Child Language Creolization And Historical Change

Researchers in Romance languages will find this book a stimulating and broad-ranging treatment of the development of grammar, demonstrating the relevance of markedness for both linguistic theory and language teaching. A substantial and original account of a unique body of data, across first and second language acquisition, creolization and historical linguistics and across a wide range of languages and contact varieties, demonstrates a new impetus and predictive force for markedness theory.

This book studies the acquisition, loss and re-acquisition of Spanish, English, Portuguese, and Hebrew, the first languages of this writer's son. It applies the results of current work in the areas of psycholinguistics, bilingualism, and applied linguistics to the study of language development in one multilingual child, Noam, from birth to age 17.

Research on creolization, language change, and language acquisition has been converging toward a triangulation of the constraints along which grammatical systems develop within individual speakers--and (viewed externally) across generations of speakers. The originality of this volume is in its comparison of various sorts of language development from a number of linguistic-theoretic and empirical perspectives, using data from both speech and gestural modalities and from a diversity of acquisition environments. In turn, this comparison yields fresh insights on the mental bases of language creation.The book is organized into five parts: creolization and acquisition; acquisition under exceptional circumstances; language processing and syntactic change; parameter setting in acquisition and through creolization and language change; and a concluding part integrating the contributors' observations and proposals into a series of commentaries on the state of the art in our understanding of language development, its role in creolization and diachrony, and implications for linguistic theory.Contributors : Dany Adone, Derek Bickerton, Adrienne Bruyn, Marie Coppola, Michel DeGraff, Viviane D�prez, Alison Henry, Judy Kegl, David Lightfoot, John S. Lumsden, Salikoko S. Mufwene, Pieter Muysken, Elissa L. Newport, Luigi Rizzi, Ian Roberts, Ann Senghas, Rex A. Sprouse, Denise Tangney, Anne Vainikka, Barbara S. Vance, Maaike Verrips.

Eduardo Faingold chronicles his family’s experiences before, during, and after the military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983). He uses his diaries, interviews in Latin America and Israel, documents and pictures given to him by his family and friends and studies the works of political scientists, historians and journalists. He begins with his family history from the time when his ancestors immigrated in the 19th century from Byelorussia and Bessarabia to Argentina as a part of the Baron de Hirsch’s emigrant wave that established farming villages in the provinces of Santa Fe and Buenos Aires. Then, using his family’s history as background, he discusses his life as an exile in Israel and Denmark from 1976 to 1979, his return to Argentina to comply with his military service in the Argentine Marine Infantry and his return to Israel in 1980. In a revealing preface to the second edition of Exile from Argentina, the author updates the family history and notes some important political events in Argentina and Israel in the 1980s and beyond that help contextualize the author’s experiences. Notably, as the author points out in this new preface to Exile from Argentina, by the end of the first quarter of the 21st century, all his siblings and their families, as well as his mother, the descendants of his ancestors who emigrated to Argentina from Byelorussia and Bessarabia at the turn of the 19th century to escape the violence of the Russian pogroms, are now scattered in five continents, living their lives in cultures as varied as those of the United States, Brazil, Israel, Norway, Sweden, and Australia. Finally, this new edition of Exile from Argentina features a trove of historical photos and documents of the author and his family which were not included in the first edition of the book.

The term “crosscurrent” is defined as “a current flowing counter to another.” This volume represents crosscurrents in second language acquisition and linguistic theory in several respects. First, although the main currents running between linguistics and second language acquisition have traditionally flowed from theory to application, equally important contributions can be made in the other direction as well. Second, although there is a strong tendency in the field of linguistics to see “theorists” working within formal models of syntax, SLA research can contribute to linguistic theory more broadly defined to include various functional as well as formal models of syntax, theories of phonology, variationist theories of sociolinguists, etc. These assumptions formed the basis for a conference held at Stanford University during the Linguistic Institute there in the summer of 1987. The conference was organized to update the relation between second language acquisition and linguistic theory. This book contains a selection of (mostly revised and updated) papers of this conference and two newly written papers.