Language, Culture, and Mind: Natural Constructions and Social Kinds
Based on fieldwork carried out in a Mayan village in Guatemala, this book examines local understandings of mind through the lens of language and culture. It focuses on a variety of grammatical structures and discursive practices through which mental states are encoded and social relations are expressed: inalienable possessions, such as body parts and kinship terms; interjections, such as 'ouch' and 'yuck'; complement-taking predicates, such as 'believe' and 'desire'; and grammatical categories such as mood, status and evidentiality.
A renewed interest in grammar, from pedagogical and research perspectives, has created the need for new approaches to assessing the grammatical ability of language learners. This book presents a comprehensive framework of second language grammatical knowledge and uses this as a base to help readers create their own assessment tools to test students' grammar.
This book is a significant contribution to an under-studied aspect of SLA research, namely the acquisition of sociolinguistic variation by immersion students who have learnt their second language primarily in an educational context. The student’s mastery of sociolinguistic competence is measured in relation to a range of phonetic, lexical and grammatical variants and to the factors that influence such mastery.
First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development
Added by: panarang | Karma: 451.45 | Other | 11 May 2010
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First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development
First Verbs is a detailed diary study of one child's earliest language development during her second year of life. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author focuses on how his daughter acquired her first verbs, and the role verbs played in her early grammatical development. The author argues that many of a child's first grammatical structures are tied to individual verbs, and that earliest language is based on general cognitive and social-cognitive processes, especially event structures and cultural learning.