Language Acquisition and Change - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Language Acquisition and Change write by Jurgen M Meisel. This book was released on 2013-10-17. Language Acquisition and Change available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Under which circumstances does grammatical change come about? Is the child the principle agent of change as suggested by historical linguistics?This book discusses diachronic change of languages in terms of restructuring of speakers' internal grammatical knowledge. Efforts to construct a theory of diachronic change consistent with findings from psycholinguistics are scarce. Here, these questions are therefore addressed against the background of insights from research on monolingual and bilingual acquisition. Given that children are remarkably successful in reconstructing the grammars of their ambient languages, commonly held views need to be reconsidered according to which language change is primarily triggered by structural ambiguity in the input and in settings of language contact. In an innovative take on this matter, the authors argue that morphosyntactic change in core areas of grammar, especially where parameters of Universal Grammar are concerned, typically happens in settings involving second language acquisition. The children acting as agents of restructuring are either L2 learners themselves or are continuously exposed to the speech of L2 speakers of their target languages. Based on a variety of case studies, this discussion sheds new light on phenomena of change which have occupied historical linguists since the 19th century and will be welcomed by advanced undergraduate and graduate students as well as researchers in the fields of historical linguistics and language acquisition.
The Development of Grammar
The Development of Grammar - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook The Development of Grammar write by Esther Rinke. This book was released on 2011-05-25. The Development of Grammar available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. This volume focuses on different aspects of language development. The contributions are concerned with similarities and differences between first and second language acquisition, the acquisition of sentence structure and functional categories, cross-linguistic influence in bilingual first language acquisition as well as the relation between language acquisition, language contact and diachronic change. The recurrent topic of the volume is the link between linguistic variation and the limitation of structural variability in the framework of a well-defined theory of language. In this respect, the volume opens up new perspectives for future research.
Changing Minds Changing Tools
Changing Minds Changing Tools - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Changing Minds Changing Tools write by Vsevolod Kapatsinski. This book was released on 2018-07-24. Changing Minds Changing Tools available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. A book that uses domain-general learning theory to explain recurrent trajectories of language change. In this book, Vsevolod Kapatsinski argues that language acquisition—often approached as an isolated domain, subject to its own laws and mechanisms—is simply learning, subject to the same laws as learning in other domains and well described by associative models. Synthesizing research in domain-general learning theory as it relates to language acquisition, Kapatsinski argues that the way minds change as a result of experience can help explain how languages change over time and can predict the likely directions of language change—which in turn predicts what kinds of structures we find in the languages of the world. What we know about how we learn (the core question of learning theory) can help us understand why languages are the way they are (the core question of theoretical linguistics). Taking a dynamic, usage-based perspective, Kapatsinski focuses on diachronic universals, recurrent pathways of language change, rather than synchronic universals, properties that all languages share. Topics include associative approaches to learning and the neural implementation of the proposed mechanisms; selective attention; units of language; a comparison of associative and Bayesian approaches to learning; representation in the mind of visual and auditory experience; the production of new words and new forms of words; and automatization of repeated action sequences. This approach brings us closer to understanding why languages are the way they are, Kapatsinski contends, than approaches premised on innate knowledge of language universals and the language acquisition device.
Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition
Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition write by Juergen Weissenborn. This book was released on 2013-02-01. Theoretical Issues in Language Acquisition available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. In recent linguistic theory, there has been an explosion of detailed studies of language variation. This volume applies such recent analyses to the study of child language, developing new approaches to change and variation in child grammars and revealing both early knowledge in several areas of grammar and a period of extended development in others. Topics dealt with include question formation, "subjectless" sentences, object gaps, rules for missing subject interpretation, passive sentences, rules for pronoun interpretation and argument structure. Leading developmental linguists and psycholinguists show how linguistic theory can help define and inform a theory of the dynamics of language development and its biological basis, meeting the growing need for such studies in programs in linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science.
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact
Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact - read free eBook in online reader or directly download on the web page. Select files or add your book in reader. Download and read online ebook Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact write by Bettelou Los. This book was released on 2017-12-14. Word Order Change in Acquisition and Language Contact available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. The case studies in this volume offer new insights into word order change. As is now becoming increasingly clear, word order variation rarely attracts social values in the way that phonological variants do. Instead, speakers tend to attach discourse or information-structural functions to any word order variation they encounter in their input, either in the process of first language acquisition or in situations of language or dialect contact. In second language acquisition, fine-tuning information-structural constraints appears to be the last hurdle that has to be overcome by advanced learners. The papers in this volume focus on word order phenomena in the history of English, as well as in related languages like Norwegian and Dutch-based creoles, and in Romance.
