Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure
By: [edited by] Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown.
Contributors: Bowerman, Melissa.; Brown, Penelope.
Publisher: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates
Published: 2008
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 370
ISBN-13: 9780805841947; 9781410616456
Subjects: Language acquisition.; Grammar, Comparative and general -- Syntax.; Grammar, Comparative and general -- Verb.; Semantics.
Description: "Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure: Implications for Learnability offers an interdisciplinary perspective on argument structure and its role in language acquisition. Much contemporary work in linguistics and psychology assumes that argument structure is strongly constrained by a set of universal principles, and that these principles are innate, providing children with certain bootstrapping strategies that help them home in on basic aspects of the syntax and lexicon of their language. Drawing on a broad range of crosslinguistic data, this volume shows that languages are much more diverse in their argument structure properties than has been realized.^

This diversity raises challenges for many existing proposals about language acquisition, affects the range of solutions that can be considered plausible, and highlights new acquisition puzzles that until now have passed unnoticed." "The volume is the outcome of a research project and comprises chapters by both specialists in first language acquisition and field linguists working on a variety of lesser-known languages. The research draws on original fieldwork and on adult data, child data, or both from seventeen languages from eleven different language families. Some chapters offer typological perspectives, examining the basic structures of a given language with language-learnability issues in mind. Other chapters investigate specific problems of language acquisition in one or more languages.^

Taken as a whole, the volume illustrates how detailed work on crosslinguistic variation is critical to the development of insightful theories of language acquisition." "Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure integrates contemporary issues in linguistics and language acquisition. With its crosslinguistic base and the empirical methods it showcases for studying the role of argument structure in language acquisition, it will be of interest to linguists and language acquisition specialists alike, as well as to upper-level students in linguistics and psychology in the United States and abroad."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and indexes.
Table of contents: title: Introduction / Melissa Bowerman and Penelope Brown; title: Verb meaning and verb syntax : cross-linguistic puzzles for language learners; title: A person, a place, or a thing? whorfian consequences of syntactic bootstrapping in Mopan Maya / Eve Danziger; title: The pitfalls of getting from here to there : bootstrapping the syntax and semantics of motion event coding in Yukatek Mayan / Jürgen Bohnemeyer; title: Making sense of complex verbs: on the semantics and argument structure of closed-class verbs and coverbs in jaminjung / Eva Schultze-Berndt; title: Figure-ground indeterminacy in descriptions of spatial relations : a construction grammar account / Sotaro Kita; title: Learning verbs without boots and straps? the problem of 'give' in Saliba / Anna Margetts; title: Participants present and absent : argument ellipsis and verb learning; title: Same argument structure, different meanings : learning "put" and "look" in Arrernte / David Wilkins; title: Verb specificity and argument realization in Tzeltal child language / Penelope Brown; title: Interacting pragmatic influences on children's argument realization / Shanley E.M. Allen; title: Transitivity, intransitivity, and their associated meanings : a complex work-space for learnability; title: Intransitive verbs in Ewe and the unaccusativity hypothesis / James Essegbey; title: He died old dying to be dead right: transitivity and semantic shifts of "die" in Ewe in crosslinguistic perspective / Felix Ameka; title: Acquiring telicity cross-linguistically : on the acquisition of telicity entailments associated with transitivity / Angeliekan Hout; title: The acquisition of the English causative alternation / Melissa Bowerman and William Croft; title: What adverbs have to do with learning the meaning of verbs / Angelika Wittek; title: Event realization in Tamil / Eric Pederson.