Íslenskt mál og almenn málfræði - 01.01.1985, Side 60

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Bergljót Baldursdóttir
that what is more regular and consistent is more easily dealt with by
children in their acquisition of language. According to this some things
in the Icelandic noun declension should be more easily learned than
others. Neuter nouns are, for example, less variable than masculine and
feminine nouns. They are only divided into two classes, strong and
weak, whereas masculine nouns are subdivided further into 2 or more
subclasses. Following the same lines of argument, the masculine nouns
of the strong declension are divided into four subclasses and the femi-
nine nouns into three. The strong masculine nouns have therefore the
most variable case endings and then the strong feminine nouns. The
weak declension, according to this, should be easier than the strong de-
clension, in all it has only 5 subclasses whereas the strong declension
has 8 subclasses. On the other hand when frequency is considered,
many common words in Icelandic are declined according to the strong
masculine noun subclasses, and children therefore more often exposed
to strong masculine nouns.
Both the arguments of complexity and frequency could be suggested
as possible explanations for the absence of the genitive case in Konráðs-
son’s data. For example Ruke-Dravina (1973:266) points out that in
those languages which make frequent use of the genitive where other
languages use the accusative or the dative „one can expect the probabil-
ity to be greater that the child will acquire the genitive ending earlier“.
In Icelandic it can be observed that sometimes when English uses geni-
tive, Icelandic uses dative (Einarsson 1945:110). Moreover the use of
the genitive in Icelandic is complex. That is, although it can be said that
the „normal“ use of the genitive is for the possessive it can also be used
to express the following meanings: measure in space and time, value,
description, material, the whole, objective genitive, genitive of naming
etc. (Einarsson 1945:111) and the possessive can also be expressed by
using the possessive pronoun and the definite article. Finally, as Kon-
ráðsson (1982:23) himself points out, the absence of the genitive could
be a reminder of the basic problem with which a researcher of language
is faced and that is the representativeness of his/her corpus.
2.4 Analysis of the data
The present study focuses on errors, particularly errors of the noun
phrase. Overall there are 2 sets of data, one for February 1982 and the
other for April 1984. Each set of data is subdivided into two subsets.