The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Animacy and Thematic Alignment

ISBN-13: 9781316644935 / Angielski / Miękka / 2017 / 342 str.

Misha Becker

Opis

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure.

Recenzje

'This book is a major milestone for acquisition research in the 'strict' sense: what exactly does the adult know, and how do children acquire that knowledge? Becker is conversant with an unusually broad range of disciplines, including generative grammar, developmental psychology, and computational modeling. This enables her to support the book's central thesis - that children use animacy cues for detecting syntactic displacement - with strong, converging evidence from cross-linguistic comparisons, adult psycholinguistics, Bayesian models, transcripts of child-directed speech, and laboratory experiments with children.' William Snyder, University of Connecticut

Spis treści

1. Introduction; 2. The syntax of displacing and non-displacing predicates; 3. Argument hierarchies; 4. Animacy and adult sentence processing; 5. Animacy and children's language; 6. Modeling the acquisition of displacing predicates; 7. Conclusions and origins.