This study deals with variation in grammar both from a theoretical and an empirical point of view. In Part I (Chaps. 1-4), an attempt is made to char acterize this phenomenon within the broader context of what might be called the "fluctuating character of natu'ral language," and to develop suitable and precise descriptive techniques that account for it. The method which is pro posed here is called "variety grammar" - roughly speaking, this is a formal grammar with probabilistic weighting for an ordered set of varieties, such as dialects, sociolects, registers, or developmental stages. In Part...

This monograph originated as an interim report on the research project Cog- nitive and Social Determinants on Language Acquisition which I conducted under the auspices of the German Department of the University of Frankfurt from September 1971 until the end of 1976. Since November 1972 this project was financed by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Bildungsforschung in Berlin as part of the research project Elternhaus und Schule conducted by Oevermann, Krappmann, and Kreppner. While the goal of this project on language acquisition is the reconstruc- tion of the language development of three German...

This volume contains the papers read at the conference on 'Semantics from different points of view' that took place at Konstanz University in Septem ber 1978. This interdisciplinary conference Vias organized by the': Sonderfor schungsbereich 99 - Linguistik' and sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsge meinschaft. Li guists, philosophers, logicians, and psychologists met to dis cuss recent developments in the study of the semantics of natural language from the point of view of their disciplines. But this is not to say that there was one particular topic shared by all the participants. The...

Not very many years ago, it was common for language researchers and theorists to argue that language development was somehow special and separate from other aspects of development. It was a period when the "1 ittle 1 inguist" view of language development was common, and much discussion was devoted to develop mental "linguistic universals," in contrast to more broadly defined cognitive universals. It seemed to me at the time (and still does) that such views reflected more their promulgators' ignorance of those aspects of cognitive development most likely to provide illuminating parallels with...

This book studies language behaviour in the larger context of modelling or ganismic behaviour more generally. It starts out from the basic premise that what is characteristic of organismic behaviour is that an organism uses its behavioural acts to accomplish something in its interactions with the world in which it finds itself. These two features, that an organism has a behav ioural repertoire and that it deploys specific behavioural acts from its repertoire in an intentional way, define the agentive nature of an organism. The study of organismic behaviour, then, must primarily concern itself...

This volume owes its existance to many different sources and influ ences. It is based on a meeting that took place from April 30 to May 2, 1982 at the University of Technology in Darmstadt. The idea for that meeting came while we were elaborating a research program on concept development and the development of word meaning; we were inspired by Werner Deutsch of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (The Netherlands) and by the Volkswagen Foundation in Hannover (Federal Republic of Germany) to organize an international conference on the same topic. We set out to invite a...

Prosody: Models and Measurements is the fruit of a three-day workshop held in Paris in April, 1982. The workshop was one of a series which is sponsored by the Maison des Sciences de I'Homme under the auspices of the European Psycho linguistics Association, and which aims to bring together workers in a particular field from different European laboratories and to encourage future collaboration across regional, national and disciplinary boundaries. Thus the topic of the workshop - "Prosody" - was fairly liberally interpreted in the invitations, and the participants were drawn from a variety of...

In the past fi fteen years there has been a growi ng interest in the development of children's awareness of language as an object in itself -- a phenomenon now generally referred to as metal inguistic awareness. Until the publication of an earlier volume in the Springer Series in Language and Communication, The Chitd's Conoeption oi Language, edited by A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt, there had been no systematic treatment of metalinguistic awareness. The major goal of that volume was to map out the field of study by describing the phenomenon of interest and defining major...

This book deals with the conditions and the consequences of the production of different syntactic sentence structures. During the sixties the syntactic structure of sentences was one of the most intensively studied topics in psycholinguistic research. The dominant interest did not, however, lie in the function of syntactic structures but in the ability to understand and to utter them. Later, in the seventies the interest shifted to the semantic structure of sentences. Many studies centred around the structural aspects of the repre sentation of knowledge. The leading question was: how can the...

This study of gender was conceived when I first took up the position of lecturer in linguistics at the University of Tiibingen in 1975. My particular in terest in gender arose out of the work with German children and adults con ducted in the context of preparing my doctoral dissertation for the University of York; my position at the University of Tiibingen has given me the opportunity to carry out the necessary research in both Germany and Britain. The empirical investigations reported in this study were begun in my first year in Tiibingen and continued over a period of 7 years. In this...