Acquisition of Verbs at the Syntax-Semantics Interface
Early Predicates
1st Edition
Published on 11. June 2018
283 pages
978-1-5275-1220-7 (ISBN)
Description
This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child's speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
12/2017
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
€100.59
Shipment within 15-20 days
Content
- Intro
- Table of Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter One
- 1.0 Introduction
- 1.1 The Lexicon-Syntax Interface
- 1.2 Lexicalist Approaches
- 1.3 The Constructivist approach
- 1.3.1 The functional version of the constructivist approach
- 1.4 Structural meaning and acquisition
- 1.5 Labeling the world through language
- 1.6 Nouns and Verbs
- 1.6.1 An overview of the timetable of lexicon-appearance in acquisition
- 1.6.2 The appearance of verbs and the lexical spurt
- 1.7 The bootstrapping of argument-structure
- 1.7.1 Semantic Bootstrapping (Pinker)
- 1.7.2 Syntactic Bootstrapping (Gleitman)
- 1.8 Acquisition at the Interface
- Chapter Two
- 2.0 Introduction
- 2.1 The distribution of overt subjects in non-pro-drop languages
- 2.1.1 Grammatical accounts
- 2.1.2 Grammar-External Accounts
- 2.1.3 Informational-Structure Accounts
- 2.2 Background studies on the distribution of overt subjects in Italian
- 2.3 Null subjects in a corpus of spontaneous speech
- 2.3.1 Corpus
- 2.3.2 Coding
- 2.3.3 General data
- 2.3.4 Longitudinal Data
- 2.3.5 Null Objects
- 2.3.6 Number of Arguments
- 2.3.7 Discussion
- 2.4 L-syntactic distribution of overt subjects
- Chapter Three
- 3.0 Introduction
- 3.1 Subject position and scope-discourse semantics
- 3.2 The position of the overt subject in the corpus
- 3.2.1 General data
- 3.2.2 Longitudinal data
- 3.2.3 Discussion
- 3.3 A comparative view of the spell-out domain and linearization
- 3.3.1 Cross-linguistic evidence
- 3.3.2 Clitic-doubling parameters
- 3.3.3 Aphasic data
- 3.4 Post-verbal subjects
- 3.4.1 Post-verbal subjects with unergatives
- 3.4.2 Post-verbal subjects with unaccusatives
- 3.5 Pre-verbal subjects
- 3.5.1 Pre-verbal subjects with unaccusatives
- 3.5.2 A challenge to the unique-phase requirement
- 3.6 Verbs at the interface of acquisition
- Chapter Four
- 4.0 Introduction
- 4.1 The Appearance of Aspect
- 4.1.1 A Few Notes on Aspectual-Tense Interpretation in Italian
- 4.2 Auxiliary-Selection and Structural Meaning
- 4.2.1 Syntactic Account
- 4.2.2 Lexical Features and Aspectual Meaning
- 4.2.3 Children's Auxiliaries in the Italian Corpus
- 4.3 The Developmental Pattern in the Production of Aspectual Auxiliaries
- 4.3.1 Acquisition of Aspect
- 4.3.2 Production Task
- 4.3.3 Discussion
- 4.4 Comprehension of Semantic Features in Compounds
- 4.4.1 Experiment
- 4.4.2 Results
- 4.4.3 Discussion
- 4.5 Encyclopedic Semantic Features vs. Compositional Lexical Aspects
- 4.6 Concluding Remarks
- Chapter Five
- 5.0 Introduction
- 5.1 Lexical-Syntactic Verb Classes
- 5.2 Bootstrapping Verb-Meaning
- 5.3 Mapping the Complexity of the World at Different Stages
- 5.4 Building Interface-Relations
- 5.5 Epilogue
- References
- Appendix I
- Appendix II
