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The new experimental evidence presented in The Ups and Downs of Child Language shows that it is possible to extend research on child language to children's semantic competence, adopting the same theoretical framework that has proven useful to the study of children's syntactic competence. Andrea Gualmini investigates the role of entailment relations for child language in a series of interconnected experiments assessing children's negation and their interpretation of words like or, every, and some. Comparing his study to other models of language acquisition and characterizing the observed differences between children and adults, Gualmini asserts that even in the domain of semantic competence there is no reason to assume that child language differs from adult language in ways that would exceed the boundary conditions imposed by Universal Grammar.
List of contents
Introduction Chapter 1: Language and Acquisition Chapter 2: Entailment and Polarity Phenomena in Child Language Chapter 3: The Structure of Child Language Chapter 4: Asymmetries of Child Language Chapter 5: Structure and Beyond Chapter 6: The Structure of the Universal Asymmetry and Beyond Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C Appendix D Appendix E Appendix F Appendix G References Index
About the author
Andrea Gualmini is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of Linguistics at M.I.T. He received a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Maryland.
