Syntactic Theory And The Acquisition Of English Syntax

Author : Andrew Radford
Publisher : Wiley-Blackwell
ISBN 13 : 9780631163589
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax written by Andrew Radford and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 1991-01-08 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : A.E. Pierce
Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 9401125740
Total Pages : 178 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory written by A.E. Pierce and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Andrew Radford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521589147
Total Pages : 298 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntax written by Andrew Radford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1997-07-10 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook provides a concise, readable introduction to contemporary work in syntactic theory, particularly to key concepts of Chomsky's minimalist programme. Andrew Radford gives a general overview of the main theoretical concepts and descriptive devices used in 1990s work. The discussion is largely based on data from a range of varieties of English (not only Modern Standard, but also Belfast English, Shakespearean English, Jamaican Creole, etc.) and does not presuppose any prior knowledge of syntax. There are exercises and a substantial glossary. This is an abridged version of Radford's major textbook Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach, and will be welcomed as a short introduction to current syntactic theory.

Author : Michaela Müller
Publisher : GRIN Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3640521498
Total Pages : 53 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition written by Michaela Müller and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2010-02-03 with total page 53 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Noam Chomsky
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3112316002
Total Pages : 120 pages
Book Rating : 4.09/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Structures written by Noam Chomsky and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-05-18 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Author : Peter W. Culicover
Publisher : OUP Oxford
ISBN 13 : 9780198700234
Total Pages : 260 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Nuts written by Peter W. Culicover and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1999 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How are native speakers of a language instinctively able to make precise linguistic judgements about marginal syntactic matters? What does this tell us about both the structure of language and our innate language ability as humans? These questions form the focus of Professor Culicover's in-depth study which will appeal to both graduate students and professionals within the fields of linguistic theory and cognitive science.

Author : (Vol.1)Barbara Lust
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 1317728831
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.32/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition written by (Vol.1)Barbara Lust and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2018-10-24 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Andrew Radford
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521542753
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book English Syntax written by Andrew Radford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-15 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This textbook--an abridged version of Radford's Minimalist Syntax and the Syntax of English--provides a concise and accessible introduction to current syntactic theory, drawing on the key concepts of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme. Assuming little or no prior grammatical knowledge, it takes students through a range of topics in English syntax, beginning at an elementary level and progressing in stages towards more advanced material. There is an extensive glossary, and each chapter contains a workbook section with 'helpful hints', exercises and model answers, suitable for both class discussion and self-study.

Author : Barbara Lust
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780805813517
Total Pages : 394 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Heads, projections, and learnability written by Barbara Lust and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Barbara Lust
Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9780805813500
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Syntactic Theory and First Language Acquisition: Binding, dependencies, and learnability written by Barbara Lust and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 1994. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.