Download or read book The Acquisition of Word Order written by Marit Richardsen Westergaard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2009 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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."

Download or read book Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact written by Bettelou Los and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-12-14 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Variation in the Input written by Merete Anderssen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Word Order Change written by Ana Maria Martins and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Word Order Universals written by John A Hawkins and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-05-19 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word Order Universals

Download or read book The Free Word Order Phenomenon written by Joachim Sabel and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2008-08-22 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book deals with the syntax of the free word order phenomenon (scrambling) in a wide range of languages - in particular, German, Japanese, Kannada, Malayalam, Serbo-Croatian, Tagalog, Tongan, and Turkish - in some of which the phenomenon was previously unstudied. In the past, the syntax of free word order phenomena has been studied intensively with respect to its A- and A'-movement properties and in connection with its semantic (undoing) effects. The different articles in this volume offer new ways of analyzing free word order under (i) minimalist assumptions, (ii) concerning the typology of scrambling languages, (iii) with respect to the question of how it is acquired by children, (iv) in connection with its relatedness to information structural factors, and (v) with respect to its consequences for a highly elaborated sentence structure of the IP/VP domain. The articles that focus mainly on the emprical aspects of free word order phenomena deal with the properties and proper analysis of rightwards scrambling in Turkish, with the A-/A'-nature and triggers for VSO-VOS alternations in Tongan, as well as with left-branch extractions and NP-Split in Slavic and its consequences for a typology of scrambling languages. The articles that focus on theoretical aspects of scrambling deal with questions concerning the motivatation of a derivation with scrambling in a free word order language, such as whether scrambling has to be analyzed as topicalization or focus movement. Or assuming that scrambling is feature-driven, how the technical details of this analysis are implemented in the grammar to avoid unwarranted derivations, for example, derivations with string-vacuous scrambling. A further important question that is addressed is when scrambling is acquired in the development of the grammar, and what the consequences are for the timing of the acquisition of A- and A'-movement properties. This volume will be most relevant to researchers and advanced students interested in generative syntax, as well as typologists working on German, Japanese, Slavic, Turkish, Dravidian and Austronesian languages. We regret that due to a layout error the title of Miyagawa's article on "EPP and semantically vacuous scrambling" is misrepresented in the printed version of the book. You can download the article with the corrected title here.

Download or read book Word Order in Discourse written by Pamela Downing and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 606 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Child Language Acquisition written by Ben Ambridge and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-03-17 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Pragmatics of Word Order Flexibility written by Doris L. Payne and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Language Acquisition written by Susan Foster-Cohen and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-07-16 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

Download or read book Two First Languages written by Jürgen M. Meisel and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Acquisition of Word Order written by Gloria Brakel and published by . This book was released on 1975 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Acquisition of Word Order in Chinese as a Foreign Language written by Wenying Jiang and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2009 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this book, linguistic achievements of word order studies in Chinese have been applied to Chinese second language acquisition research. By analyzing a great number of word order errors made by learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL), this book has developed a method for describing and explaining Chinese word order errors. With this method, the book has the potential to empower CFL teachers all over the world to teach Chinese in an informed manner, and particularly to teach Chinese word order more effectively and efficiently." --Book Jacket.

Download or read book Impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation written by Sauermann, Antje and published by Universitätsverlag Potsdam. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation examines the impact of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation in German-speaking preschoolers. A puzzle in the area of language acquisition concerns the production-comprehension asymmetry for non-canonical sentences like "Den Affen fängt die Kuh." (“The monkey, the cow chases.”), that is, preschoolers usually have difficulties in accurately understanding non-canonical sentences approximately until age six (e.g., Dittmar et al., 2008) although they produce non-canonical sentences already around age three (e.g., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). This dissertation investigated the production and comprehension of non-canonical sentences to address this issue. Three corpus analyses were conducted to investigate the impact of givenness, topic status and the type of referring expression on word order in the spontaneous speech of two- to four-year-olds and the child-directed speech produced by their mothers. The positioning of the direct object in ditransitive sentences was examined; in particular, sentences in which the direct object occurred before or after the indirect object in the sentence-medial positions and sentences in which it occurred in the sentence-initial position. The results reveal similar ordering patterns for children and adults. Word order variation was to a large extent predictable from the type of referring expression, especially with respect to the word order involving the sentence-medial positions. Information structure (e.g., topic status) had an additional impact only on word order variation that involved the sentence-initial position. Two comprehension experiments were conducted to investigate whether the type of referring expression and topic status influences the comprehension of non-canonical transitive sentences in four- and five-year-olds. In the first experiment, the topic status of the one of the sentential arguments was established via a preceding context sentence, and in the second experiment, the type of referring expression for the sentential arguments was additionally manipulated by using either a full lexical noun phrase (NP) or a personal pronoun. The results demonstrate that children’s comprehension of non-canonical sentences improved when the topic argument was realized as a personal pronoun and this improvement was independent of the grammatical role of the arguments. However, children’s comprehension was not improved when the topic argument was realized as a lexical NP. In sum, the results of both production and comprehension studies support the view that referring expressions may be seen as a sentence-level cue to word order and to the information status of the sentential arguments. The results highlight the important role of the type of referring expression on the acquisition of word order variation and indicate that the production-comprehension asymmetry is reduced when the type of referring expression is considered. --- Im Rahmen der vorliegenden Dissertation wurde der Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks auf den Erwerb von Wortstellungsvariationen bei deutschsprachigen Vorschulkindern untersucht. Eine zentrale Fragestellung im Spracherwerb betrifft die Asymmetrie zwischen Produktion und Verständnis. Diese Asymmetrie ist dadurch gekennzeichnet, dass sechsjährige Kinder oft Schwierigkeiten haben, Sätze in der nicht-kanonischen Wortstellung, z.B. „Den Affen fängt die Kuh.“, zu verstehen (z.B., Dittmar et al., 2008), obwohl bereits Dreijährige nicht-kanonische Sätze produzieren können (z.B., Poeppel & Wexler, 1993; Weissenborn, 1990). Um diese Asymmetrie zu untersuchen wurde in der Dissertation die Produktion und das Verständnis von nicht-kanonischen Sätzen betrachtet. In drei Korpusstudien wurde der Einfluss von Vorerwähntheit, Topikstatus und Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks auf die Wortstellung in der Spontansprache von Zwei- bis Vierjährigen und in der kind-gerichteten Sprache ihre Mütter analysiert. Es wurde die Position des direkten Objektes in ditransitiven Sätzen untersucht, d.h., Sätze in denen das direkte Objekt vor oder nach dem indirekten Objekt in den satzmedialen Positionen stand, und Sätze in denen es in der satzinitialen Position stand. Die Ergebnisse zeigen ähnlich Abfolgemuster in der Satzproduktion der Kindern und Erwachsenen. Die Position des direkten Objektes, vor allem in den satzmedialen Positionen, war zu einem großen Teil durch die Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks vorhersagbar. Informationsstrukturelle Faktoren (z.B. Topikstatus) hingegen beeinflussten - unabhängig vom Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks - nur die Wortstellung in der satzinitialen Position. Zwei Verständnisexperimente wurden durchgeführt um den Einfluss des referierenden Ausdrucks und des Topikstatuses auf das Verständnis von nicht-kanonischen transitiven Sätzen zu untersuchen. Im ersten Experiment wurde der Topikstatus eines der beiden Satzargumente durch einen vorherigen Kontext modifiziert. Im zweiten Experiment wurde zusätzlich der referierende Ausdruck modifiziert, d.h. das Topik wurde entweder durch eine lexikalische Nominalphrase (NP) oder ein Personalpronomen realisiert. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass vier- und fünfjährige Kinder Sätze in der nichtkanonischen Wortstellung besser verstehen konnten, wenn das Topik als Personalpronomen realisiert wurde, unabhängig von der grammatischen Rolle des Topiks. Das Satzverständnis war jedoch nicht verbessert, wenn das Topik als lexikalische NP realisiert wurde. Zusammengefasst zeigen die Ergebnisse der Produktions- und Verständnisstudien, dass der referierende Ausdruck als Hinweis auf die Wortstellung und auf den Informationsstatus der Argumente des Satzes von den Kindern genutzt werden kann. Sie unterstreichen somit die Bedeutung der Wahl des referierenden Ausdrucks auf den Erwerb von Wortstellungsvariation und zeigen, dass die Asymmetrie zwischen Produktion und Verständnis an Bedeutung verliert, wenn der referierende Ausdruck einbezogen wird.

Download or read book Theoretical Perspectives on Word Order in South Asian Languages written by Miriam Butt and published by Center for the Study of Language (CSLI). This book was released on 1994 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of papers on word order variation in the languages of South Asia.

Download or read book The Development of Grammar written by Esther Rinke and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2011-05-25 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition, the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories, cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition, language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect, the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.

Download or read book Word Order and Scrambling written by Simin Karimi and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2003-05-16 with total page 410 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Word Order and Scrambling introduces readers to recent research into the linguistic phenomenon called scrambling and is a valuable contribution to the fields of theoretical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and applied linguistics. Introduces readers to recent research into the linguistic phenomenon called scrambling, or free word order. Explores major issues including factors responsible for word order variations, how scrambled constructions are processed, and whether variations are available in early child language development and in second language acquisition. Discusses a number of typologically diverse languages including Hindi, Japanese, and Navajo. Provides enlightening information on different aspects of word order variation and the consequences for our understanding of the nature of human language.