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How are native speakers of a language instinctively able to make precise linguistic judgements about marginal syntactic matters? What does this tell us about both the structure of language and our innate language ability as humans? These questions form the focus of Professor Culicover's in-depth study which will appeal to both graduate students and professionals within the fields of linguistic theory and cognitive science.
Basics of Language for Language Learners, 2nd edition, by Peter W. Culicover and Elizabeth V. Hume, systematically explores all the aspects of language central to second language learning: the sounds of language, the different grammatical structures, the tools and strategies for learning, the social functions of communication, and the psychology of language learning and use.
This volume explores how human languages become what they are, why they differ from one another in certain ways but not in others, and why they change in the ways that they do. Given that language is a universal creation of the human mind, the puzzle is why there are different languages at all: why do we not all speak the same language? Moreover, while there is considerable variation, in some ways grammars do show consistent patterns: why are languages similar in those respects, and why are those particular patterns preferred? Peter Culicover proposes that the solution to these puzzles is a constructional one. Grammars consist of constructions that carry out the function of expressing univer...
Offering a compelling perspective on the structure of the human language, this book addresses the proper balance between syntax and semantics, between structure and derivation, and between rule systems and lexicon. It argues that the balance struck by mainstream generative grammar is wrong.
This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. This book offers a comprehensive survey of research on parasitic gaps, an intriguing syntactic phenomenon. The first section of the book contains a history of work on the topic and three fundamental previously published papers. The remaining three sections present new perspectives on the theory of parasitic gaps based on data taken from diverse languages. Contributors Michael Calcagno, Peter W. Culicover, Elisabet Engdahl, Robert Hukari, Andreas Kathol, Christopher Kennedy, Katalin É. Kiss, Robert Levine, Alan Munn, Jamal Ouhalla, Paul M. Postal, Christine Tellier
The question of language learnability is central to modern linguistics. Yet, despite its importance, research into the problems of language learnability has rarely gone beyond the informal, commonsense intuitions that currently prevail among linguists and psychologists. By focusing their inquiry on formal language learnability theory-the interface of formal mathematical linguistics, linguistic theory and cognitive psychology-the authors of this book have developed a rigorous and unified theory that opens the study of language learnability to discoveries about the mechanisms of language acquisition in human beings. Their research has important implications for linguistic theory, child languag...
A work that reveals the profound links between the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language, and proposes a new integrative framework for the language sciences. Language is a hallmark of the human species; the flexibility and unbounded expressivity of our linguistic abilities is unique in the biological world. In this book, Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater argue that to understand this astonishing phenomenon, we must consider how language is created: moment by moment, in the generation and understanding of individual utterances; year by year, as new language learners acquire language skills; and generation by generation, as languages change, split, and fuse through the processes...
This lingustic textbook covers principles of advanced syntax and is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate courses
Even though the range of phenomena syntactic theories intend to account for is basically the same, the large number of current approaches to syntax shows how differently these phenomena can be interpreted, described, and explained. The goal of the volume is to probe into the question of how exactly these frameworks differ and what if anything they have in common. Descriptions of a sample of current approaches to syntax are presented by their major practitioners (Part I) followed by their metatheoretical underpinnings (Part II). Given that the goal is to facilitate a systematic comparison among the approaches, a checklist of issues was given to the contributors to address. The main headings are Data, Goals, Descriptive Tools, and Criteria for Evaluation. The chapters are structured uniformly allowing an item-by-item survey across the frameworks. The introduction lays out the parameters along which syntactic frameworks must be the same and how they may differ and a final paper draws some conclusions about similarities and differences. The volume is of interest to descriptive linguists, theoreticians of grammar, philosophers of science, and studies of the cognitive science of science.