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OverviewBetween the ages of one-and-a-half and two years children start to form elementary phrases and clauses. This stage of their linguistic development provides the first clear evidence that they have begun to develop a grammar of the language being acquired. It is therefore of paramount importance for any attempt to construct a theory of language acquisition. Drawing data from a corpus of more that 100,000 spontaneous utterances, Andrew Radford demonstrates that the fundamental characteristic of children's earliest structures is that they are essentially lexical and thematic in nature. They show evidence of the acqusition of lexical but not functional categories, and of thematic but not nonthematic constituents. This hypothesis provides a unified account of a wide range of phenomena in early child English including children's nonmastery of determiners, possessives, pronouns, missing arguments, expletives, case, binding, tense, agreement, auxiliaries, infinitives, complementisers, and movement phenomena. This detailed study of children's initial grammars suggests a model of acquisition which is essentially maturational. Different modules of the child's grammar come into operation at different stages of development, triggered by relevant aspects of the child's experience. In this, Radford's account sheds significant light on some of the fundamental questions for the theory of language acquisition. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Andrew Radford (University of Essex)Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd Imprint: Wiley-Blackwell Dimensions: Width: 15.40cm , Height: 1.70cm , Length: 22.90cm Weight: 0.454kg ISBN: 9780631163589ISBN 10: 0631163581 Pages: 320 Publication Date: 01 October 1990 Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Professional & Vocational Format: Paperback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: Out of stock  The supplier is temporarily out of stock of this item. It will be ordered for you on backorder and shipped when it becomes available. Table of ContentsPreface. 1. Aims and Approaches. 2. Categorization in Early Child English. 3. Lexical Category Systems in Early Child English. 4. Absence of a Determiner System in Early Child English. 5. Absence of a Complementizer System in Early Child English. 6. Absence of an Inflection System in Early Child English. 7. Absence of a Case System in Early Child English. 8. The Grammar of Missing Arguments in Early Child English. 9. The Overall Structure of Early Child Grammars of English. 10. Explanations and Implications. Bibliography. Index.ReviewsAuthor InformationAndrew Radford is Professor (and Head of the Dept.) of Linguistics at the University of Essex. His major publications include a book on Italian Syntax (1977) and two standard introductions to syntactic theory, Transformational Syntax (1981) and Transformational Grammar (1988). Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |
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