The Acquisition of Verbs and their Grammar: PDF Download

Author: Natalia Gagarina
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402043341
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
This volume investigates the linguistic development of children with regard to their knowledge of the verb and its grammar. The selection of papers brings to researchers and in particular psycholinguists empirical evidence from a wide variety of languages from Hebrew, through English to Estonian. The authors interpret their findings with a focus on cross-linguistic similarities and differences, without subscribing to either a UG-based or usage-based approach.

Author: Stefan Hinterholzer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 363877967X
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 30

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Innsbruck (Department of English), course: Language Awareness III, 3 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The focus of this paper is on the different types and forms of verbs and especially on their semantic and grammatical function. Verbs can convey lexical meaning or solely be used for grammatical constructions without conveying meaning. First of all, their will be given a possible classification of verbs depending on their function either as conveyers of meaning or elements in grammatical constructions. Then, the functions of different verb forms will be looked at. Finally, the verb's role in a sentence and the distinction between phrasal verbs and prepositional verbs will be analyzed. In a more practical part the theory will be applied to texts and proved by that. The analysis of the texts is intended to provide a concrete understanding of the abstract theory that is depicted in the chapters at the beginning.

Author: J. Meisel
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401128030
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
other aspects of developing grammars. And this is, indeed, what the contributions to this volume do. Parameterization of functional categories may, however, be understood in different ways, even if one shares the dual assumptions that substantive elements (verbs, nouns, etc. ) are present in all grammars and that X-bar principles are part of the grammatical knowledge available to the child prior to language-specific learning processes. From these assumptions it follows that the child should, from early on, be able to construct projections on the basis of these elements. The role of functional categories, however, may still be interpreted differently. One possibility, first suggested by Radford (1986, 1990) and by Guilfoyle and Noonan (1988), is that children must discover which functional categories (FC) need to be implemented in the grammar of the language they are acquiring. Another possibility, first explored by Hyams (1986), is that a specific category is present in developing grammars but that parameter values are set in a way deviating from the target adult grammar, corresponding, however, to options realized in other adult systems. A third option would be that these categories might be specified differently in developing as opposed to mature grammars. All three are explored in the papers collected in this volume. Before outlining the various hypotheses in more detail, however, I would like briefly to sketch the grammatical context in which the following debate is situated. 2.

Author: Manuela Schönenberger
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9401007985
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
How children acquire competence in verb placement in languages in which verb placement in matrix clauses does not coincide with that in embedded clauses is not well understood. Verb-Second languages like German and Dutch display the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses, which can be confusing for a developing child. This book addresses this problem in the context of Swiss German, itself a Germanic dialect. Numerous examples are given of natural language produced by two children who were consistently followed between the ages of 4 and 6. Unexpectedly, since previous literature has suggested that children master verb placement very early in their linguistic development, these children move the verb in any type of embedded clause, leading to many verb-placement errors. After introducing the problem and describing the data in detail, a technical analysis is developed in terms of a minimally split-CP, which is rather successful in accounting for these data. The book should interest advanced students and researchers in both language acquisition and syntax.

Author: Anne Vainikka
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 311026384X
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 421

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Book Description
The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book’s major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process — with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition — is highly similar to that of younger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, is offered as a practical alternative to Chomsky’s Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students’ German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.

Author: Silvina A. Montrul
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027294909
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 413

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Book Description
This is the first book on the acquisition of Spanish that provides a state-of-the-art comprehensive overview of Spanish morphosyntactic development in monolingual and bilingual situations. Its content is organized around key grammatical themes that form the empirical base of research in generative grammar: nominal and verbal inflectional morphology, subject and object pronouns, complex structures involving movement (topicalizations, questions, relative clauses), and aspects of verb meaning that have consequences for syntax. The book argues that Universal Grammar constrains all instances of language acquisition and that there is a fundamental continuity between monolingual, bilingual, child and adult early grammatical systems. While stressing their similarities with respect to linguistic representations and processes, the book also considers important differences between these three acquisition situations with respect to the outcome of acquisition. It is also shown that many linguistic properties of Spanish are acquired earlier than in English and other languages. This book is a must read for those interested in the acquisition of Spanish from different theoretical perspectives as well as those working on the acquisition of other languages in different contexts.

Author: Jella Delzer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 334650364X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 13

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Book Description
Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel (Philosophische Fakultät - Englisches Seminar), course: From the Phoneme to the Word: Semantics, language: English, abstract: Linguists have long been intrigued with children’s acquisition of their native tongue. But only since the 1970s, considerable attention has been paid to first language acquisition in research (Kuczaj & Barrett 1986: ix). First language acquisition is the study of when and how infants and children get a command of their native tongue (Goodluck 1991: 1). Even though there are a number of empirical studies and data, there is still a significant need for further research on children’s language acquisition. The fact that children acquire implicit and productive knowledge of adult grammar—even though they do not obtain explicit instruction in the linguistic rules of their specific language and their language input is severely restricted to the speech that they hear—is called the logical problem of language acquisition (Goodluck 1991: 3). According to Goodluck, this logical problem is the reason why the notion of an innate and unconscious linguistic knowledge is quite common among (psycho)linguists (1991: 3). The assumption that the child is biologically equipped with fundamental linguistic knowledge can additionally be justified with the fact that deaf children babble (Goodluck 1991: 141). The study of first language acquisition is as complex as the process itself since there are different theories and approaches and, most importantly, because language acquisition differs cross-linguistically and individually. The paper explains how English-speaking children start to acquire past tense structures and elucidates the patterns in which regular and irregular past tense forms are acquired.This is particularly interesting because children’s acquisition of relational terms like verbs has only recently been studied in greater detail (Behrens 2001: 451).

Author: Jürgen M. Meisel
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027224706
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
The contributions in this volume are based on an analysis of data from bilingual children acquiring French and German simultaneously. The longitudinal studies started at approximately age one year and six months and continued till age six. The papers focus on the development of specific grammatical phenomena; explanations are given within the framework of the Principle and Parameter approach. The study is primarily concerned with the acquisition of so-called 'functional categories' and the consequences of their acquisition for the development of grammar. Specific points dealt with in these papers include: gender, number and case and their internal structure (DP vs NP); inflection and its consequences for agreement marking; and word order phenomena (subject-raising constructions (incl. passives), word order in subordinate clauses). The basic hypothesis underlying this study is that early child grammars consist only of lexical categories and that functional categories are implemented later in the child's grammar. How this happens exactly is the central issue explored in this book.

Author: Umberto Ansaldo
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 902722255X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets. These articles were originally published in "Studies in Language" 32:3 (2008).

Author: Esther Rinke
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027287112
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 414

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Book Description
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.