What Is Language Development?: Rationalist, Empiricist, and Pragmatist Approaches to the Acquisition of Syntax - Hardcover

Russell, James

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0192632485 ISBN 13: 9780192632487

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Language development is one of the major battle grounds within the humanities and sciences. This is the first time that the three major theories in language development research have been fully described and compared within the covers of a single book. The three approaches: (1) The rationalism of Chomsky and the syntactic nativism that it entails; (2)The empiricism instinct in connectionist modelling of syntactic development; (3) The pragmatism of those who see the child as actively constructing a grammatical inventory piece-by-piece through recruiting general learning abilities and socio-cognitive knowledge.

The book is unique in striking a balance between broad philosophical assessment of these three theories and and fine-grain, fairly technical, accounts of how they fare at the empirical and linguistic 'coal faces.'

In Part I, the kind of psychology to which rationalism, empiricism, and pragmatism give rise are described with reference to philosophers such as Fodor, Hume, and the American pragmatists from Piece, to Rorty, and Brandom. After an introduction to the syntactic analysis of the sentence, Part 2 continues with an account of the evolution of Chomskyan theory from its inception to present day, followed by a review of developmental research inspired by it. Part 3 takes a sceptical look at connectionist modelling of syntactic development. Part 4 describes the kind of linguistic theories that the socio-cognitive approach find sympathetic, reviewing its empirical progress (e.g., the work of Tomasello), ending with a comparison of how the generativists and functionalists tackle the evolution of syntax. Clearly and accessibly written, the book will be an important text for the developmental psychologists, linguists, and philosophers working on language.

About this title

About the Author

James Russell, Reader in Cognitive Development, Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Cambridge, UK.

Review

A fresh and integrative approach to language development. Russell is to be applauded for injecting some hard new thinking into this difficult topic. Steve Pinker

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0192632485
• ISBN 13: 9780192632487
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 569