Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory
Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory

Author: A.E. Pierce

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2012-12-06

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9401125740

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The theory of language acquisition is a young but increasingly active field. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory presents one of the first detailed studies of comparative syntax acquisition. It is informed by the view that linguists and acquisitionists are essentially working on the same problem, that of explaining grammar learnability. The author takes cross-linguistic data from child language as evidence for recent proposals in syntactic theory. Developments in the structure of children's sentences during the first few years of life are traced to changes in the setting of specific grammatical parameters. Some surprising differences between the early child grammars of French and English are uncovered, differences that can only be explained on the basis of subtle distinctions in inflectional structure. This motivates the author's claim that functional or nonthematic categories are represented in the grammars of very young children. The book also explores the relationship between acquisition and diachronic change in French and English. It is argued that findings in acquisition, when viewed from a parameter setting perspective, provide answers to important questions arising in the study of language change. The book promises to be of interest to all those involved in the formal, psychological or historical study of linguistic knowledge.

Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax
Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax

Author: Andrew Radford

Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Published: 1991-01-08

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9780631163589

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Between the ages of one-and-a-half and two years children start to form elementary phrases and clauses. This stage of their linguistic development provides the first clear evidence that they have begun to develop a grammar of the language being acquired. It is therefore of paramount importance for any attempt to construct a theory of language acquisition. Drawing data from a corpus of more that 100,000 spontaneous utterances, Andrew Radford demonstrates that the fundamental characteristic of children's earliest structures is that they are essentially lexical and thematic in nature. They show evidence of the acqusition of lexical but not functional categories, and of thematic but not nonthematic constituents. This hypothesis provides a unified account of a wide range of phenomena in early child English including children's nonmastery of determiners, possessives, pronouns, missing arguments, expletives, case, binding, tense, agreement, auxiliaries, infinitives, complementisers, and movement phenomena. This detailed study of children's initial grammars suggests a model of acquisition which is essentially maturational. Different modules of the child's grammar come into operation at different stages of development, triggered by relevant aspects of the child's experience. In this, Radford's account sheds significant light on some of the fundamental questions for the theory of language acquisition.

Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures

Author: Noam Chomsky

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2020-05-18

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 3112316002

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No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition
Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

Author: (Vol.1)Barbara Lust

Publisher: Psychology Press

Published: 2018-10-24

Total Pages: 581

ISBN-13: 1317728807

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Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars. The issues surrounding cross-linguistic variation in "Heads, Projections, and Learnability" (Volume 1) and in "Binding, Dependencies, and Learnability" (Volume 2) are arguably the most fundamental in UG. How can principles of grammar be learned by general learning theory? What is biologically programmed in the human species in order to guarantee their learnability? What is the true linguistic representation for these areas of language knowledge? What universals exist across languages? The two volumes summarize the most critical current proposals in each area, and offer both theoretical and empirical evidence bearing on them. Research on first language acquisition and formal learnability theory is placed at the center of debates relative to linguistic theory in each area. The convergence of research across several different disciplines -- linguistics, developmental psychology, and computer science -- represented in these volumes provides a paradigm example of cognitive science.

Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition
Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition

Author: Michaela Müller

Publisher: GRIN Verlag

Published: 2010-02-03

Total Pages: 53

ISBN-13: 3640521498

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Seminar paper from the year 2002 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3 (A), University of Cologne (English Seminar), course: Hauptseminar Syntactic theory and first language acquisition, language: English, abstract: Heather's (26 months old) speech shows that she has already entered the later multi-word stage. She makes use of the three primary functional category systems (the D-system, the I-system and the C-system), which are projections of the corresponding functional categories (D, I and C).The core assumption of the X-bar model is that any word category X can function as the head of a phrase and can be projected into the corresponding phrasal category XP by addition of up to three different kinds of modifiers which are full phrasal constituents: complement, adjunct and specifier. Therefore, phrases in English have the schematic structure below: [x'' specifier [x' adjunct [x' [x head] complement/s]]] Functional category systems, in contrast to lexical category systems, lack semantic content, but have grammatical meaning. Furthermore, functional elements permit only one complement. All of these functional category systems consist of a head, a complement and a nonthematic specifier position and so have a symmetrical structure. The following essay will describe these systems of English and the use of nonthematic specifier positions in adult grammar.

Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories
Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories

Author: Thom Huebner

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1991-01-01

Total Pages: 444

ISBN-13: 9027224633

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The term “crosscurrent” is defined as “a current flowing counter to another.” This volume represents crosscurrents in second language acquisition and linguistic theory in several respects. First, although the main currents running between linguistics and second language acquisition have traditionally flowed from theory to application, equally important contributions can be made in the other direction as well. Second, although there is a strong tendency in the field of linguistics to see “theorists” working within formal models of syntax, SLA research can contribute to linguistic theory more broadly defined to include various functional as well as formal models of syntax, theories of phonology, variationist theories of sociolinguists, etc. These assumptions formed the basis for a conference held at Stanford University during the Linguistic Institute there in the summer of 1987. The conference was organized to update the relation between second language acquisition and linguistic theory. This book contains a selection of (mostly revised and updated) papers of this conference and two newly written papers.

Syntactic Complexity from a Language Acquisition Perspective
Syntactic Complexity from a Language Acquisition Perspective

Author: Elisa Di Domenico

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1443893528

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The volume examines syntactic complexity from an acquisitional perspective, which offers a peculiarly grounded starting point when dealing with linguistic complexity, under the assumption that what is simpler is acquired earlier than what must be thought of as complex. Connecting acquisitional data inseparably to formal linguistic analyses, it not only allows a comparison between structures at various levels in terms of complexity, but also a deeper insight into the factors determining complexity in different populations of acquirers. The book is divided into two parts following an introductory chapter. The papers in Part I consider the first language acquisition of some complex structures such as different types of passives, relative clauses, questions and classes of predicates, with a look at children’s early sensitivity to seemingly complex domains, such as the Definiteness Effect and unaccusative predicates. Part II is dedicated to the acquisition of complex structures in different modes of acquisition. The papers here examine, sometimes comparatively, different conditions of language acquisition dealing with clitics, types of relative clauses or referential pronouns. The languages considered range from European Portuguese to Finnish, French, German, Italian and Romanian.