Virve‐anneli Vihman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4796365 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Virve‐anneli Vihman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Virve‐anneli |
| FAMILY NAME | Vihman |
| SIGNATURE | VIHMAN V A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Tartu |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0874-1730 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 21 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 24 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Acquisition of Morphological Variation
Children’s acquisition of variation in the target language depends on a number of factors not yet well understood. This study probes the acquisition of morphological variation in two unrelated languages, Croatian (Slavic) and Estonian (Finnic), focussing on parallel forms of a lexeme expressing a single grammatical category (a phenomenon known as morphological overabundance). We conducted a cross-linguistic elicitation experiment with 140 monolin…
Bilingual Acquisition of Morphology
In this study, we investigate whether two structurally distinct languages, Norwegian and Russian, influence the use of Estonian morphosyntax by bilingual 5 to 7-year-olds. Using a sentence-repetition task, we tested the acquisition and use of Estonian morphosyntax by children acquiring Estonian alongside Norwegian and Russian, which differ in their use of morphological marking. We tested 69 children aged 4;9 to 7;10 (24 Estonian-Norwegian and 24 …
Language exposure and competence in Estonian-Norwegian bilingual children
This paper investigates the relationship between language exposure and Estonian competence of Estonian-Norwegian bilinguals aged 5–7. The sample includes 29 children acquiring Estonian and Norwegian (16 successive and 8 simultaneous bilinguals acquiring Estonian as a heritage language in Norway, 5 simultaneous bilinguals acquiring Norwegian as a heritage language in Estonia). Their language environments are described using data from the Q-BEx que…
The Acquisition of Noun Class Morphology in Eegimaa
In this paper, we examine young children’s acquisition of the prefixal noun class system of Eegimaa, a Jóola language spoken in Senegal (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo). The analysis is based on spontaneous, spoken data representing a mixed design (longitudinal and cross-sectional), with –9.5 hr of recordings, including nine children, aged between 1;10 and 3;2. The data yielded 967 spontaneously produced noun tokens. Across the group of children, a…
Outsourcing teenage language
This paper presents a remote method used for engaging teenagers as citizen sociolinguists within the research project Teen Speak in Estonia. The project, launched in January 2020, aims to investigate young people’s language by creating the first systematic dual corpus of Estonian teenagers’ spoken language and text messaging. Previously, youth language in Estonia has not been the subject of much research. Yet scholarly attention to teenage langua…
Preferences in the use of overabundance
This study of morphological overabundance focuses on the (non-)synonymy of parallel forms in Estonian illative case (‘into’) and the type of entrenchment behind it. We focus on the lexical level, testing whether the form preferred for a lexeme depends on semantic or morphophonological factors, or both. Using multifactorial regression analyses, we compare three corpus datasets: lexemes biased toward long forms, those biased toward short forms and …
Adolescent Heritage Speakers
Heritage language (HL) research has investigated adults and children, while adolescents have garnered far less attention, despite adolescence being a crucial time in the development of idiolects and identities, and, hence, also for language maintenance. This study describes HL usage among Estonian-Swedish bilingual teenagers. Data were collected from 21 first- and second-generation Estonian heritage speakers (aged 12-17). Non-standard usage occur…
Täitsa lambist
Eleven out of fourteen Estonian nominal cases are generally regarded as semantic cases, rather than grammatical, but some are more grammaticalised (i.e. less semantic) than others. These can be said to be (semi-)grammatical cases, carrying both semantic and syntactic functions. This study focusses on elative and allative case, which stand out among semantic cases in terms of multifunctionality and a higher degree of grammaticalisation. We investi…
A corpus study of grammatical case forms in written and spoken Estonian
In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, we take the perspective of morphological case, and investigate the relative frequency of each case in…
Oblique complements in Estonian
This study focuses on Estonian verb-complement structures, which include oblique (non-canonically marked) complements marked in spatial cases. Not all approaches agree on whether canonical arguments and oblique complements have argument status of the same type, but they do mostly agree that the two types of complement markings are used by different types of verbs. First, oblique case is viewed as always indexing the original semantics of the case…
Acquisition of Eegimaa (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo) in a polyadic environment
Research on lesser studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa have the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we show that Eegimaa children learn to speak in a polyadic environment, where they receive input from mu…
Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian
This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a verb-second language along the same lines as the modern Germanic standard languages, spoken Estonian…
Many ways to decline a noun
Aims This study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to phonological neighbours. Method We taught children novel nouns in nominative or allative case and el…
Effects of Animacy in Grammar and Cognition
Most, if not all, languages exhibit “animacy effects”: grammatical structures interact with the relative animacy of noun referents, as represented on various versions of animacy scales, with human discourse participants at one end and inanimate objects at the other. Cross-linguistic evidence attests to a range of linguistic phenomena conditioned by animacy, with complex effects requiring (a) subtler distinctions than a binary contrast [± animate]…
Animacy Distinctions Arise from Iterated Learning
Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they…
Pilk laste keeleomandamisele. Teoreetilistest alustest ja kvantitatiivsetest lähenemistest
Lapsesuu on kõigile nii tuttav ja emakeel nii omane, et leidub palju värvikaid näiteid suurtelt mõtlejatelt, kes kirjeldavad, kuidas lapsed keelt omandavad. Püha Augustinus, keda tsiteerib Ludwig Wittgenstein (2005 [1953]), väidab mäletavat seda, kuidas ta õppis keelt, kui vanemad osutasid erinevatele asjadele ja nimetasid neid.(1) Wittgenstein seab selle mälestuse kahtluse alla: tema meelest on keeletekke kontekst [...]
Shifting perspective
Bringing the toys to life
In the children’s film Toy Story , toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions over the course of the narrative, as they reflect the animacy of their referents. We re…
Language Interaction in Emergent Grammars
This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children's code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switchi…
Language ideology and language planning in Estonian higher education
In recent years, interest in the study of language policy issues in the context of universities has grown considerably. One reason for this is the coexistence of two apparently contradictory discourses, centring around nationalising and globalising orientations. Universities are seen by many as the key institutions for safeguarding the sustainability of national languages, while in order to operate on a global scale, an increasing use of foreign …
Who needs it? Variation in experiencer marking in Estonian ‘need’-constructions
In this paper, we tackle the twin issues of obligatoriness of semantic arguments and variation in their expression through a study of Estonian constructions denoting need. The variation under investigation consists in the choice of case-marking, between adessive and allative case, as well as the option to omit the oblique argument. We extracted and coded ‘need’-constructions from spoken and written corpora and used non-parametric classification m…
Varieerumine "tarvis-/vaja-"konstruktsioonides keelekontaktide valguses
eelekontaktide uurimises on ha enam thelepanu plvinud keelte (morfo)sntaktilised sarnastumisnhud. Selles valdkonnas on eesti keele kontaktide mju vaadeldud peamiselt seoses kahe keeleliiduga (sks Sprachbund): Lnemere keeleliiduga (vt nt Dahl, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001) vi Euroopa keeleliiduga, millele iseloomulikke nhtusi vetakse enamasti kokku
The lure of lability
This paper examines the phenomenon of lability in Estonian. We describe the types of lability found in our database and the distribution of verbs according to formal (derivational) and semantic verb classes, and we propose an explanation for the spread of lability in the Estonian verbal lexicon. Estonian displays a wealth of labile verbs, compared with Finnish, for instance, a closely related language which uses similar (derivational and morphosy…
Forms of address across languages
This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal form of the second person pronoun, but we also investig…
Language Interaction in Emergent Grammars
This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children's code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switchi…
Language ideology and language planning in Estonian higher education
In recent years, interest in the study of language policy issues in the context of universities has grown considerably. One reason for this is the coexistence of two apparently contradictory discourses, centring around nationalising and globalising orientations. Universities are seen by many as the key institutions for safeguarding the sustainability of national languages, while in order to operate on a global scale, an increasing use of foreign …
Who needs it? Variation in experiencer marking in Estonian ‘need’-constructions
In this paper, we tackle the twin issues of obligatoriness of semantic arguments and variation in their expression through a study of Estonian constructions denoting need. The variation under investigation consists in the choice of case-marking, between adessive and allative case, as well as the option to omit the oblique argument. We extracted and coded ‘need’-constructions from spoken and written corpora and used non-parametric classification m…
Oblique complements in Estonian
This study focuses on Estonian verb-complement structures, which include oblique (non-canonically marked) complements marked in spatial cases. Not all approaches agree on whether canonical arguments and oblique complements have argument status of the same type, but they do mostly agree that the two types of complement markings are used by different types of verbs. First, oblique case is viewed as always indexing the original semantics of the case…
Forms of address across languages
This paper examines linguistic politeness in a bilingual society, focusing on forms of address among Estonian speakers and Russian speakers in Estonia. We ask in what ways groups living in different conditions of societal bilingualism acknowledge different norms of politeness and hence exhibit different politeness behavior. Our study focuses especially on the choice of the formal or informal form of the second person pronoun, but we also investig…
Varieerumine "tarvis-/vaja-"konstruktsioonides keelekontaktide valguses
eelekontaktide uurimises on ha enam thelepanu plvinud keelte (morfo)sntaktilised sarnastumisnhud. Selles valdkonnas on eesti keele kontaktide mju vaadeldud peamiselt seoses kahe keeleliiduga (sks Sprachbund): Lnemere keeleliiduga (vt nt Dahl, Koptjevskaja-Tamm 2001) vi Euroopa keeleliiduga, millele iseloomulikke nhtusi vetakse enamasti kokku
The lure of lability
This paper examines the phenomenon of lability in Estonian. We describe the types of lability found in our database and the distribution of verbs according to formal (derivational) and semantic verb classes, and we propose an explanation for the spread of lability in the Estonian verbal lexicon. Estonian displays a wealth of labile verbs, compared with Finnish, for instance, a closely related language which uses similar (derivational and morphosy…
Language ideology and language planning in Estonian higher education
In recent years, interest in the study of language policy issues in the context of universities has grown considerably. One reason for this is the coexistence of two apparently contradictory discourses, centring around nationalising and globalising orientations. Universities are seen by many as the key institutions for safeguarding the sustainability of national languages, while in order to operate on a global scale, an increasing use of foreign …
Who needs it? Variation in experiencer marking in Estonian ‘need’-constructions
In this paper, we tackle the twin issues of obligatoriness of semantic arguments and variation in their expression through a study of Estonian constructions denoting need. The variation under investigation consists in the choice of case-marking, between adessive and allative case, as well as the option to omit the oblique argument. We extracted and coded ‘need’-constructions from spoken and written corpora and used non-parametric classification m…
Animacy Distinctions Arise from Iterated Learning
Linguistic animacy reflects a particular construal of biological distinctions encountered in the world, passed through cultural and cognitive filters. This study explores the process by which our construal of animacy becomes encoded in the grammars of human languages. We ran an iterated learning experiment investigating the effect of animacy on language transmission. Participants engaged in a simple artificial language learning task in which they…
Pilk laste keeleomandamisele. Teoreetilistest alustest ja kvantitatiivsetest lähenemistest
Lapsesuu on kõigile nii tuttav ja emakeel nii omane, et leidub palju värvikaid näiteid suurtelt mõtlejatelt, kes kirjeldavad, kuidas lapsed keelt omandavad. Püha Augustinus, keda tsiteerib Ludwig Wittgenstein (2005 [1953]), väidab mäletavat seda, kuidas ta õppis keelt, kui vanemad osutasid erinevatele asjadele ja nimetasid neid.(1) Wittgenstein seab selle mälestuse kahtluse alla: tema meelest on keeletekke kontekst [...]
Shifting perspective
Bringing the toys to life
In the children’s film Toy Story , toys spring to life when their human owners are away, creating an alternative world of transferred animacy relations signalled by visual and linguistic cues. The storylines and characters explore the nature of animacy and relationships between conspecifics and ‘others’. Our analysis focuses on the use of referring expressions over the course of the narrative, as they reflect the animacy of their referents. We re…
Language Interaction in Emergent Grammars
This paper examines the morphological integration of nouns in bilingual children's code-switching to investigate whether children adhere to constraints posited for adult code-switching. The changing nature of grammars in development makes the Matrix Language Frame a moving target; permeability between languages in bilinguals undermines the concept of a monolingual grammatical frame. The data analysed consist of 630 diary entries with code-switchi…
Effects of Animacy in Grammar and Cognition
Most, if not all, languages exhibit “animacy effects”: grammatical structures interact with the relative animacy of noun referents, as represented on various versions of animacy scales, with human discourse participants at one end and inanimate objects at the other. Cross-linguistic evidence attests to a range of linguistic phenomena conditioned by animacy, with complex effects requiring (a) subtler distinctions than a binary contrast [± animate]…
Verb-second in spoken and written Estonian
This paper investigates clausal constituent order in Estonian, a language often described in the literature as exhibiting a verb-second “tendency”. We present a corpusbased study of ordering in independent affirmative declarative clauses, drawing data from both written and spoken corpora. Our results show that, while written Estonian is robustly a verb-second language along the same lines as the modern Germanic standard languages, spoken Estonian…
Many ways to decline a noun
Aims This study investigated three- to five-year-olds’ ability to generalise knowledge of case inflection to novel nouns in Estonian, which has complex morphology and lacks a default declension pattern. We explored whether Estonian-speaking children use similar strategies to adults, and whether they default to a preferred pattern or use analogy to phonological neighbours. Method We taught children novel nouns in nominative or allative case and el…
Acquisition of Eegimaa (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo) in a polyadic environment
Research on lesser studied languages is vital for the advancement of theories of language acquisition. We discuss two areas where data from Eegimaa have the potential to produce innovative research: (1) language typology, with an overview of the complex demonstratives found in this language, and (2) learning environment and input speech. Here, we show that Eegimaa children learn to speak in a polyadic environment, where they receive input from mu…
Täitsa lambist
Eleven out of fourteen Estonian nominal cases are generally regarded as semantic cases, rather than grammatical, but some are more grammaticalised (i.e. less semantic) than others. These can be said to be (semi-)grammatical cases, carrying both semantic and syntactic functions. This study focusses on elative and allative case, which stand out among semantic cases in terms of multifunctionality and a higher degree of grammaticalisation. We investi…
A corpus study of grammatical case forms in written and spoken Estonian
In this paper, we present the results of a corpus study investigating the distribution of the three grammatical cases in Estonian (nominative, genitive, partitive) and the factors affecting the interpretation of syntactic role for nouns marked in these cases. Unlike previous studies, which have focussed on the properties of grammatical relations, we take the perspective of morphological case, and investigate the relative frequency of each case in…
Oblique complements in Estonian
This study focuses on Estonian verb-complement structures, which include oblique (non-canonically marked) complements marked in spatial cases. Not all approaches agree on whether canonical arguments and oblique complements have argument status of the same type, but they do mostly agree that the two types of complement markings are used by different types of verbs. First, oblique case is viewed as always indexing the original semantics of the case…
Outsourcing teenage language
This paper presents a remote method used for engaging teenagers as citizen sociolinguists within the research project Teen Speak in Estonia. The project, launched in January 2020, aims to investigate young people’s language by creating the first systematic dual corpus of Estonian teenagers’ spoken language and text messaging. Previously, youth language in Estonia has not been the subject of much research. Yet scholarly attention to teenage langua…
Preferences in the use of overabundance
This study of morphological overabundance focuses on the (non-)synonymy of parallel forms in Estonian illative case (‘into’) and the type of entrenchment behind it. We focus on the lexical level, testing whether the form preferred for a lexeme depends on semantic or morphophonological factors, or both. Using multifactorial regression analyses, we compare three corpus datasets: lexemes biased toward long forms, those biased toward short forms and …
Adolescent Heritage Speakers
Heritage language (HL) research has investigated adults and children, while adolescents have garnered far less attention, despite adolescence being a crucial time in the development of idiolects and identities, and, hence, also for language maintenance. This study describes HL usage among Estonian-Swedish bilingual teenagers. Data were collected from 21 first- and second-generation Estonian heritage speakers (aged 12-17). Non-standard usage occur…
Language exposure and competence in Estonian-Norwegian bilingual children
This paper investigates the relationship between language exposure and Estonian competence of Estonian-Norwegian bilinguals aged 5–7. The sample includes 29 children acquiring Estonian and Norwegian (16 successive and 8 simultaneous bilinguals acquiring Estonian as a heritage language in Norway, 5 simultaneous bilinguals acquiring Norwegian as a heritage language in Estonia). Their language environments are described using data from the Q-BEx que…
The Acquisition of Noun Class Morphology in Eegimaa
In this paper, we examine young children’s acquisition of the prefixal noun class system of Eegimaa, a Jóola language spoken in Senegal (Atlantic family, Niger-Congo). The analysis is based on spontaneous, spoken data representing a mixed design (longitudinal and cross-sectional), with –9.5 hr of recordings, including nine children, aged between 1;10 and 3;2. The data yielded 967 spontaneously produced noun tokens. Across the group of children, a…
Acquisition of Morphological Variation
Children’s acquisition of variation in the target language depends on a number of factors not yet well understood. This study probes the acquisition of morphological variation in two unrelated languages, Croatian (Slavic) and Estonian (Finnic), focussing on parallel forms of a lexeme expressing a single grammatical category (a phenomenon known as morphological overabundance). We conducted a cross-linguistic elicitation experiment with 140 monolin…
Bilingual Acquisition of Morphology
In this study, we investigate whether two structurally distinct languages, Norwegian and Russian, influence the use of Estonian morphosyntax by bilingual 5 to 7-year-olds. Using a sentence-repetition task, we tested the acquisition and use of Estonian morphosyntax by children acquiring Estonian alongside Norwegian and Russian, which differ in their use of morphological marking. We tested 69 children aged 4;9 to 7;10 (24 Estonian-Norwegian and 24 …
Linguistics (20 works) · Estonian (15 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (9 works) · Language Development and Disorders (8 works) · Noun (7 works) · Animacy (6 works) · Artificial Intelligence (6 works)