The Acquisition of Word Order
The Acquisition of Word Order

Author: Marit Richardsen Westergaard

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9027255288

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Within a new model of language acquisition, this book discusses verb second (V2) word order in situations where there is variation in the input. While traditional generative accounts consider V2 to be a parameter, this study shows that, in many languages, this word order is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. Thus, within a split-CP model of clause structure, a number of "micro-cues" are formulated, taking into account the specific context for V2 vs. non-V2 (clause type, subcategory of the elements involved, etc.). The micro-cues are produced in children s I-language grammars on exposure to the relevant input. Focusing on a dialect of Norwegian, the book shows that children generally produce target-consistent V2 and non-V2 from early on, indicating that they are sensitive to the micro-cues. This includes contexts where word order is dependent on information structure. The children s occasional non-target-consistent behavior is accounted for by economy principles."

Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact

Author: Bettelou Los

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Published: 2017-12-14

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9027264848

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The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.

Variation in the Input
Variation in the Input

Author: Merete Anderssen

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2010-09-22

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 9048192072

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The topic of variation in language has received considerable attention in the field of general linguistics in recent years. This includes research on linguistic micro-variation that is dependent on fine distinctions in syntax and information structure. However, relatively little work has been done on how this variation is acquired. This book focuses on how different types of variation are expressed in the input and how this is acquired by young children. The collection of papers includes studies of the acquisition of variation in a number of different languages, including English, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Norwegian, Swiss German, Ukrainian, and American Sign Language. Different kinds of linguistic variation are considered, ranging from pure word order variation to optionally doubly filled COMPs and the resolution of scopal ambiguities. In addition, papers in the volume deal with the extreme case of variation found in bilingual acquisition.

Word Order Change
Word Order Change

Author: Ana Maria Martins

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0198747306

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This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax and offers new insights into word order, syntactic movement, and related phenomena. It draws on data from a wide range of languages including Sanskrit, Tocharian, Portuguese, Irish, Hungarian and Coptic Egyptian.

Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility
Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility

Author: Doris L. Payne

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 9027229058

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For some time the assumption has been widely held that for a majority of the world's languages, one can identify a "basic" order of subject and object relative to the verb, and that when combined with other facts of the language, the "basic" order constitutes a useful way of typologizing languages. New debate has arisen over varying definitions of "basic," with investigators encountering languages where branding a particular order of grammatical relations as basic yielded no particular insightfulness. This work asserts that explanatory factors behind word order variation go beyond the syntactic and are to be found in studies of how the mind grammaticizes forms, processes information, and speech act theory considerations of speakers' attempts to get their hearers to build one, rather than another, mental representation of incoming information. Thus three domains must be distinguished in understanding order variation: syntactic, cognitive and pragmatic. The works in this volume explore various aspects of this assertion.

The Free Word Order Phenomenon
The Free Word Order Phenomenon

Author: Joachim Sabel

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 3110178222

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Review text: "The articles in this volume represent the most recent and most advanced thinking on free word order phenomena in the languages discussed, and as such Sabel & Saito's book will be an invaluable volume for linguists of all persuasions interested in the syntax of free word order."John Frederick Bailyn in: Journal of Linguistics 43/2007.

Child Language Acquisition
Child Language Acquisition

Author: Ben Ambridge

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2011-03-17

Total Pages: 465

ISBN-13: 1139500511

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Is children's language acquisition based on innate linguistic structures or built from cognitive and communicative skills? This book summarises the major theoretical debates in all of the core domains of child language acquisition research (phonology, word-learning, inflectional morphology, syntax and binding) and includes a complete introduction to the two major contrasting theoretical approaches: generativist and constructivist. For each debate, the predictions of the competing accounts are closely and even-handedly evaluated against the empirical data. The result is an evidence-based review of the central issues in language acquisition research that will constitute a valuable resource for students, teachers, course-builders and researchers alike.

Word Order in Discourse
Word Order in Discourse

Author: Pamela Downing

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing

Published: 1995-01-01

Total Pages: 606

ISBN-13: 902722921X

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This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers dealing with the problem of word order variation in discourse. Word order variation has often been treated as an essentially unpredictable phenomenon, a matter of selecting randomly one of the set of possible orders generated by the grammar. However, as the papers in this collection show, word order variation is not random, but rather governed by principles which can be subjected to scientific investigation and are common to all languages.The papers in this volume discuss word order variation in a diverse collection of languages and from a number of perspectives, including experimental and quantitative text based studies. A number of papers address the problem of deciding which order is 'basic' among the alternatives. The volume will be of interest to typologists, to other linguists interested in problems of word order variation, and to those interested in discourse syntax.