Minimum of Language Acquisition: Lectures in General Linguistics, Syntax, and Child Language Acquisition

Minimum of Language Acquisition: Lectures in General Linguistics, Syntax, and Child Language Acquisition provides readers with a compelling exploration of how children learn languages, the barriers to acquisition, and the complex nature of language as a largely internal mental process.

The text features five lectures, which include discussions of language and linguistics; movement distinctions based on inflectional versus derivational morphology; the Four Sentences; the myth of "function defines form;" and the development of grammar. Throughout these lectures, the book presents insights into traditional questions dealing with learnability problems associated with language acquisition. Additional topics include child syntactic development, second language acquisition, and phonology. The text also includes five helpful appendices on the (American) English sound system; lexical versus functional grammar as it relates to child language syntax; the differences between vertical and horizontal processing, as well as learning and acquisition; the vocal tract; and anatomy of the brain.

Developed to inspire greater understanding of how children learn and process languages, Minimum of Language Acquisition is an ideal resource for courses and program in linguistics.

A well-respected syntactician in the tradition of Noam Chomsky, Dr. Joseph Galasso has two recent publications on young children's utterances that postulate the nature of the innate language capability based on actual data: "Small Children's Sentences are 'Dead on Arrival': Remarks on a Minimalist Approach to Early Child Syntax" in Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development and the monograph "From Merge to Move: A Minimalist Perspective on the Design of Language and its Role in Early Child Syntax (LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 59. 238pp. 2016). A follow-up monograph on syntax was published in 2019 entitled "Recursive Syntax: A Minimalist Perspective on Recursion as the Core Property of Human Language and tis Role in the Generative Grammar Enterprise: (with Special Notes on Dual Mechanism Model, Problems of Projection, Proto-language, Recursive Implementation in AI, and the Brain"). His work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (2016) (eds. Jeffrey L. Lidz, William Snyder, and Joe Pater) and most recently in the 2022 edition of the Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics edited by Elena Babatsouli.Dr. Galasso is a faculty member in the departments of English and Linguistics at California State University, Northridge, and serves as an adjunct faculty member of linguistics at California State University, Long Beach.