Language Development Syntax And Semantics

First published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume brings together a number of researchers working on generative syntax and semantics, language acquisition and phonology to explore various theoretical frameworks, ranging from generative grammar and formal semantics to more descriptive approaches. The contributions gathered here investigate various aspects in the syntax, semantics, phonology and acquisition of Romanian in comparison with other (mainly Romance) languages. The book will be of interest to linguists who are keen on keeping up with the latest advances in the field of Romance studies, as well as those whose research bears on languages such as Hungarian, German, and Maltese, among others.

This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

In the beginning, before there are words, or syntax, or discourse, there is speech. Speech is an infant's gateway to language. Without exposure to speech, no language--or at most only a feeble facsimile of language--develops, regardless of how rich a child's biological endowment for language learning may be. But little is given directly in speech--not words, for example, as anyone who has ever listened to fluent conversation in an unfamiliar language can attest. Rather, words and phrases, or rudimentary categories--or whatever other information is required for syntactic and semantic analyses to begin operating--must be pulled from speech through an infant's developing perceptual capacities. By the end of the first year, an infant can segment at least some words from fluent speech. Beyond this, how impoverished or rich an infant's representations of input may be remains largely unknown. Clearly, in the debate over determinants of early language acquisition, the input speech stream has too often been offhandedly dismissed as a potential source of information. This volume brings together internationally-known scholars from a range of disciplines--linguistics, psychology, cognitive and computer science, and acoustics --who share common interests in how speech, in its phonological, prosodic, distributional, and statistical properties, may encode information useful for early language learning, and how such information may be deciphered by very young children. These scholars offer a spectrum of viewpoints on the possibility that aspects of speech may provide bootstraps for language learning; contribute important, state-of-the-art findings across a variety of relevant domains; and illuminate critical directions for future inquiry. The publication of this volume represents a significant step in renewing the bonds between two fields that have long been sundered--speech perception and language acquisition.

This book presents theoretical and experimental analyses of the nature of early verbs. At around the age of two years old, children start to combine words and produce their first verbs. Verbal items appear later than nouns in a child’s speech and refer to the relational concepts in the world that are represented in syntax through the argument structure. The central set of data investigated here is based on the analysis of the features of first verbal productions in Italian. Since the appearance of verbs implies the mastery of a mapping procedure between syntactic positions and semantic roles, the syntactic regularities found for each lexical verb class suggest that the relation at the syntax-semantics interface is well-established early on. The non-adult-like sentences are those which involve the mastery of the scope-discourse semantic interface or higher functional syntactic categories. The analysis of the delay in the production and comprehension of some constructions here uncovers some general characteristics of language acquisition devices.

This 22-chapter text explores the structure of language and the meaning of words within a given structure. The text/workbook combination gives students both the theory and practice they need to understand this complex topic. Analyzing Syntax and Semantics features the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) approach. This method uses student performance objectives, practice, feedback, individualization of pace, and repeatable testing as instructional strategies.

The research reported is in investigation into the early acquisition of grammar by three children from the age of approximately 19 months. Nonlinguistic information from situational and behavioral context was used to infer the semantic intent of utterances in order to analyze the development of linguistic expression. Previous psycholinguistic studies of child language had described utterances in terms of the orderly distribution with which words occurred in juxtaposition. In this study, by making judgments of semantic intent, it was possible to describe the inherent structure of utterances so that conclusions could be drawn about the child's knowledge of semantic-syntactic relationship in the derivation of sentences. For example, when the child said "Mommy sock" and Mommy was putting the child's sock on the child, it was clear that a different semantic interpretation was intended than when the child said "Mommy sock" and picked up Mommy's sock. The syntactic components of generative transformational grammars were proposed for those samples of the children's language in which mean length of utterance was less than 1.5 morphemes. For the psychologist, the book provides added insight into the relative development of syntactic expression and underlying cognitive function. It was clear, for example, that the two did not develop hand in hand. For the linguist, the book provides additional evidence for the growing conclusion that child language is not incoherent. There is strong evidence presented to demonstrate the extent (and limitations) of the child's knowledge of basic grammatical relations in the earliest two-word utterances. For the speech pathologist concerned with language disorders in children, the evidence presented and the resulting conclusions should provide important hypotheses for application in treatment. One of the major contributions that this book will make to the literature on child language is the presentation of a large body of data in support of the conclusions that have been drawn. There is an extensive catalog of the children's earliest two-word utterances, negative sentences, and syntactic and single-word lexicons. This evidence should prove invaluable to other researchers in the field.