Download or read book Principle B VP Ellipsis and Interpretation in Child Grammar written by Rosalind Thornton and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first experimental study of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis. Among the universal principles are those known as the principles of the binding theory. These principles constrain the range of interpretations that can be assigned to sentences containing reflexives and reciprocals, pronouns, and referring expressions. The principle that is relevant for pronouns, Principle B, has provided a fertile ground for the study of linguistic development. Although it has long been known that children make certain kinds of errors that appear to contradict this principle, further experimental and theoretical investigation reveals that the child does know the grammatical principle, but implements the pragmatic knowledge incorrectly. In fact, discoveries concerning children's knowledge of Principle B are among the most well-known in the study of language acquisition because of the dissociation between syntactic and pragmatic knowledge (binding versus reference). In this book the authors deepen and extend the results of years of developmental investigation of Principle B by studying the interaction of Principle B with verb phrase ellipsis and properties of the interpretation of empty pronouns in ellipsis--properties of "strict" and "sloppy" interpretation. This is the first experimental study of these topics in the developmental literature. The striking results show that detailed predictions from the "pragmatic deficiency" theory seem to be correct. Many novel experimental results concern the question of how children interpret pronouns, including elided pronouns, and how they understand VP ellipsis. The authors present the necessary theoretical background on Principle B, review and critique previous accounts of childrens errors, and present a novel account of why children misinterpret pronouns. The book will thus be of interest not only to readers interested in the development of the binding theory, but to those interested in the development of interpretation and reference by children.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition Morphosyntax and Semantics written by Tania Ionin and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-11 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook provides innovative and comprehensive coverage of research on the second language acquisition (SLA) of morphosyntax, semantics, and the interface between the two. Organized by grammatical topic, the chapters are written by experts from formal and functional perspectives in the SLA of morphosyntax and semantics, providing in-depth yet accessible coverage of these areas. All chapters highlight the theoretical underpinnings of much work in SLA and their links to theoretical syntax and semantics; making comparisons to other populations, including child language acquirers, bilinguals, and heritage speakers (links to first language acquisition and bilingualism); dedicating a portion of each chapter to the research methods used to investigate the linguistic phenomenon in question (links to psycholinguistics and experimental linguistics); and, where relevant, including intervention studies on the phenomenon in question (links to applied linguistics). The volume will be indispensable to SLA researchers and students who work on any aspect of the SLA of morphosyntax or semantics. With its coverage of a variety of methodologies and comparisons to other populations (such as child language acquirers, early bilinguals, heritage speakers, and monolingual adults), the handbook is expected to also be of much interest to linguists who work in psycholinguistics, first language acquisition, and bilingualism.

Download or read book Romance Linguistics 2012 written by Jason Smith and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-08-15 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 42nd annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at Southern Utah University in Cedar City, Utah, in 2012. The contributions cover a wide range of current topics in the areas of phonetics, phonology, syntax, interfaces, and diachronic Romance linguistics, with an emphasis on experimental approaches, in connection to L1 and L2 acquisition, code-switching and psycholinguistics. Among the languages and varieties of Romance analyzed are French (Old, Modern, and Norman), Portuguese (Brazilian and Classical), and Spanish (Modern and Judeo-Spanish), but also Italo-Romance, Latin, and Romanian. In a comparative tradition, the discussions extend to languages outside Romance, such as dialects of Arabic, Germanic, and Palenquero creole. This collection of papers at the forefront of research contributes to our understanding of Romance languages, and to the influence of Romance linguistics, and will be of interest to scholars in Romance and general linguistics.

Download or read book Minimalist Inquiries into Child and Adult Language Acquisition written by Acrisio Pires and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009-06-23 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together chapters written by specialists in North America, Europe and Brazil. It includes original research about the acquisition (L1, bilingualism) and acquisition/ learning (L2 or L3) of dialects of Brazilian and European Portuguese. In an effort to maximize volume cohesion, the emphasis has been on contributions that present studies exploring both empirical/experimental and theoretical aspects of the acquisition of syntax, and its interfaces with morphology, with semantics/pragmatics, and with language change. Within the generative paradigm alone there are various volumes on the acquisition of other languages, but there are no volumes currently in print focusing on the acquisition of Portuguese. We believe that it is time for such a volume, considering among other factors that Portuguese is the second most widely spoken Romance language (second only to Spanish), and the seventh most widely spoken language in the world. In addition, the significant changes that have taken place between Brazilian and European Portuguese especially since the 19th century make the inquiry into the acquisition of the different dialects a source for very productive insights about the connections between linguistic theory, language acquisition and language change. Finally, having a collection of high quality articles in one place pays homage to the importance for linguistic research of investigations into the acquisition of the Portuguese language.

Download or read book The Prism of Grammar written by Tom Roeper and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-02-13 with total page 637 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the creativity of mind through children's language: how the tiniest utterances can illustrate the simple but abstract principles behind modern grammar—and reveal the innate structures of the mind. Every sentence we hear is instantly analyzed by an inner grammar; just as a prism refracts a beam of light, grammar divides a stream of sound, linking diverse strings of information to different domains of mind—memory, vision, emotions, intentions. In The Prism of Grammar, Tom Roeper brings the abstract principles behind modern grammar to life by exploring the astonishing intricacies of child language. Adult expressions provide endless puzzles for the child to solve. The individual child's solutions ("Don't uncomfortable the cat" is one example) may amuse adults but they also reveal the complexity of language and the challenges of mastering it. The tiniest utterances, says Roeper, reflect the whole mind and engage the child's free will and sense of dignity. He offers numerous and novel "explorations"—many at the cutting edge of current work—that anyone can try, even in conversation around the dinner table. They elicit how the child confronts "recursion"—the heartbeat of grammar—through endless possessives ("John's mother's friend's car"), mysterious plurals, contradictory adjectives, the marvels of ellipsis, and the deep obscurity of reference ("there it is, right here"). They are not tests of skill; they are tools for discovery and delight, not diagnosis. Each chapter on acquisition begins with a commonsense look at how structures work—moving from the simple to the complex—and then turns to the literary and human dimensions of grammar. One important human dimension is the role of dialect in society and in the lives of children. Roeper devotes three chapters to the structure of African-American English and the challenge of responding to linguistic prejudice. Written in a lively style, accessible and gently provocative, The Prism of Grammar is for parents and teachers as well as students—for everyone who wants to understand how children gain and use language—and anyone interested in the social, philosophical, and ethical implications of how we see the growing mind emerge.

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Ellipsis written by Jeroen van Craenenbroeck and published by Oxford Handbooks. This book was released on 2019 with total page 1147 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This handbook is the first volume to provide a comprehensive, in-depth, and balanced discussion of ellipsis, a phenomena whereby expressions in natural language appear to be incomplete but are still understood. It explores fundamental questions about the workings of grammar and provides detailed case studies of inter- and intralinguistic variation.

Download or read book Advances in Language Acquisition written by Xenia Konstantinopoulou and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-16 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains 51 chapters based on papers presented at the GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) conference held in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2011. It thus reflects the GALA 2011 scientific presentations and discussions and raises issues that are currently at the centre of language acquisition research. Such issues examined in this volume include first and second language acquisition and processing by children and adults; language acquisition by individuals with linguistic and/or cognitive impairment; and cross-linguistic comparisons in (a)typical language acquisition. As such, Advances in Language Acquisition constitutes a valuable reference guide for current work on the interdisciplinary research field of language acquisition.

Download or read book Reflexive Pronouns A Theoretical and Experimental Synthesis written by Darcy Sperlich and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.

Download or read book Stevens Handbook of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience Developmental and Social Psychology written by and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-13 with total page 672 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IV. Developmental & Social Psychology: Simona Ghetti (Volume Editor) (Topics covered include development of visual attention; self-evaluation; moral development; emotion-cognition interactions; person perception; memory; implicit social cognition; motivation group processes; development of scientific thinking; language acquisition; development of mathematical reasoning; emotion regulation; emotional development; development of theory of mind; category and conceptual development; attitudes; executive function.)

Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntax in Romance Languages written by Vincent Torrens and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume includes a selection of papers that address a wide range of acquisition phenomena from different Romance languages and all share a common theoretical approach based on the Principles and Parameters theory. They favour, discuss and sometimes challenge traditional explanations of first and second language acquisition in terms of maturation of general principles universal to all languages. They all depart from the view that language acquisition can be explained in terms of learning language specific rules, constraints or structures. The different parts into which this volume is organized reflect different approaches that current research has offered, which deal with issues of development of reflexive pronouns, determiners, clitics, verbs, auxiliaries, Inflection, wh-movement, rssumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, topic and focus, and null arguments.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and Development written by Anna Gavarró and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 520 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume gathers fifty papers from the conference Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, GALA 2007, celebrated in Barcelona between the 6th and 8th of September, 2007. It covers the areas of syntax and phonology of child language from the theoretical perspective of generative grammar – the theoretical outlook which first placed language acquisition at the centre of linguistic inquiry.

Download or read book The Emergence of Meaning written by Stephen Crain and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-08-30 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An investigation into the underlying logic of human languages which looks at how children acquire English and Mandarin.

Download or read book Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension written by Petra Hendriks and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-07-31 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else. Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults. Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon. “Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court.” Ana Pérez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

Download or read book Romance Languages and Linguistic Theory 2005 written by Sergio Baauw and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2007 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conference series Going Romance is the major European discussion forum for theoretically relevant research on Romance languages, where ideas about language and linguistics and about Romance languages are put in an interactive perspective, giving space to both universality and Romance-internal variation. The current volume features a selection of 18 articles (out of 28) that were presented during the 19th meeting at Utrecht University, December 8-10, 2005. Included in this volume are four papers that were presented by invited speakers: Belletti, Delais-Roussarie & Rialland, Notley & Van der Linden & Hulk, and Ordóñez; these reflect both issues discussed in the general session as well as themes of the workshop on acquisition. A number of reknown Romance linguists (Saltarelli, di Sciullo, Zubizarreta) also contributed to the volume. In general, contributions bear on a variety of topics in the field of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics and include the perspective from acquisition.

Download or read book New Directions in the Acquisition of Romance Languages written by João Costa and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-10-21 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book puts together a selection of papers presented at The Romance Turn V Workshop, held in Lisbon in 2012. The papers presented at the workshop discussed general problems in the field of Language Acquisition, with a special focus on data from several Romance varieties. The papers in the volume cover a wide array of topics and subfields of acquisition studies, including L1 and L2 acquisition, typical and atypical development, acquisition of syntax, semantics, and phonology.

Download or read book Grammatical Features and the Acquisition of Reference written by Sergio Baauw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-16 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses to what extent errors young children make with their interpretation of definite articles and pronouns are due to their immature pragmatic skills, and to what extent incomplete syntactic development plays a role.

Download or read book Empirical Perspectives on Anaphora Resolution written by Anke Holler and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakaré) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units. This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.