The theory of language acquisition is a young but increasingly active field. Language Acquisition and Syntactic Theory presents one of the first detailed studies of comparative syntax acquisition. It is informed by the view that linguists and acquisitionists are essentially working on the same problem, that of explaining grammar learnability.The author takes cross-linguistic data from child language as evidence for recent proposals in syntactic theory. Developments in the s...

Prepositions (words like above, from, in, of and with which relate one part of a sentence to another) are, though few in number, among the most frequently used words in English. They are also among the most frequently misused: writers and speakers alike seem to have endless trouble in choosing the right or acceptable preposition. The sad result is widespread uncertainty, confusion and misunderstanding. Addressed to both native speakers and to learners of English as a second language, Saving o...

Generative Grammar presents a substantial contribution to the field of linguistics in drawing together for the first time the author's most significant work on the theory of generative grammar.The essays collected here display Freidin's role in moving the theory forward in terms of new proposals, and analyse the efforts to understand the evolution and history of the theory by careful investigation of how and why it has changed over the years.

This volume offers a valuable overview of recent research into the semantic aspects of complex words through different theoretical frameworks. Contributions by experts in the field, both morphologists and psycholinguists, identify crucial areas of research, present alternative and complementary approaches to their examination from the current level of knowledge, and indicate perspectives of research into the semantics of complex words by raising important questions that need to be investig...

This collection of papers investigates two specific linguistic phenomena from the point of view of first- and second-language acquisition. While observations on the acquisition of scrambling or pronominal clitics can be found in the literature, up until the recent past they were sparse and often buried in other issues. This volume fills a long-existing gap in providing a collection of articles which focus on language acquisition but at the same time address the overarching syntactic issues...

This book investigates the language of Polish-English bilingual children raised in the United Kingdom and their Polish monolingual counterparts. It exemplifies the lexico-grammatical knowledge of both groups and uses corpus-based grammatical inference in order to establish the source of the impediment of the minority language of the bilingual group. The author applies the methodology of corpus linguistics and narrative analysis to study the language of young bilinguals. He presupposes the ...

Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of synta...

This book provides a fascinating account of the psycholinguistic and social factors behind variation in speech timing in US English. With detailed discussions of its methods and data, it also acts as a valuable model for conducting corpus (socio)phonetic research.

This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from ...

constraints', which serve to block the association of antecedent to gap under specific syntactic conditions. Of the restrictions identified by Ross and others, the ones we will discuss here are the Complex NP Constraint, exemplified with a relative clause in (3b) and with a nominal complement in (4a), the Subject and wh Island Conditions (Chomsky, 1973) in (4b, c) respectively, and the Adjunct Island Condi tion (see Huang, 1982's Condition on Extraction Domain), illustrated in (4d, e). (4)...

This volume combines psycholinguistic experiments with typological investigations in order to provide a comprehensive exploration of the linguistic structure of verb-number agreement in bilingual speakers, with a particular focus on the Turkish language. It takes as its starting point the question of which linguistic structures pose difficulties for bilingual speakers, and then proceeds to evaluate the question by using the interface phenomenon of optional verb number agreement. In doing s...