The Polysemy of 'with' in First Language Acquisition : Psycholinguistic Studies of Children's Understanding and Use of a Multi-functional Preposition

ISBN-13: 9783639120295 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 228 str.

David McKercher

Opis

The English preposition ''with'' is polysemous in thatit has multiple distinct senses. It can be used tomark instruments (''He ate with a fork''),accompaniments (''He ate with a friend'', ''He ate pizzawith a salad''), manner (''He ate with enthusiasm'') andattributes (''He ate pizza with anchovies''). How dochildren learning English as their first languagedeal with the polysemy of ''with''? This book presentsevidence from a corpus study and threepsycholinguistic experiments that suggests thatchildren begin with a general meaning ofaccompaniment. This leads to over-generalization suchthat children occasionally answer questions such as"What is he eating with?" with a "food" answer. Inproduction, errors of the form "He''s going to cut theknife with the apple" can be elicited and statementsof the form "She''s eating cake with a fork" aresometimes answered as true even when the fork issimply present but not being used. This book will beof interest to linguists and psycholinguists who have wondered about the meaningsof prepositions and about how multiple meanings aredealt with in first language acquisition.

O autorze

David A. McKercher received his M.A. in Linguistics from the
University of Victoria in 1996 and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from
Stanford University in 2001. Dr. McKercher teaches courses on
psycholinguistics, semantics, syntax, and morphology in the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Victoria, British
Columbia, Canada.