Misha Becker

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of syntactic and semantic bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition.

Animacy and Thematic Alignment

The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure

Kamil Ud Deen

An introduction to the study of children's language development that provides a uniquely accessible perspective on generative/universal grammar–based approaches. How children acquire language so quickly, easily, and uniformly is one of the great mysteries of the human experience. The theory of Universal Grammar suggests that one reason for the relative ease of early language acquisition is that children are born with a predisposition to create a grammar. This textbook offers an introduction to the study of children's acquisition and development of language from a generative/universal grammar–based theoretical perspective, providing comprehensive coverage of children's acquisition while presenting core concepts crucial to understanding generative linguistics more broadly. After laying the theoretical groundwork, including consideration of alternative frameworks, the book explores the development of the sound system of language—children's perception and production of speech sound; examines how words are learned (lexical semantics) and how words are formed (morphology); investigates sentence structure (syntax), including argument structure, functional structure, and tense; considers such “nontypical” circumstances as acquiring a first language past infancy and early childhood, without the abilities to hear or see, and with certain cognitive disorders; and studies bilingual language acquisition, both simultaneously and in sequence. Each chapter offers a summary section, suggestions for further reading, and exercises designed to test students' understanding of the material and provide opportunities to practice analyzing children's language. Appendixes provide charts of the International Phonetic Alphabet (with links to websites that allow students to listen to the sounds associated with these symbols) and a summary of selected experimental methodologies.

A Generative Introduction

Language Acquisition and Development

Jason Rothman

John Grinstead

The articles of this collection cover a wide range of formal syntactic and semantic phenomena. The focus is on a broad array of developmental syntactic phenomena, including topics in Argument Structure and Clause-Internal Syntax, the DP Domain and Learning Theory. In total, the contents of the volume illustrate ways in which theoretically informed linguistic research can explain language behavior in terms that are motivated on independent grounds and point towards new research opportunities to test theoretical claims about the adult model of grammar. The contributions of this volume are inspired by or related to the scholarship of Nina Hyams, whose dedication to rigorous, theoretically-informed research on language is well represented here.

Misha Becker

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