This volume collects twenty-nine published and unpublished papers by the linguist James Gair, considered the foremost western scholar of the Sri Lankan languages Sinhala and Jaffna Tamil. Ranging over thirty years, his work also considers issues in a variety of Indian languages, including Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, and Bengali. The collection reflects the wide range of Gair's interests, from morpho-syntactic questions to questions regarding historical and areal linguistics, especially language contact and diglossia, and extending to language acquisition. By collecting these papers and...

First Language Acquisition: The Essential Readings is a collection of pioneering classics that provide a framework for understanding current work in each of the basic areas of language acquisition: morphology, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics.

• Collects classic works that provide the foundation for current research in the field of first language acquisition.
  
• Includes selections from Noam Chomsky, Jean Piaget, Eric Lenneberg and Roman Jakobson, as well as others who contributed groundbreaking discoveries, insights, concepts, and...