Acquisition of the Reflexive and Reciprocal Interpretations of Albanian Anaphors and the Verbal Affix u

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the acquisition of the reflexive pronoun vetvete ´self-self´ and the reciprocal pronoun njëri tjetri ´each other’ and the lexical meaning of the verbal affix u (u like Romance se shows ambiguity when used with a plural predicate i.e., passive, reflexive and reciprocal) by pre-school Albanian children. Following Wexler and Manzini (1987) Subset Principle it was hypothesized that children would give adult-like interpretation to the reciprocals and reflexives and only give three readings to the affix u. Sixty children - mean age 5.04- (target group) and sixty adults - mean age 18.08 - (control group) participated in a study that investigated the interpretation of reflexives and reciprocals. Experimental sentences containing 3 different predicates, (lag ‘squirt’, giciloj ‘tickle’, ngjyros ‘paint’) were used, each containing the reflexive anaphora vetvete ‘self-self’, the reciprocal njëri tjetri ‘each other’, and the affix ‘u’. Just to make sure that children know the reflexive and reciprocal morphemes an Elicited Imitation task was carried out. Whereas a Truth-Value Judgment task examined the hypothesis that children from the positive evidence though they see that there is a form in Albanian that has all three meanings, i.e. affix u, when acquiring reflexive and reciprocal pronouns they will not overgeneralize the meanings of the affix u to reflexives nor reciprocals. The results revealed an interesting observation. Children as expected did not overgeneralize the reading of the affix u to the reflexive and reciprocal morphemes. That is, they rejected e reciprocal reading for the reflexive morpheme and vice versa.