Case, Typology and Grammar (Typological Studies in Language)
By Anna Siewierska, Jae Jung Song
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:395
* Publication Date:1998-05
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027229376
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027229373
Preface
The 15 papers in this volume have been written in honour of Barry John Blake,
Foundation Professor of Linguistics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia
to commemorate his 60th birthday. The title of the volume and the contents of the
contributions reflect the three themes that have played a dominant role in Barry’s
linguistic work.
Born in Ascot Vale, Victoria, Australia in 1937, Barry received his BA (honours)
in English Language and Latin in 1958 from the University of Melbourne. In 1960
—after a one-year stint as a secondary school teacher of English, Latin and Ancient
History—he went to work for the Department of Defence, initially as a linguist and
later as a language training officer. In 1966 he accepted a position as Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies research fellow at Monash University (in the first
linguistic department of Australia), which took him to western Queensland to work
on three languages: Kalkatungu, Pitta-Pitta and Yalarnnga. He obtained MA and
Ph.D degrees from Monash University in 1968 and 1975, respectively. He taught
at Monash University from 1970 till 1987. In recognition of his research achievements,
in 1987 he became a fellow of the Australian Academy of Sciences. In 1988
he took up the Foundation Chair in Linguistics at La Trobe University.
Barry’s research for the last thirty years has been devoted to the study of Australian
Aboriginal languages. His numerous publications include: descriptive grammars
of individual languages (Kalkatungu and Pitta-Pitta), pan-Australian surveys of
aspects of clause structure, theory specific analyses of particular phenomena in
individual languages and across-languages, works on the genetic classification of
Australian languages and more popular accounts of the history and nature of Australian
languages.
Barry’s research on language classification has put to rest the long standing
debate among Australianists as to the existence of a genetic as opposed to merely
typological distinction between the Pama–Nyungan and non-Pama–Nyungan languages.
By demonstrating that the verb pronominal prefix forms in a range of non-
Pama–Nyungan languages could have evolved from a single proto-language, he has
provided strong evidence for the genetic unity of the non-Pama–Nyungan languages,
on the one hand, and the Pama-Nyungan languages, on the other. This work on
pronouns resulted in the establishing of a set of proto-pronouns for the non-Pama-
Nyungan languages in addition to the proto-Australian pronouns reconstructed earlier
byR.M.W. Dixon. The implications of there being two separate proto-languages
in Australia are, needless to say, highly significant and will undoubtedly constitute
an imporatant topic of future research on Australian languages.
While Barry has been concerned with diverse facets of the structure of Australian
languages, as epitomized in his 1987 book Australian Aboriginal Grammar (London:
Croom Helm), the theme which has most consistently reoccurred throughout
hiswork is case. Given the rich concentration of inflectional case languages in Australia,
this is not altogether surprising. As is well known, most Australian languages
have rich inflectional case systems, though some, only for the non-core relations.
Moreover, unlike in other parts of the world, the majority of the languages with
inflectional case marking in Australia, display ergative or split ergative case marking,
a phenomenon which has aroused not only much theoretical interest but also
considerable controversy. The issues that have featured most prominently in Barry’s
discussions of case are: the identification of cases, particularly the use of distributional
as opposed to functional criteria, the relationship between synthetic and
analytic exponents of case, the order of the emergence and decay of morphological
cases, the relationship between case marking and alternative forms of marking via
cross-referencing pronouns on the verb and word order, and the nature, origin and
distribution of ergative as opposed to accusative case marking systems. His interest
in the distribution of ergativity in particular has more recently taken him beyond his
home continent into the Philippines and Indonesia, and led him to ‘discover’ the
existence of ergativity in languages of these regions, thereby demonstrating that
ergativity is much more widely attested than previously thought. Many of Barry’s
insights on these topics, which appeared in his books and articles published in the
70s and 80s, are summarised in Case (1994) written for the Cambridge Textbooks
in Linguistics series.
Inherently intertwined with Barry Blake’s work on case is the second central
theme of his research, linguistic typology. His Language Typology: Cross-linguistic
Studies in Syntax (1981), written with Graham Mallinson, together with Bernard
Comrie’s Language Universals and Linguistic Typology were the first textbooks in
the field of language typology. Both books are widely regarded as having had a
considerable impact on developing interest in the field of typology and inspiring
new work in this area. A particularly valuable feature of Barry’s textbook is the
inclusion of a range of statistical data, which enables the reader to form a better
understanding of typological methodology and provides a sound basis for evaluating
the relevance of the typological correlations discussed. Another laudable characteristic
of this book is the insistence on viewing typological generalizations not as sole
ends of typological research but rather as essential means to formulating external
explanations for the distributuion of cross-linguistic data. Despite the passage of
time, most of the topics covered in the book continue to be relevant and the explanations
offered for the presented typological generalizations have lost little of their
appeal.
While the analyses of cross-linguistic data in Language Typology are presented
in an essentially model-neutral framework, incorporating general functional princi
ples, much of Barry’s typological work has been coupled, in a symbiotic manner,
with his interest in different models of grammar. Unlike many typologists, who
eschew formal models of grammar altogether or restrict their attention to only one,
Barry has constantly sought to bring the insights of language typology into the realm
of formal syntactic theory, and vice versa. He has developed analyses of various
syntactic phenomena, particularly grammatical relations and grammatical relations
changing operations such as passives, antipassives, and applicative constructions in
a number of grammatical frameworks including: Case Grammar, Relational Grammar,
Lexical Functional Grammar, Role and Reference Grammar, Lexicase and
Word Grammar. He has also elaborated, independently of Kenneth Hale, a nonconfigurational
analysis of the clause structure of Kalkutungu. Barry’s attitude to
grammatical models is reflected most admirably in Relational Grammar (1990,
London: Routledge) in which he not only presents a highly lucid account of the
basic tenets of the theory, but also greatly informs the RG analyses of clause structure
by bringing his expertise in a wide range of languages to bear on them.
The above three themes of Barry’s research, case, linguistic typology and grammar
cover much of the ground of modern theoretical linguistics. It is no coincidence
therefore that the contributions to this volume cover a suitably wide range of language
phenomena and several different theoretical persuasions, and thus reflect his
research themes closely. The editors sought to limit the contributors to this volume
to three different categories: Barry’s Ph.D students, Barry’s colleagues at Monash
and La Trobe universities, and finally scholars who have shared or exchanged their
ideas about, and admiration for, language with Barry. Some of the contributors fall
into more than one category. Needless to say, there are many students, colleagues,
and friends of his who may have been left out, and the editors express their abject
apologies, and implore their understanding. It is hoped that there will be more
opportunities for all in the future.
Perhaps it is fitting to close this preface by reflecting on one important feature of
language which the editors years ago learned about from Barry as his students. He
not only showed them that language is an object of great sophistication. But he also
taught them to appreciate it as an object of beauty. The editors would like to invite
the reader to not only view the following chapters as contributions to the discipline,
but also appreciate them in this spirit, just as Barry will.
Lancaster A.S.
Melbourne J.J.S.
September 1997
'Subordination' versus 'Coordination' in Sentence and Text: A Cross-linguistic Perspective (Studies in Language Companion Series)
By Cathrine Fabricius-Hansen, Wiebke Ramm
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages:359
* Publication Date:2008-05-21
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027231095
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027231093
Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology)
By Matras, Yaron
* Publisher:Walter de Gruyter
* Number Of Pages:598
* Publication Date:2007-12-19
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:311019628X
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9783110196283
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
The book contains 30 descriptive chapters dealing with a specific language contact situation. The chapters follow a uniform organisation format, being the narrative version of a standard comprehensive questionnaire previously distributed to all authors. The questionnaire targets systematically the possibility of contact influence / grammatical borrowing in a full range of categories. The uniform structure facilitates a comparison among the chapters and the languages covered. The introduction describes the setup of the questionnaire and the methodology of the approach, along with a survey of the difficulties of sampling in contact linguistics. Two evaluative chapters, each authored by one of the co-editors, draws general conclusions from the volume as a whole (one in relation to borrowed grammatical categories and meaningful hierarchies, the other in relation to the distribution of Matter and Pattern replication).
Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in Language
By Adele Goldberg
* Publisher:Oxford University Press, USA
* Number Of Pages:290
* Publication Date:2006-02-16
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0199268517
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780199268511
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
This book investigates the nature of generalization in language and examines how language is known by adults and acquired by children. It looks at how and why constructions are learned, the relation between their forms and functions, and how cross-linguistic and language-internal generalizations about them can be explained.
Constructions at Work is divided into three parts: in the first Professor Goldberg provides an overview of constructionist approaches, including the constructionist approach to argument structure, and argues for a usage-based model of grammar. In Part II she addresses issues concerning how generalizations are constrained and constructional generalizations are learned. In Part III the author shows that a combination of function and processing accounts for a wide range of language-internal and cross-linguistic generalizations. She then considers the degree to which the function of constructions explains their distribution and examines cross-linguistic tendencies in argument realization. She demonstrates that pragmatic and cognitive processes account for the data without appeal to stipulations that are language-specific.
This book is an important contribution to the study of how language operates in the mind and in the world and how these operations relate. It is of central interest for scholars and graduate-level students in all branches of theoretical linguistics and psycholinguistics. It will also appeal to cognitive scientists and philosophers concerned with language and its acquisition.
Approaches to Bootstrapping: v. 1 (Language Acquisition & Language Disorders)
By J. Weissenborn, Barbara Hohle
(October 2001)
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:318
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027224919
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027224910
Introduction
Jürgen Weissenborn & Barbara H鰄le
University of Potsdam
There is growing consensus that by the age of three children have acquired the
basic phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic regularities of the target
language irrespective of the language or languages to be learned, and the
language modality in which learning takes place, i.e., spoken or signed language.
Evidence is also accumulating that the schedule for the major milestones of
language development in the productive as well as in the receptive mode is
largely identical from language to language (for a detailed overview see Jusczyk
1997).
How is this early learning or bootstrapping into the native language
possible? The notion of bootstrapping implies that the child (on the basis of
already existing knowledge and information processing capacities) can make use
of specific types of information in the linguistic and non-linguistic input in order
to determine the language particular regularities which constitute the grammar
and the lexicon of her native language. Depending on the type of information
which the child makes use of, we can distinguish prosodic, lexico-semantic,
conceptual, morpho-syntactic, and pragmatic bootstrapping. The central assumption
behind the bootstrapping approach is that there is a systematic relationship
between properties of the input at one level of representation, which the child
already has access to, and another level of representation. An example is the
intensively studied parallelism between prosodic and syntactic structure, or
between lexico-semantic and syntactic structure (e.g., Gleitman 1990; Pinker
1994). In other words, the child makes use of the regularities that characterize
the interface, i.e., the interaction between different linguistic and non-linguistic
domains of representation. A problem with this strategy is, as has repeatedly
been pointed out, that this parallelism between levels of representation is only
partial (e.g., Selkirk 1984; Jackendoff 1997). The child must thus use other
means to solve the problems that result from this type of discrepancy. It could be
that the child makes use of different types of information in order to overcome
these difficulties (Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff 1996; Mattys, Jusczyk, Luce &
Morgan 1999; Morgan, Shi & Allopenna 1996).
Other questions related to the process of bootstrapping are whether and how
the bootstrapping strategies and their interrelation may change during development.
Such a change is to be expected given the constantly increasing knowledge
of the child in the linguistic and non-linguistic domain. For example, the growing
lexicon of the child, especially in the domain of the closed class, functional
vocabulary which in languages like English, French or German constitute about
50% of the lexical tokens of any given text, should considerably facilitate and
enhance the lexical (e.g., word segmentation and categorization) and syntactic
(e.g., determination of syntactic boundaries) bootstrapping capacities of the child
because of the distributional properties of these items. That is, from a very early
stage, the child should be able to apply — albeit only to a certain extent — an
adult-like top-down parsing strategy (e.g., H鰄le & Weissenborn 2000). We may
thus have to reckon with a constantly changing hierarchy of bootstrapping
strategies. The extent to which these changes may result in the attrition of
bootstrapping capacities that are no longer in use is not clear. The best known
evidence for changes in the sensitivity of the child to distinctions in the input is
the attested restriction of the child’s segmental discrimination capacities to the
phonological contrasts of the target (Werker & Lalonde 1988).
In addition to the dependency on the perceptual and representational
capacities of the child in the different linguistic and non-linguistic domains,
success of bootstrapping strategies will also depend on the availability of
information processing capacities like memory and attention which are necessary
to integrate the information extracted from the input into the learning mechanisms.
Thus, rule formation on the basis of distributional learning probably puts
particular demands on memory because of the necessity to keep track of the
relevant co-occurrence relations. The existence of such frequency effects in prelinguistic
children points to the importance of memory processes (e.g., Jusczyk,
Luce & Charles-Luce 1994). Consequently, changes in the bootstrapping
capacities of the child may also be the result of changes in her information
processing capacities, i.e., changes in memory and attentional resources, like, for
example, changes in (short term) auditory memory or in the capacity of the child
to coordinate her eye gaze with the eye gaze of the caretaker (e.g., Adams &
Gathercole 1995; Baldwin 1995).
In order to understand the acquisition process, it is crucial to ask to which
extent (and how) the child uses the information accessed in the input in her rule
learning mechanisms (via bootstrapping mechanisms). The fact that the child is
sensitive to a certain property of the input which may be relevant from a
theoretical perspective for the acquisition of a particular aspect of linguistic
knowledge does not yet mean that she actually uses this information to acquire
this knowledge.
Last but not least, we also have to reckon with the fact that all the capacities
and the related processes mentioned so far may be affected by changes in
the biological, neurophysiological environment in which they are embedded, and
which in turn will also be affected by the perceptual and cognitive processes
supported by it. Thus, the assumption that certain processes like the processing
of closed class functional elements are subject to an increasing degree of
automatization may be the expression of changes in the underlying brain
structure (e.g., Friederici 1995). Another effect of maturational processes in the
brain may be the existence of critical periods for the acquisition of specific
aspects of linguistic knowledge.
The main aim of the present collection of studies is to contribute to the
clarification and understanding of the questions and issues mentioned above. One
important aspect is the interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic approach taken.
Apart from experimental studies, the study of the acquisition of different
languages, which differ only minimally in some well-defined respect, is a
powerful tool for collecting evidence about the structure and interaction of
bootstrapping mechanisms.
The present studies should both challenge and stimulate the efforts in
related areas of research which are only marginally represented by these two
volumes, like the increasingly active field of modelling of acquisition processes,
the study of the interaction between general cognitive and linguistic development,
the reflection on general models of language development, and especially the
study of developmental language disorders. If, as we mentioned in the beginning,
and as shown pervasively in the research on language acquisition in the last
years, the decisive steps into language are taken during the first two years of life
(made on the basis of the powerful bootstrapping capacities displayed by the
child), it seems more promising to investigate the hypothesis that it is deficiencies
in the bootstrapping capacities that largely contribute to the emergence of
developmental language disorders.
For the study in the origin of language disorders, the importance of getting
a clearer picture of the contribution of the different bootstrapping mechanisms
and their interactions with normal language development becomes more and
more clear. As mentioned before, the relative strength of the contribution of the
different bootstrapping strategies for the extraction of language-specific regularities
from the input seems to change over time. What we do not yet know is how
much development differs across subjects and how much deviance from the
general course is tolerable without constituting a risk for successful language
acquisition. In order to find out where the potential risks for the emergence of
language disorders lie, it is necessary to compare the language development of
unimpaired and language-impaired children over time. Initial results from current
longitudinal studies in impaired and unimpaired language acquisition point to the
fruitfulness of this approach (e.g., Benasich 1998; Lyytinen 1997). Longitudinal
data is also needed to answer the question of which of the child’s early linguistic
and non-linguistic capacities underlying the bootstrapping mechanisms are
innately determined and which are rather the result of epigenetic processes.
The papers contained in the two volumes are organized into five chapters.
Chapter one concentrates on the prerequisites of early word learning. In his paper
Jusczyk discusses the beginnings of word segmentation abilities at around 7 to
8 months of age. He presents evidence that English children use mainly prosodic
cues with a preference for trochaic rhythmical patterns at the beginning but also
benefit from phonotactic constraints, allophonic cues and distributional regularities
from very early on. Furthermore, he reviews findings on the detection of
function words in the input as an aid for the development of syntactic knowledge.
Echols reports further evidence for a trochaic segmentation strategy in
English children. Moreover, she argues that perceptually salient syllables are
those syllables in the speech stream infants are especially sensitive to. Besides
stressed syllables final syllables have a high degree of perceptual saliency. She
presents findings according to which final syllable lengthening is more pronounced
in child-directed speech than in adult-directed speech. This fits with
production patterns where stressed and final syllables are more likely to be
included in the speech of one-word speakers than unstressed nonfinal syllables.
This saliency pattern could also contribute to the tendency to extract trochaic feet
from the input.
Fisher and Church discuss another open question with regard to lexical
processing:namely the question how the initially rather poor word recognition
abilities of young children develop into the efficient and rapid recognition skills
found in adults. Differences in processing as well as in lexical representations
are discussed as potential sources for these differences between children and
adults. In a series of experiments the authors found evidence that basic word
identification processes of preschoolers resemble those of adults. On the basis of
these findings it is argued that the learning mechanisms that children use to
create lexical phonological representations are the same as those mechanisms that
create long-term auditory word priming in adults, i.e., a mechanism that continu
ally updates the representations of the sound of words to reflect ongoing auditory
experience.
Bernstein Ratner and Rooney provide evidence that certain structural
properties of child-directed speech facilitate the early stages of word learning,
especially the segmentation of the speech input in word like units. Their analysis
of 10000 utterances spoken to children between 13 and 20 months of age shows
several features that might assist children in solving the segmentation problem,
namely a high proportion of very short utterances with many repetitions of
lexical items and syntactic frames. Along with the demonstrated abilities of
young children to use input information these specific input characteristics might
support early language acquisition.
With the study by Gleitman and Gleitman the focus of the discussion
changes to the semantic aspects of the acquisition of the lexicon:they ask how
word meanings are learned and how word meanings function in the semantics of
sentences. They argue that one potential source for the learning of word meanings
lies in the child’s capacity to match the occurrence of words with the scenes
and events that accompany the words in adult-to-child interactions. Furthermore,
within the syntactic bootstrapping account language internal contextual information
is assumed to provide another powerful source of information on word
meaning. Some experiments with adults reveal that these different sources of
information might be relevant for the acquisition of the meaning of different
word classes:given only extralinguistic context of a word use by video scenes
without tone adult subjects were much better in identifying the meanings of
nouns as compared to verbs. Verb identification abilities were better giving the
subjects sentence structures in which only the grammatical morphemes appeared
and all lexical morphemes were replaced by nonsense syllables. In language
acquisition these different information sources for different word classes might
be related to the initial dominance of nouns in children’s production.
Fernald, McRoberts and Swingley focus on the developmental changes in
word comprehension during the second year of life. They report findings that the
speed and the accuracy in recognizing familiar words increases significantly
within this period and that children from 18 months on already show the features
of incremental processing which are found also in adults. They argue that these
changes may reflect changes in the nature of lexical representations as well as
changes in general perceptual and cognitive processing abilities.
McKee and Iwasaki argue in a similar direction on the basis of production
data. Within the framework of a model of lemma-driven syntactic processing
they point out that the misuse and the missing of closed-class elements in
children’s production data may have several reasons:it could either result from
incomplete linguistic knowledge or from a deficient processing system that put
this underlying knowledge into actual utterances. A critical feature for distinguishing
between these alternatives is the consistency with which a pattern of
misuse appears:a deficient processing system allows for more variability than
lack of linguistic knowledge. Based on data on the acquisition of Japanese they
show the relevance of this criterion.
Chapter two focuses on the development of early syntactic knowledge. In
the first paper Gerken argues that one of the main tasks of future research is to
build the bridge between input features and the acquired system in the domain of
syntax. She focuses on the question which input cues might help the child to
detect phrase and clause boundaries to find out about syntactic structure and
syntactic categories. Besides mentioning prosodic cues she draws the attention to
the importance of the processing of grammatical morphemes which could signal
phrase and clause boundaries and could also be used to assign a syntactic
category to adjacent words. She points out that the recent findings on the
richness of the signal and the high sensitivity of infants for distributional
properties of the input should shed new light on the discussion of the logical
problem of the acquisition of syntax.
Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek and Schweisguth follow the line of Gerken
arguing that the sensitivity to grammatical morphemes may contribute in
important ways to the acquisition of syntax. They report findings of an experiment
that support the assumption of an early sensitivity to grammatical morphemes:
children between 18 to 20 months of age react differently to correctly
inflected verbforms than to verbs with a “wrong” inflectional ending or a
nonsense syllable replacing the inflection.
A slightly different perspective on possible input cues to the acquisition of
syntactic categories is taken in the paper by Durieux and Gillis. They discuss
several phonological features of a word itself that could be used to predict its
syntactic category. They show that the integration of several phonological cues
(stress, length, vowel and consonant quality among them) leads to good predictions
of the syntactic category for English as well as in Dutch words. But it is
still an open question whether infants can benefit from these cues in natural
language acquisition.
Within the framework of the parameter setting model for acquisition of
syntax Guasti, Nespor, Christophe and van Ooyen argue that children use the
correlation of prosodic and syntactic structure — especially the rhythmic pattern
within the intonational phrase — to find out whether their target language is head
initial or head final.
Following this idea H鰄le, Weissenborn, Schmitz and Ischebeck present
the results of a series of studies on the sensitivity of German children to word
order regularities. They found clear prosodic differences between sentences
involving head-complement constructions as compared to head-modifier constructions.
This may help children to discriminate between complements and modifiers.
Furthermore they present evidence, that children of 20 to 21 months of age
may discriminate grammatical vs. ungrammatical word order if the difference in
grammaticality correlates with differences in prosody.
Penner,Wymann andWeissenborn discuss an apparent asymmetry in the
speech of children learning German between systematic violations of the
canonical strong-weak pattern in speech production and target consistent word
order which is assumed to be acquired on the basis of the knowledge of the
stress pattern of the target. They explain the delay at the production level by the
fact that intricate interface data force the child to resort to intermediate underspecified
representations of phonological phrases.
Chapter three focuses on the interaction between prosodic and morphosyntactic
factors in the process of development of linguistic knowledge. Demuth
reports an account of syllable omission and the development of grammatical
morphology in early mono- and multimorphemic utterances of a Spanish child on
the basis of a theory of Prosodic Constraints. She shows that these constraints
are different from those found in English. The main result is that the appearance
of grammatical morphology depends on the level at which grammatical morphemes
are prosodified, with lower level elements being acquired before higher
level elements. She concludes by pointing out possible implications of her
approach for the study of individual differences, for the identification of children
at risk of language delay, and for a more general constraint-based approach to
language acquisition.
In a similar vain Lleó shows in her contribution that the fact that Spanish
determiners are acquired way before their appearance in the language of German
speaking children is explained by the different prosodic structures of the article
in the languages concerned. These prosodic differences explain that the Spanish
article appears already on single nouns whereas in German the article is first
realized within larger structures. These results provide further evidence for the
importance of the prosody-syntax interface for the acquisition of grammatical
knowledge.
This importance is confirmed by the findings of the study by Freitas,
Miguel and Hub Faria on the acquisition of codas in European Portuguese.
They show that the acquisition of elements of syllabic structure like codas may
differ depending on the grammatical features encoded by them in the target
language. Thus, codas with fricatives encoding plural are acquired earlier than
one would expect on the basis of prosodic factors alone. This finding opens up
new perspectives on the intricate interaction of different linguistic levels in
development, and especially draws attention to the fact that from very early on
abstract grammatical features must be taken into account.
Fikkert discusses data from the development of the prosodic structure of
monomorphemic and compound nouns in Dutch. In this domain, contrary to a
widely held view, it is not the case that simple structures are acquired earlier
than complex ones. What she observes instead is that the acquisition of compounds
guides the child in the acquisition of monomorphemic words consisting
of more than one foot. Her analysis is formulated in terms of a parameter setting
approach that assumes that parameters are set from an initial unmarked (default)
value to the marked value when the required evidence is encountered in the
input.
In his paper Lebeaux develops an account of how the properties of
telegraphic speech in children can be explained as the result of a prosodicsyntactic
tree mapping at the phonology-syntax interface. More specifically, he
argues that telegraphic speech is derived as a consequence of the child computing
structure with two representations:the syntactic one and the prosodic one.
The child attempts to find the maximal alignment of these two structures by
factoring out their discrepancies which had been introduced by generalized
transformations operating on identical phonological and syntactic kernel structures.
Peters proposes a model for the development of distinct closed class lexical
elements in English from an initial undifferentiated single protomorpheme
occupying grammatical positions which the child is assumed to discover on the
basis of their prosodic characteristics. The subsequent differentiation of this
protomorpheme into three distinct classes (catenatives, auxiliaries, and modals)
is the result of a gradual process of specification on the basis of growing
information from phonological, semantic, and syntactic properties of the input.
In the last paper of this section Str鰉qvist, Ragnarsdóttir and Richthoff
show on the basis of a particular cross-linguistic approach, namely the withinlanguage
group comparison (Danish, Icelandic, Swedish) that subtle differences
in the configuration of function words in terms of frequency, stress, word order,
and ambiguity have an impact on the course and structure of acquisition. They
provide evidence that the child starts with stressed, more concrete (e.g., deictic)
elements which may serve as templates for the acquisition of unstressed,
functionally different (e.g., expletive) forms instantiating the developmental
principle that new functions are first expressed by old forms.
Chapter four deals with neurophysiological aspects of language acquisition.
Molfese, Narter, van Matre, Ellefson and Modglin give an overview of changes
found in ERP-patterns to linguistic stimuli in infancy and early childhood. In the
domain of sound discrimination ERPs reflect behavioral findings very closely,
including categorical perception and the emergence of the discrimination of
different speech cues at different times. Changes observed during early language
development include changes in temporal as well as in topological features of the
ERPs. If words are used as stimuli ERPs reflect whether the words are rated as
known or as unknown by the child. Furthermore, the paper discusses findings
that ERPs may be used as a predictor for later language development:longitudinal
data suggest that children who differ in their language abilities at three or
five years of age already differ in their ERPs to speech at birth.
Friederici and Hahne focus on ERP components that correlate with the
processing of syntactic information. They report findings that adult-like temporally
different ERP patterns to semantic and syntactic violations can be found
already in children from 6 years on but that especially the component related to
a first-pass syntactic parsing mechanism is slowed down in the children. On the
basis of a three stage model for language comprehension they argue that the
parsing routines of the children are similar to those used by adults but have not
yet reached the highly automatic status found with adults.
St. George and Mills take a closer look at correlations of changes in ERP
patterns and changes in word knowledge. They report that the vocabulary spurt
goes hand in hand with dramatic changes in the topology of the ERP-pattern of
known and unknown words. They recorded ERP responses to open and closed
class items during the second to the fourth year of life linking the acquisition of
lexical knowledge and the acquisition of syntax. While initial responses to open
and closed class items are the same, at around 28 to 30 months of age the ERPs
start to be different for the two classes with a greater lateralization to the left
hemisphere for the closed class than for the open class. This difference is even
bigger for older children. Furthermore, the appearance of these changes seem to
be linked to language abilities and not to chronological age.
Chapter five groups together studies on additional perspectives of language
acquisition addressing questions of methodology, the nature of linguistic primitives,
and the development of bird song as compared to human language
acquisition. Plunkett summarizes the recent contributions of cognitive neuroscience,
experimental psycholinguistics, and neural network modelling for our
understanding of how brain processing, neural development, genetic programmes,
and the environment interact in language acquisition by focussing on the areas of
early speech perception, word recognition and the acquisition of inflectional
morphology. Each area demonstrates how linguistic development can be driven
by the interaction of general learning mechanisms, highly sensitive to particular
statistical regularities in the input, with a richly structured environment.
Bierwisch addresses the question whether the primitives of linguistic
knowledge, i.e., phonetic, semantic, and formal, morpho-syntactic features, are a
prerequisite or a result of the acquisition process. He concludes that they must
basically be considered as derived categories which emerge from the accommodation
of actual data according to general principles of representation provided
by Universal Grammar which may be interpreted as genetically fixed dispositions.
On the basis of the analysis of trajectories of song development in nightingales
Hultsch and Todt provide evidence that, in addition to interactional
variables and a predisposition to sensitive phases, the development of bird song
shares learning mechanisms with human language development like the hierarchical
organization of memory, the chunking of information into distinct units, e.g.,
songs vs. sentences, and the sensitivity to contextual factors. These similarities
have to be contrasted with the structural differences between bird song allowing
only for a limited number of meaningful elements, and human language which
provides the speaker with the possibility of an unlimited number of novel
meaningful utterances.
Cross-Linguistic Semantics (Studies in Language Companion Series)
By Cliff Goddard
* Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages: 356
* Publication Date: 2008-04-10
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 9027205698
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9789027205698
* Binding: Hardcover
Standard Negation: The Negation of Declarative Verbal Main Clauses in a Typological Perspective (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology)
By Matti Miestamo
* Publisher:Mouton de Gruyter
* Number Of Pages:490
* Publication Date:2005-12
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:3110185792
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9783110185799
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
This book is the first cross-linguistic study of clausal negation based on an extensive and systematic language sample. Methodological issues, especially sampling, are discussed at length. Standard negation - the basic structural means languages have for negating declarative verbal main clauses - is typologized from a new perspective, paying attention to structural differences between affirmatives and negatives. In symmetric negation affirmative and negative structures show no differences except for the presence of the negative marker(s), whereas in asymmetric negation there are further structural differences, ie asymmetries. A distinction is made between constructional and paradigmatic asymmetry; in the former the addition of the negative marker(s) is accompanied by further structural differences in comparison to the corresponding affirmative, and in the latter the correspondences between the members of (verbal etc) paradigms used in affirmatives and negatives are not one-to-one. Cross-cutting the constructional-paradigmatic distinction, asymmetric negation can be further divided into subtypes according to the nature of the asymmetry. Standard negation structures found in the 297 sample languages are exemplified and discussed in detail. The frequencies of the different types and some typological correlations are also examined. Functional motivations are proposed for the structural types - symmetric negatives are language-internally analogous to the linguistic structure of the affirmative and asymmetric negatives are language-externally analogous to different asymmetries between affirmation and negation on the functional level. Relevant diachronic issues are also discussed. The book is of interest to language typologists, descriptive linguists and to all linguists interested in negation.
Language Acquisition: Knowledge Representation and Processing
By A. Sorace, C. Heycock, R. Shillcock (ed.)
* Publisher:North Holland
* Number Of Pages:272
* Publication Date:1999-03-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0080433707
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780080433707
Product Description:
Hardbound. Language Acquisition has been a much-disputed territory over which the conflicting claims of cognitive scientists, psychologists and linguists have long been fought. While for years each discipline has kept within its own theoretical frameworks, a fruitful recent development has been the increase in cross-disciplinary fertilisation of ideas between researchers of different orientations. It is in this spirit of collaboration that the GALA conferences on Language Acquisition have taken off. The aim of GALA '97 was to further promote cross-fertilisation across the different disciplines. The conference was an overwhelming success and this volume reflects both the eminence of the invited speakers and the richness of current debate. Presenting current cutting-edge research the book fully illustrates the fruitfulness of the convergence of endeavours between researchers of different orientations.
Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought (Bradford Books)
by: Dedre Gentner, Susan Goldin-Meadow (Editors)
en
0262072432 9780262072434
description
The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently.
Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers.
Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. The contributors include Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello. posted bymaxxum
Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought
Summary:
Review
"The current status of the linguistic relativity debate is laid out in this volume, in a series of position papers and experimental demonstrations, by some of the most interesting and theoretically diverse investigators working in this area today. The book presents strong arguments on both sides. It aims to stimulate enlightened debate rather than to settle the matter. Definitely required reading for both psychologists and linguists interested in whether and how a language influences the way its users think."
--Lila Gleitman, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
"Remember the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--the idea that the language you speak shapes the way you think? It's been pronounced dead a number of times in the past fifty years, and yet it just won't go away. To understand why not, read Language in Mind. There the leading scholars in the field take a fresh look at Sapir-Whorf and offer intriguing new evidence for it. But they do more than just revive the hypothesis. They rework it and give it a genuinely new shape as they show how it bears on a range of new issues in language and thinking. It is this revised perspective that will inspire the next generation of thinking and research on the way language affects thought."
--Herbert H. Clark, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in homage to Gideon Toury (Benjamins Translation Library)
By Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, Daniel Simeoni
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Company
* Number Of Pages:417
* Publication Date:2008-03-13
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027216843
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027216847
* Binding:Hardcover
Synopsis
To go "beyond" the work of a leading intellectual is rarely an unambiguous tribute. However, when Gideon Toury founded Descriptive Translation Studies as a research-based discipline, he laid down precisely that intellectual challenge: not just to describe translation, but to explain it through reference to wider relations. That call offers at once a common base, an open and multidirectional ambition, and many good reasons for unambiguous tribute.The authors brought together in this volume include key players in Translation Studies who have responded to Toury's challenge in one way or another. Their diverse contributions address issues such as the sociology of translators, contemporary changes in intercultural relations, the fundamental problem of defining translations, the nature of explanation, and case studies including pseudotranslation in Renaissance Italy, Sherlock Holmes in Turkey, and the coffee-and-sugar economy in Brazil. All acknowledge Translation Studies as a research-based space for conceptual coherence and creativity; all seek to explain as well as describe. In this sense, we believe that Toury's call has been answered beyond expectations
Translation/History/Culture: A Sourcebook (Translation Studies)
By Andre Lefevere
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:200
* Publication Date:1992-12-22
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0415076978
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780415076975
* Binding:Library Binding
Product Description:
Translation/History/Culture is a collection of the most important statements on the translation of literature from Roman times to the 1920s. Arranged thematically around the main topics which recur over the centuries--power, poetics, language, education--it contains many texts previously unavailable in English.
As the first survey of its kind in both scope and selection, Translation/History/Culture argues that translation commands a central position in the shaping of European literatures and cultures. It reestablishes in the reader's mind the unbroken continuity of the tradition of translation and reveals the topicality of many of the texts included.
Translation/History/Culture can therefore serve both as a textbook of translation history and as a starting point for further discussion about translation. As such, it is a valuable addition to the shelves of literary historians, theorists of literature, students and teachers of comparative literature and cultural studies, and scholars of translation.
The Turns of Translation Studies: New paradigms or shifting viewpoints? (Benjamins Translation Library)
By Mary Snell-Hornby
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:205
* Publication Date:2006-06-09
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027216738
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027216731
Product Description:
What's new in Translation Studies? In offering a critical assessment of recent developments in the young discipline, this book sets out to provide an answer, as seen from a European perspective today. Many "new" ideas actually go back well into the past, and the German Romantic Age proves to be the starting-point. The main focus lies however on the last 20 years, and, beginning with the cultural turn of the 1980S, the study traces what have turned out since then to be ground-breaking contributions (new paradigms) as against what was only a change in position on already established territory (shifting viewpoints). Topics of the 1990S include nonverbal communication, gender-based Translation Studies, stage translation, new fields of interpreting studies and the effects of new technologies and globalization (including the increasingly dominant role of English). The author's aim is to stimulate discussion and provoke further debate on the current profile and future perspectives of Translation Studies.
Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies
By Mona Baker
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:654
* Publication Date:1998-01-09
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0415093805
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780415093804
* Binding:Hardcover
Book Description:
Who were the translators and interpreters of a given historical period? How did they approach the act of translation?
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies covers a variety of such issues. This work is divided into two parts, and is ordered alphabetically for ease of lookup:
* Part 1 (General) covers the conceptual framework of the discipline. Categories of entries include: central issues (e.g. unit of translation, translatability); summaries of distinct perspectives on translation (e.g. linguistic perspective, interpretive approach); types of translation (e.g. literary translation, dubbing).
* Part II (History and traditions) covers the history of translation in major linguistic/cultural communities. There are entries on a wide range of languages which include Russian, French, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese and Finnish.
Consultant Editors: Susan Bassnett, Peter Fawcett, Marilyn Gaddis-Rose, Michael Hoey, Eugene Nida, Douglas Robinson and Gideon Toury Contributors include: Jean Delisle, Umberto Eco, Daniel Gile, Theo Hermans, Juliane House, Louis Kelly, Jose Lambert, Anthony Pym, Lawrence Venuti and Judith Woodsworth.
Contributors include: Jean Delisle, Umberto Eco, Daniel Gile, Theo Hermans, Juliane House, Louis Kelly, Jose lambert, Anthony Pym, Lawrence Venuti and Judith Woodsworth.
Summary: Encyclopedic, as an encyclopedia should be...
Rating: 5
A rare blend of fascinating reading and authoritative instruction. The example translations alone are reason to pick up the book.
A Companion to Translation Studies (Topics in Translation)
By Piotr Kuhiwczak, Karin Littau
* Publisher:Multilingual Matters Limited
* Number Of Pages:181
* Publication Date:2007-05
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:1853599565
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9781853599569
* Binding:Paperback
Book Description:
- Presents authoritative contributions from leading scholars in the field - Takes the reader through the basic theoretical concepts, issues and themes which define the most important approaches to translation - Provides an unparalleled work of reference for teaching and researching in Translation Studies - Offers pointers to the future of Translation Studies - Contains an up-to-date bibliography with suggestions for further reading
The Translation Studies Reader
By L. Venuti
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:544
* Publication Date:2000-01
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0415187478
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780415187473
* Binding:Paperback
Product Description:
This definitive collection is the first comprehensive reader on the fast-growing field of translation studies. Concentrating on the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the past thirty years, Lawrence Venuti has chosen a wide range of readings on translation, placing each selection within its social, thematic, and historical context. The Reader is divided into five chronological sections, with each section prefaced by an introductory essay, a detailed bibliography and suggestions for further reading. The Reader also features a new essay by Lawrence Venuti on the future of Translation Studies.
Summary: Extra-ordinary!
Rating: 5
This book covers Translation Studies from an historical outset, laid out decade by decade. My surprise was that it did not focus only on mainstream translators, but that it also accentuates on less covered topics by other "anothologies" - such as femenist and postmodernist grounds of thought. I recomend it to all translators seeking a broad spectrum of views in a neat cronological order.
Summary: THE GOOD BOOK , IN THE GOOD TIME
Rating: 5
DEAR AUTHORS: I AM GLAD TO LET U KNOW THAT I REALLY APPRECIATE UR BOOK.....COZ IT IS THE GOOD BOOK IN THE GOOD TIME.
FOR ME AS A TRANSLATION STUDENT I FOUND THIS BOOK HELPFUL.
I HOPE THAT I WILL BE ABLE TO GET IT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE...COZ IT IS A RECOMMENDED BOOK BY MY TEACHERS...AND IT DOES WORTH TO BE OWNED.
Postcolonial Translation Theory (Translation Studies (London, England).)
By Susan Bassnet
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:216
* Publication Date:1999-01-29
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0415147441
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780415147446
* Binding:Hardcover
Product Description:
This outstanding collection brings together eminent contributors to examine some crucial connections between postcolonial theory and translation studies. As English becomes an increasingly global language, more people become multilingual and translation becomes a crucial communicative activity. The essays in this book, by contributors from Britain, the US, Brazil, India and Canada, examine the relationships between language and power across cultural boundaries, and reveals the vital role of translation in redefining the meanings of culture and ethnic identity.
Contributors: Rosemary Arrojo, Ganesh Devy, Vinay Dharwadker, Andre Lefevere, G.J.V. Prasad, Sherry Simon, Nathaniel Tarn, Maria Tymoczko, Else Ribeiro Pires Vieira, Vanamala Viswanatha.
The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation (Translation Studies)
By L. Venuti
* Publisher:Routledge
* Number Of Pages:368
* Publication Date:1994-12-21
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:0415115388
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9780415115384
* Binding:Paperback
Product Description:
The Translator's Invisibilty traces the history of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day. It shows how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English, and investigates the cultural consequences of the domestic values which were simulateneously inscribed and masked in foreign texts during this period.
Lawrence Venuti examines alternative theories of translation which aim to communicate linguistic and cultural differences instead of eliding them. This book is an indispensable explanation of the way in which translation can be studied as a locus of difference. It will illuminating and helpful reading.
Theories on the Move: Translation's Role in the Travels of Literary Theories (Approaches to Translation Studies 27) (Approaches to Translation Studies)
by: Sebnem Susam-sarajeva
en
9042020598 9789042020597
By
* Publisher:Editions Rodopi BV
* Number Of Pages:241
* Publication Date:2006-08-10
* Sales Rank:2187272
* ISBN / ASIN:9042020598
* EAN:9789042020597
* Binding:Paperback
* Manufacturer:Editions Rodopi BV
* Studio:Editions Rodopi BV
* Average Rating:
* Total Reviews:
Translation Studies at the Interface of Disciplines (Benjamins Translation Library)
By Joao Ferreira Duarte, Alexandra Assis Rosa, Teresa Seruya
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:207
* Publication Date:2006-10-30
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027216762
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027216762
Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies: Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Lisbon 2004 (Benjamins Translation Library)
By Yves Gambier, Miriam Shlesinger, Radegundis Stolze
* Publisher:John Benjamins Publishing Co
* Number Of Pages:362
* Publication Date:2007-07-13
* ISBN-10 / ASIN:9027216800
* ISBN-13 / EAN:9789027216809