Functional categories in learner language. Studies on language acquisition 37 (SOLA).

Dimroth, Christine and Peter Jordens (Eds.):

ISBN 10: 3110216167 / ISBN 13: 9783110216165

Published by Berlin ; New York, NY : Mouton de Gruyter, 2009

About this Item

XII, 347 S. Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - Convergence on finite V2 clauses in LI, bilingual LI and early L2 acquisition. Rosemarie Tracy and Dieter Thoma -- The acquisition of functional categories in child LI and adult L2 Dutch. Peter Jordens -- The acquisition of syntactic finiteness in LI German. A structure-building approach. Steffi Winkler -- Stepping stones and stumbling blocks. Why negation accelerates and additive particles delay the acquisition of finiteness in German. Christine Dimroth -- Does finiteness mark assertion? A picture selection study with native speakers and adult learners of German. Sarah Schimke -- Light verbs and the acquisition of finiteness and negation in Dutch as a second language. Josje Verhagen -- Finiteness in children with SLI: a functional approach. Anke Jolink -- Functional and modal elements in child and adult Russian. Natalia Gagarina -- How much (morpho-)syntax is needed to express finiteness? Karen Ferret and Clive Perdue. ISBN 9783110216165 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 1635 Fadengehefteter Originalpappband.

Seller Inventory # 1023051

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Functional categories in learner language. Studies on language acquisition 37 (SOLA).
• Publisher: Berlin ; New York, NY : Mouton de Gruyter
• Publication Date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3110216167
• ISBN 13: 9783110216165
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Sehr gut
• Weight: 1635 grams
• Seller catalogs:
  • Linguistik

About this title

Synopsis

Language acquisition is a developmental process. Research on spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that particular stages of acquisition can be discriminated. Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. In studies on second language acquisition this learner system is called the Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue 1997). Utterance structure of the Basic Variety is determined by a grammar which consists of lexical structures that are constrained, for example, by semantic principles such as "The NP-referent with highest control comes first" and a pragmatic principle such as "Focus expression last". At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like system with morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness, topicality, the determiner system, etc. Insights into how this process evolves may also provide an answer to the question of why it takes place. Within this functional perspective on language acquisition research focuses on questions such as the following.
1. What is the driving force behind the process that causes learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a morpho-syntactic functional category system?
2. What is the added value of morpho-syntactic properties of inflection, word-order variation, definiteness and agreement?
3. Why is it that in cases of specific language impairment it is mainly morpho-syntactic properties of the target language that are affected?

About the Author

Christine Dimroth, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Peter Jordens , Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.