Download or read book The Acquisition of Scrambling and Cliticization written by S.M. Powers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues involved (for example, the X-bar status of clitics, base-generation vs. movement accounts of scrambling). This volume contains an overview of L1 (and, in one case, L2) acquisition data from a number of different languages including Bernese, Swiss, German, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and Swedish, as well as from several theoretical points of view with these two clause-internal processes at its center. These language acquisition data are considered to be crucial in the validation of analyses of these specific linguistic phenomena in adult grammars. The contributions in this volume include the earliest thoughts in this vein and, for this reason, should be viewed as a starting point for discussions within theoretical linguistics and language acquisition alike.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Direct Object Scrambling and Clitic Placement written by Jeannette C. Schaeffer and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a new contribution to the debate concerning the “real time acquisition” of grammar in First Language Acquisition Theory. It combines detailed and quantitative observations of object placement in Dutch and Italian child language with an analysis that makes use of the Modularity Hypothesis. Real time development is explained by the interaction between two different modules of language, namely syntax and pragmatics. Children need to build up knowledge of how the world works, which includes learning that in communicating with someone else, one must realize that speaker and hearer knowledge are always independent. Since the syntactic feature referentiality can only be marked if this (pragmatic) distinction is made, and assuming that certain types of object placement (such as scrambling and clitic placement) are motivated by referentiality, it follows that the relevant syntactic mechanism is dependent on the prior acquisition of a pragmatic distinction.

Download or read book Developments in the Acquisition of Clitics written by Kleanthes K. Grohmann and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2014-03-17 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The present volume presents new theoretical and empirical findings on the acquisition and development of clitics in and across different languages. It features ten chapters that largely emerged from the CYCL1A Workshop on the Acquisition of Clitics held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in May 2012. These chapters explore issues pertaining to the first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition of clitic pronouns. There is an emphasis on Greek, with the first four chapters discussing mono- and bilingual acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek and the next two chapters on Standard Modern Greek. Three contributions focus on Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, and European Portuguese, respectively. The last chapter of this volume is an invited contribution by Ken Wexler on the Unique Checking Constraint as an explanation of clitic omission in normal and SLI development. This volume will constitute a valuable reference guide for current work on the acquisition of clitic pronouns.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Reference written by Ludovica Serratrice and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2015-11-15 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Referring to entities is one of the key functions of language; learning to understand and use the relevant referential expressions is one of children’s major linguistic achievements. The 13 chapters of this volume bring together a wealth of information on the acquisition of referential processes in infants, pre-schoolers and school-age children drawing on data from more than 25 languages ranging from Italian to Inuktitut, and from Norwegian to Turkish. This book presents the state-of-the-art of corpus and experimental research on the acquisition of reference. The breadth of aspects of referential acquisition will make the volume appealing to a wide audience of researchers, including linguists and psycholinguists working on phonological, morpho-syntactic, and discourse-pragmatic aspects of language development. The cross-linguistic perspective adopted by several of the contributors will be of particular interest to researchers investigating the relevance of typological differences. The state-of-the-art approach makes the research accessible to specialist and non-specialist researchers alike, and will provide an invaluable resource for graduate-level courses.

Download or read book Pronouns and Clitics in Early Language written by Pilar Larranaga and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2012-08-31 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traditional grammars have stated that clitics are subject or object pronouns whose distributional features make them different from personal pronouns. This book focuses on the acquisition of personal and demonstrative pronouns as well as clitics with respect to determinative phrases in a variety of languages of the Romance family and several indigenous languages, such as Quechua. A particularly original aspect of the present volume is that it not only addresses syntactic issues, but also semantic and pragmatic questions that have been widely neglected in the literature. It also reports on acquisition data of languages, such as Quechua, which have not attracted the attention of researchers until very recently.

Download or read book The Expression of Negation written by Laurence R. Horn and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2010 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Negation is at the core of human language; without negation there can be no denial, contradiction, irony, or lies. This book examines the form and function of negative sentences in a variety of languages and offers state-of-the-art surveys of the acquisition of negation by children, its processing by adults, its historical development, and its interaction with other operators and predicates within natural language sentences. Topics covered include the nature of negative polarity, the phenomenon of pleonastic or illogical negation, and the role of morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic.

Download or read book Language Acquisition and Development written by Ana Castro and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-08-11 with total page 540 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection contains 43 papers presented at the GALA (Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition) conference 2009, held in Lisbon, Portugal. The volume contains a very wide and rich range of topics, reflecting the immense quality of the event: the acquisition of languages from different families is studied; comparisons between acquisition of L1, L2 and atypical language development are made; all areas of language development are explored (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, pragmatics and interactions between components). The proceedings of GALA are an invaluable reference for those interested in Language Acquisition, Language Development and Child Language.

Download or read book The Acquisition of French in Different Contexts written by Philippe Prévost and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is a collection of studies by some of the foremost researchers of French acquisition in the generative framework. It provides a unique perspective on cross-learner comparative research in that each chapter examines the development of one component of the grammar (functional categories) across different contexts in French learners: i.e. first language acquisition, second language acquisition, bilingual first language acquisition and specifically-language impaired acquisition. This permits readers to see how similar issues and morphosyntactic properties can be investigated in a range of various acquisition situations, and in turn, how each context can contribute to our general understanding of how these morphosyntactic properties are acquired in all learners of the same language. This state-of-the-art collection is enhanced by an introductory chapter that provides background on current formal generative theory, as well as a summary and synthesis of the major trends emerging from the individual studies regarding the acquisition of different functional categories across different learner contexts in French.

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 2006-07-26 with total page 438 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, ressumptive pronouns, topic and focus, mood, the syntax/discourse interface, and null arguments.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Verbs at the Syntax Semantics Interface written by Paolo Lorusso and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2018-06-11 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child’s speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.

Download or read book Weak Referentiality written by Ana Aguilar-Guevara and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2014-12-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together studies in the domain of weak referentiality, the phenomenon that a definite or indefinite noun phrase lacks its usual referential force. Several papers investigate syntactic or semantic properties of indefinite noun phrases, such as modality, number neutrality, narrow scope, incorporation, predication, and case marking, and that in a range of languages (Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Catalan, German, Papiamentu, Russian). Other papers deal with weakly referential definite noun phrases in various languages (Basque, Dutch, English, French) involving scrambling, modification, possession, and accessibility. The papers demonstrate a range of empirical methods and theoretical models. This volume will not only be of interest to researchers and students in syntax and semantics, but also in psycholinguistics and language typology.

Download or read book Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition written by Jill de Villiers and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-08-27 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of syntactic topics that have formed the central domains of investigation and debate. These topics are treated from the unique perspective of central actors in each domain who have helped shape the research agenda. The authors have presented a summary of the data, the theories under discussion, and their own best assessments of where each domain stands. Providing as well the agenda for future work in the field showing both particular needs and general directions that should be pursued in the coming decades.

Download or read book The Acquisition of Syntax written by Marc-Ariel Friedemann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a collection of studies that survey recent research in developmental linguistics, illustrating the fruitful interaction between comparative syntax and language acquisition. The contributors each analyse a well defined range of acquisition data, aiming to derive them from primitive differences between child and adult grammar. The book covers cross-linguistic and cross-categorial phenomena, shedding light on major developments in this novel and rapidly growing field. Extensions to second language acquisition and neuropathology are also suggested.

Download or read book Studies in French Applied Linguistics written by Dalila Ayoun and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008-10-29 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies in French Applied Linguistics invites the reader to adopt a broad perspective on applied linguistics, illustrating the fascinating multifaceted work researchers are conducted in so many various, inter-connected subfields. The five chapters of the first part are dedicated to the first and second language acquisition of French in various settings: First language acquisition by normal children from a generative perspective and by children with Specific Language Impairment; second language acquisition in Canadian immersion settings, from a neurolinguistic approach to phonology and natural language processing and CALL. The six chapters of the second part explore the contribution of French in various subfields of applied linguistics such as an anthropological approach to literacy issues in Guadeloupean Kréyòl, literacy issues in new technologies, phonological and lexical innovations in the banlieues, French in North Africa, language planning and policy in Quebec, as well as the emerging field of forensic linguistics from an historical perspective.

Download or read book Production Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language written by Angela Grimm and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2011-10-27 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The workshop Production-Comprehension Asymmetries in Child Language held in Osnabrück in 2009 is the starting point for this book. The workshop developed from the observation that children's production skills appear to precede their comprehension skills in a number of phenomena, e.g. pronouns or negation. The volume provides cross-linguistic evidence for such asymmetric development and investigates grammatical and methodical explanations of the observed asymmetries.

Download or read book Advances in Greek Generative Syntax written by Melita Stavrou and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2005-05-19 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original research focuses on various lesser studied aspects of Greek syntax. The articles combine a sound empirical coverage within current developments of generative theory and cover a wide spectrum of areas. The syntax of sentential structure is dealt with by two articles, one is an extensive analysis of the distribution of goal and beneficiary dative DPs in Greek (and cross-linguistically) and the other addresses the relation agree in small clauses (and between adjectives and nouns). Two articles study the acquisition of the left periphery and of eventivity and one focuses on the historical evolution of participles in Greek, out of which gerunds emerged. The syntax and semantics of wh-clauses in DP positions and of the non-volitional verb θelo are the focus of two articles situated in the syntax–semantics interface. The DP domain is approached by two theoretical articles, one on a Greek possessive adjective and another on determiner heads. The final contribution studies the acquisition of the Greek definite article.

Download or read book Semi lexical Categories written by Norbert Corver and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2013-05-22 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The distinction between functional categories and lexical categories is at the heart of present-day grammatical theory, in theories on language acquisition, code-switching and aphasia. At the same time, it has become clear, however, that there are many lexical items for which it is less easy to decide whether they side with the lexical categories or the functional ones. This book deals with the grammatical behavior of such in- between-categories, which are referred to here as "semi-lexical categories".