the changes that have taken place and furthermore to
be able to determine whether attrition or acquisition failure has taken
place.
Icelandic is an inflected language where certain grammatical distinc-
tions like gender, case, number, definition, tenses and aspects are ex-
pressed in inflectional endings of the words. Icelandic nouns have three
genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, two numbers, singular and
plural, and four cases, nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. The
inflections of Icelandic are syncretistic, that is each suffix has more than
one simultaneous function. For example the ending -ur marks the stem
for case, gender and number. It can be a masculine ending in nomina-
tive singular.