Acquisition of Syntactic Structure - Animacy and Thematic Alignment

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure.

List of contents

1. Introduction; 2. The syntax of displacing and non-displacing predicates; 3. Argument hierarchies; 4. Animacy and adult sentence processing; 5. Animacy and children's language; 6. Modeling the acquisition of displacing predicates; 7. Conclusions and origins.

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.

Summary

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure. 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.

Product details

• Authors: Misha Becker, Misha (University of North Carolina Becker
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 03.04.2014
• EAN: 9781107007840
• ISBN: 978-1-107-00784-0
• No. of pages: 342
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics; Cambridge Studies in Linguisti; Cambridge Studies in Linguistics
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Other languages / Other literatures