Proceedings Of The 3rd Conference On Generative Approaches To Language Acquisition North America Galana 2008

This volume contains 33 papers and posters presented at the 3rd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA 2008), which was held at the University of Connecticut in Storrs from September 4-6, 2008. The conference included a special focus on language acquisition and cross-linguistic variation, as well as original research in many areas of first and second language acquisition.

This proceedings contains 46 papers and posters presented at the 2nd Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition North America (GALANA), which was held August 17-19, 2006, in Montreal. The authors examine first and second language acquisition issues in a large number of languages. The papers focus on the acquisition of syntax, semantics, phonology, and morphology.

This volume contains 19 papers selected from among those presented at the 5th Conference on Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition -- North America, which took place from October 11-13, 2012 at the University of Kansas. The papers are grouped into sections on phonology; syntax; syntax-semantics/pragmatics interfaces; tense, aspect, and negation; and quantifiers and quantification.

This edited volume contains a representative sample of papers presented at the 7th meeting of the Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition – North America (GALANA-7) conference. The book features three streams of research (Variation in Input, First Language Acquisition, and Second Language Acquisition), each of which investigates the nature of language acquisition from the generative perspective. A unique feature of the GALANA-7 conference, and of this volume, is the bringing together of research on generative language acquisition and research on the role that cross-dialectal input variation plays in acquisition. This volume should be of interest to scholars and students of first language acquisition, second language acquisition, and input variation.

Modern linguistic theory has been based on the promise of explaining how language acquisition can occur so rapidly with such subtlety, and with both surprising uniformity and diversity across languages. This handbook provides a summary and assessment of how far that promise has been fulfilled, exploring core concepts in acquisition theory, including notions of the initial state, parameters, triggering theory, the role of competition and frequency, and many others, across a variety of syntactic topics that have formed the central domains of investigation and debate. These topics are treated from the unique perspective of central actors in each domain who have helped shape the research agenda. The authors have presented a summary of the data, the theories under discussion, and their own best assessments of where each domain stands. Providing as well the agenda for future work in the field showing both particular needs and general directions that should be pursued in the coming decades.

The scholarly articles included in this volume represent significant contributions to the fields of formal and descriptive syntax, conversational analysis and speech act theory, as well as language development and bilingualism. Taken together, these studies adopt a variety of methodological techniques—ranging from grammaticality judgments to corpus-based analysis to experimental approaches—to offer rich insights into different aspects of Ibero-Romance grammar. The volume consists of three parts, organized in accordance with the topics treated in the chapters they comprise. Part I focuses on structural patterns, Part II analyzes pragmatic ones, and Part III investigates the acquisition of linguistic aspects found in the speech of L1, L2 and heritage speakers. The authors address these issues by relying on empirically rooted linguistic approaches to data collection, which are coupled with current theoretical assumptions on the nature of sentence structure, discourse dynamics and language acquisition. The volume will be of interest to anyone researching or studying Hispanic and Ibero-Romance linguistics.