The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure. Animacy and Thematic Alignment.

Becker, Misha

ISBN 10: 1107007844 / ISBN 13: 9781107007840

Published by Cambridge University Press, 2014

About this Item

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure. Series: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics. Num Pages: 342 pages, 32 b/w illus. 26 tables. BIC Classification: CFDC; CFK. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 237 x 164 x 23. Weight in Grams: 63. . 2014. Hardback. . . . .

Seller Inventory # V9781107007840

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure. Animacy and Thematic Alignment.
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication Date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1107007844
• ISBN 13: 9781107007840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language processing, conceptual development, language acquisition, and computational modeling, exposing readers to these different kinds of data in an accessible way. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of syntactic and semantic bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition. This is a must-read for researchers in language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

About the Author

Misha Becker is an Associate Professor in the linguistics department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she has taught courses in linguistic theory and child language acquisition since 2002.