Author: Ineta Savickien?
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9789027253033
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Get Book Here
Book Description
This cross-linguistic volume innovates research of the acquisition of diminutives in the inflecting-fusional languages Lithuanian, Russian, Croatian, Greek, Italian, Spanish, German and Dutch, the agglutinating languages Turkish, Hungarian and Finnish and in the introflecting Hebrew. These languages differ in various aspects relevant for the acquisition of diminutives and the development of pragmatics in early child language. Diminutive formation often tends to be the first pattern of word formation to emerge. The main reason for this seems to lie in the pragmatic functions of endearment, empathy, and sympathy, which make diminutives particularly appropriate for child-centred communication. A main topic of this book is the relation of emergence and early development between diminutives and other categories of word formation and inflection. The greater degree of morphological productivity and transparency, as well as phonological saliency, favors the use of diminutives. In this case diminutives may facilitate the acquisition of inflection.
Author: Stela Manova
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311079294X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume addresses a number of issues in current morphological theory from the point of view of diminutive formation, such as the role of phonology in diminutives and hypocoristics and consequently its place in the overall architecture of grammar, i.e. phonology-first versus syntax/morphology-first theoretical analyses, diminutives in the L1 acquisition of typologically diverse languages, and the borrowing of non-diminutive morphology for the expression of diminutive meanings, among others. Among the peculiarities of diminutive morphology discussed are the relation between diminutives and mass nouns, the avoidance of diminutives in plural contexts in some languages, and the relatively frequent semantic bleaching and reanalysis of diminutive forms cross-linguistically. Special attention is paid to the debate on the head versus modifier status of diminutive affixes (corresponding to high versus low diminutives in alternative analyses), with data from spoken and sign languages. Overall, the volume addresses a number of topics that will be of interest to scholars of almost all linguistic subfields and per
Author: Steven Gillis
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027285551
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 455
Get Book Here
Book Description
In the present-day context of cross-linguistic perspectives on language acquisition, The Acquisition of Dutch offers a much needed overview of the wealth of Dutch child language research that was hitherto lacking. Its comprehensive coverage in terms of topics, its many new theoretical contributions and its focus on providing a solid basis for cross-linguistic comparisons will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists studying child language everywhere.The volume consists of four thematic chapters preceded by an introductory overview. The thematic chapters cover early speech development in the first year of life, the acquisition of phonology, the lexicon and syntax. The consolidated list of references cover most of the work on Dutch child language in the last few decades.
Author: Peter Arkadiev
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110394987
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 563
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book is a collection of articles dealing with various aspects of the Baltic languages (Lithuanian, Latvian and Latgalian), which have only marginally featured in the discourse of theoretical linguistics and linguistic typology. The aim of the book is to bridge the gap between the study of the Baltic languages, on the one hand, and the current agenda of the theoretical and typological approaches to language, on the other. The book comprises 13 articles dealing with various aspects of phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, lexicon, and their interactions, plus a lengthy introduction, whose aim is to outline the state of the art in the research on the Baltic languages. The contributions are data-driven, being based on field-work, corpus research, and data published in the sources not accessible to the general linguistic audience. On the other hand, all contributions are informed in the relevant contemporary linguistic theories and in the advances of linguistic typology. Some of the contributions aim at a more detailed, accurate and theoretically informed description of the data, others look at the Baltic material from a more theoretical point of view, still others assume an areal-typological or contact perspective.
Author: Brian MacWhinney
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198709846
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 468
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language usage. Speakers and addressees need to contend with these rules when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions influence a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. Chapters in the book analyse grammar and usage in adult language as well as first and second language acquisition, and the motivations that drive historical change. Several of the chapters seek explanations for the competitions involved, based on earlier accounts including the Competition Model, Natural Morphology, the functional-typological tradition, and Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to linguists from a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly those interested in psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.
Author: Dagmar Bittner
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 9783110178234
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 472
Get Book Here
Book Description
Language acquisition is a human endeavor par excellence. As children, all human beings learn to understand and speak at least one language: their mother tongue. It is a process that seems to take place without any obvious effort. Second language learning, particularly among adults, causes more difficulty. The purpose of this series is to compile a collection of high-quality monographs on language acquisition. The series serves the needs of everyone who wants to know more about the problem of language acquisition in general and/or about language acquisition in specific contexts.
Author: Yan Huang
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191065226
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 816
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume brings together distinguished scholars from all over the world to present an authoritative, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current issues in pragmatics. Following an introduction by the editor, the volume is divided into five thematic parts. Chapters in Part I are concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories, while Part II deals with central topics in pragmatics, including implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. In Part III, the focus is on cognitively-oriented pragmatics, covering topics such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics. Part IV takes a look at socially and culturally-oriented pragmatics such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology, the lexicon, prosody, language change, and information structure. The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of pragmatics of all theoretical stripes. It will also be a valuable resource for linguists in other fields, including philosophy of language, semantics, morphosyntax, prosody, psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics, and for researchers and students in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.
Author: Nicola Grandi
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748681752
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 752
Get Book Here
Book Description
With examples drawn from over 200 world languages, this ground-breaking volume presents a state-of-the-art overview of evaluative morphology.
Author: Charles Yang
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262035324
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281
Get Book Here
Book Description
An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages. All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and demand, the price of linguistic productivity arises from the quantitative considerations of rules and exceptions. The learner postulates a productive rule only if it results in a more efficient organization of language, with the number of exceptions falling below a critical threshold. Supported by a wide range of cases with corpus evidence, Yang's Tolerance Principle gives a unified account of many long-standing puzzles in linguistics and psychology, including why children effortlessly acquire rules of language that perplex otherwise capable adults. His focus on computational efficiency provides novel insight on how language interacts with the other components of cognition and how the ability for language might have emerged during the course of human evolution.
Author: Egbert Fortuin
Publisher: Rodopi
ISBN: 9401210659
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 263
Get Book Here
Book Description
This volume, Dutch Contributions to the Fifteenth International Congress of Slavists (Minsk, 2013) presents a comprehensive overview of current Slavic linguistic research in the Netherlands, and covers its various linguistic disciplines (both synchronic and diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, history of linguistics) and subdomains (phonology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, text). The different chapters in this peer-reviewed volume show the strong data-oriented tradition of Dutch linguistics and focus on various topics: the use of imperative subjects in birchbark letters (Dekker), the existential construction in Russian (Fortuin), Jakovlev’s formula for designing an alphabet with an optimal number of graphemes (Van Helden), frequency effects on the acquisition of Polish and Russian nominal flexion paradigms (Janssen), Macedonian verbal aspect (Kamphuis), the concept of ‘communicatively heterogeneous texts’ in connection with three birchbark letters from medieval Rus’ (Schaeken), a philological analysis of the authorship of some Cyrillic manuscripts (Veder), a reconstruction of the evolution of the Slavic system of obstruents: the motivation of mergers and the rise of dialect differences (Vermeer), and a contrastive analysis of Russian delat’ and Dutch doen (Honselaar and Podgaevskaja). With a well-known cast of contributors, this reference work will be of interest to researchers in both Slavic and general linguistics.
