The Origins of Grammar: Evidence from Early Language Comprehension
How do children achieve adult grammatical competence? How do they induce syntactical rules from the bewildering linguistic input that surrounds them? The major debates in language acquisition theory today focus not on whether there are some sensitivities to syntactic information but rather which sensitivities are available to children and how they might be translated into the organizing principles that get syntactic learning off the ground.
The paradox of how children regularly learn highly complex natural languages upon limited exposure to simple data lies at the center of any study of language acquisition. This book explores a new and important hypothesis for how young children might be able to learn a language from very simple sentences.
This book examines the concepts of schema, register, and discourse genre. It considers what corpus descriptions of text tell us about language and examines how speakers take turns and negotiate meaning.
The pragmatic system consists of the rules for appropriate and communicatively effective language use. Pragmatic Development provides an integrated view of the acquisition of all the various pragmatic subsystems, including expression of communicative intents, participation in conversation, and production of extended discourse.For the first time, the three components of the pragmatic system are presented in a way that makes clear how they relate to each other and why they all fall under the rubric pragmatics.
Political Language - Words that Succeed and Policies that Fail
Political Language: Words That Succeed and Policies That Fail examines the role of everyday language, governmental rhetoric, and professional language in creating dubious beliefs about the causes, nature, consequences, and remedies for poverty and related social problems.The book analyzes the nature and dynamics of complex cognitive structures engendered in public officials, professionals, administrators, and the general public through recurring categorizations, metaphors, metonyms, and syntactic structures.
