Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English - Couverture souple

Radford, Andrew

 
9780631163589: Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English
Couverture souple
ISBN 10 : 0631163581 ISBN 13 : 9780631163589
Editeur : Wiley-Blackwell, 1990

Synopsis

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.

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À propos de l?auteur

Andrew Radford is Professor (and Head of the Dept.) of Linguistics at the University of Essex. His major publications include a book on Italian Syntax (1977) and two standard introductions to syntactic theory, Transformational Syntax (1981) and Transformational Grammar (1988).

Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.

Éditeur
Wiley-Blackwell
Date d'édition
1990
Langue
anglais
ISBN 10 
0631163581
ISBN 13 
9780631163589
Reliure
Broché
Nombre de pages
319
Coordonnées du fabricant
non disponible
Personne responsable
non disponible

Autres éditions populaires du même titre

9780631163572: Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grammars of English

Edition présentée

ISBN 10 :  0631163573 ISBN 13 :  9780631163572
Editeur : Blackwell Publishers, 1990
Couverture rigide