Investigations In Universal Grammar

Download or read book Investigations in Universal Grammar written by Stephen Crain and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence and a model of language processing. In the following two sections, they discuss in detail their two experimental techniques.

Download or read book Meaning and Universal Grammar written by Cliff Goddard and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume one of a set of studies that is founded on the idea that universal grammar is based on - indeed, inseparable from - meaning. The theoretical framework is the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka and developed in collaboration with Cliff Goddard.

Download or read book Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar written by Lydia White and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-03-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Table of contents

Download or read book Universal Grammar in the Reconstruction of Ancient Languages written by Katalin É Kiss and published by Walter de Gruyter. This book was released on 2005 with total page 538 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The architecture of the human language faculty has been one of the main foci of the linguistic research of the last half century. This branch of linguistics, broadly known as Generative Grammar, is concerned with the formulation of explanatory formal accounts of linguistic phenomena with the ulterior goal of gaining insight into the properties of the 'language organ'. The series comprises high quality monographs and collected volumes that address such issues. The topics in this series range from phonology to semantics, from syntax to information structure, from mathematical linguistics to studies of the lexicon.

Download or read book Universal Grammar and American Sign Language written by D.C. Lillo-Martin and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1991-09-30 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE American Sign Language (ASL) is the visual-gestural language used by most of the deaf community in the United States and parts of Canada. On the surface, this language (as all signed languages) seems radically different from the spoken languages which have been used to formulate theories of linguistic princi ples and parameters. However, the position taken in this book is that when the surface effects of modality are stripped away, ASL will be seen to follow many of the patterns proposed as universals for human language. If these theoretical constructs are meant to hold for language in general, then they should hold for natural human language in any modality; and ifASL is such a natural human language, then it too must be accounted for by any adequate theory of Universal Grammar. For this rea son, the study of ASL can be vital for proposed theories of Universal Grammar. Recent work in several theoretical frameworks of syntax as well as phonology have argued that indeed, ASL is such a lan guage. I will assume then, that principles of Universal Gram mar, and principles that derive from it, are applicable to ASL, and in fact that ASL can serve as one of the languages which test Universal Grammar. There is an important distinction to be drawn, however, be tween what is called here 'American Sign Language', and other forms of manual communication.

Download or read book Empirical Linguistics written by Geoffrey Sampson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2002-09-12 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Linguistics has become an empirical science again after several decades when it was preoccupied with speakers' hazy "intuitions" about language structure. With a mixture of English-language case studies and more theoretical analyses, Geoffrey Sampson gives an overview of some of the new findings and insights about the nature of language which are emerging from investigations of real-life speech and writing, often (although not always) using computers and electronic language samples ("corpora"). Concrete evidence is brought to bear to resolve long-standing questions such as "Is there one English language or many Englishes?" and "Do different social groups use characteristically elaborated or restricted language codes?" Sampson shows readers how to use some of the new techniques for themselves, giving a step-by-step "recipe-book" method for applying a quantitative technique that was invented by Alan Turing in the World War II code-breaking work at Bletchley Park and has been rediscovered and widely applied in linguistics fifty years later.

Download or read book Third Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar written by Yan-kit Ingrid Leung and published by Multilingual Matters. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents studies which approach the relatively new field of third language (L3) acquisition from the generative linguistic perspective. It aims to bring together researchers who are interested in L3 acquisition and who are at the same time working within the generative framework i.e. Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG) approach to language acquisition. A total of nine contributions are included, reporting research on L3 involving different combinations of source/target languages and investigating various UG-related properties.