This book provides a current and interdisciplinary overview of work on the biology of language - what is sometimes called the "biolinguistic approach." A wide range of areas are investigated and reviewed by specialists: the micro-parametric theory of syntax, models of language acquisition and historical change, dynamical systems in language, genetics of populations, pragmatics of discourse, language neurology, genetic disorders of language, sign language, and evolution of language.
This volume focuses on the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in L1 Italian children learning L2 English and in L1 English children learning L2 Italian. This bidirectional design, where two languages represent both the source and the target, is geared towards showing the effects of language transfer in learners that, because of their age, have the potential of becoming native-speakers of the target language. What makes child SLA interesting is its having the characteristics of both L1 acquisition and adult L2 acquisition.
The following chapters deal with one of the central concerns of syntactic theory since Ross (1967): How local is syntax and what are the measures of syntactic locality? These questions lie at the core, for example, of both the theory of movement and the theory of binding. A constant theme has been the issue of whether or not movement and anaphoric relations are governed by a unified concept of locality. I argue here that they are.
In recent years the discussion around issues of argument structure, argument projection and argument changing operations in the generative literature has focused around two extreme positions on the role of lexical entries. The more traditional view ( Lexicalist or endo-skeletal , as in Borer 2003) assumes that the lexical entry of a given verb encodes enough information to allow structure to directly project from it.
The papers comprising this volume focus on a broad range of acquisition phenomena (subject dislocation, structural case, word order, determiners, pronouns, quantifiers and logical words) from different languages and language combinations.
