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One significant area of research in the multifaceted field of bilingualism over the past two decades has been the demonstration, validation, and account of the so-called ‘bilingual advantage’. This refers to the hypothesis that bilingual speakers have advanced abilities in executive functions and other domains of human cognition. Such cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the processing mechanisms active during language acquisition in a way that results in language variation. Within bilingual populations, the notion of language proximity (or linguistic distance) is also of key importance for deriving variation. In addition, sociolinguistic factors can invest the process of...
This volume collects novel contributions to comparative generative linguistics that “rethink” existing approaches to an extensive range of phenomena, domains, and architectural questions in linguistic theory. At the heart of the contributions is the tension between descriptive and explanatory adequacy which has long animated generative linguistics and which continues to grow thanks to the increasing amount and diversity of data available to us. The chapters address research questions in comparative morphosyntax, including the modelling of syntactic categories, relative clauses, and demonstrative systems. Many of these contributions show the influence of research by Ian Roberts and collaborators and give the reader a sense of the lively nature of current discussion of topics in morphosyntax and morphosyntactic variation.
This volume is a comprehensive, state-of-the-science treatment of the acquisition of different Indo- and Non-Indo-European languages in different contexts (i.e., L1, L2, L3/Ln, bi/multilingual language, heritage languages, pathology and language impairment and sign language acquisition) conducted within the generative framework. It also encompasses the diversity of methodologies and issues that can be found with contemporary research in the field. The different chapters contain original research from several different angles and provide a basis for dialogue between researchers working on diverse projects with the aim to further our understanding of how languages are acquired and, at the same time, refine and propose new theoretical constructs, such as complexity of linguistic features as a relevant factor forming children’s, adult’s and bilingual’s acquisition of syntactic, morphological, lexical and phonological structures.
How did social communication evolve in primates? In this volume, primatologists, linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists and philosophers of science systematically analyze how their specific disciplines demarcate the research questions and methodologies involved in the study of the evolutionary origins of social communication in primates in general and in humans in particular. In the first part of the book, historians and philosophers of science address how the epistemological frameworks associated with primate communication and language evolution studies have changed over time and how these conceptual changes affect our current studies on the subject matter. In the second part, sch...
The present volume presents new theoretical and empirical findings on the acquisition and development of clitics in and across different languages. It features ten chapters that largely emerged from the CYCL1A Workshop on the Acquisition of Clitics held in Nicosia, Cyprus, in May 2012. These chapters explore issues pertaining to the first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition of clitic pronouns. There is an emphasis on Greek, with the first four chapters discussing mono- and bilingual acquisition of clitics in Cypriot Greek and the next two chapters on Standard Modern Greek. Three contributions focus on Albanian, Serbo-Croatian, and European Portuguese, respectively. The last chapter of this volume is an invited contribution by Ken Wexler on the Unique Checking Constraint as an explanation of clitic omission in normal and SLI development. This volume will constitute a valuable reference guide for current work on the acquisition of clitic pronouns.
Biolinguistics is a highly interdisciplinary field that seeks the rapprochement between linguistics and biology. Linking theoretical linguistics, theoretical biology, genetics, neuroscience and cognitive psychology, this book offers a collection of chapters situating the enterprise conceptually, highlighting both the promises and challenges of the field, and chapters focusing on the challenges and prospects of taking interdisciplinarity seriously. It provides concrete illustrations of some of the cutting-edge research in biolinguistics and piques the interest of undergraduate students looking for a field to major in and inspires graduate students on possible research directions. It is also meant to show to specialists in adjacent fields how a particular strand of theoretical linguistics relates to their concerns, and in so doing, the book intends to foster collaboration across disciplines. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
This book proposes a new model of syntax, in which all the fundamental units and properties of syntax are rethought.
What is the most descriptively and explanatorily adequate format for syntactic structures and how are they constrained? Different theories of syntax have provided various answers: sets, feature structures, tree diagrams... Building on formal and empirical insights from a wide variety of approaches spanning more than 70 years (including Transformational Grammar, Relational Grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar, and Tree Adjoining Grammar), this monograph develops a new, mathematically grounded, framework in which objects known as graphs, and the constraints that follow from them, are argued to provide the best characterisation of the system of expressions and relations that make up natural language grammars. This new approach is motivated and exemplified via detailed and formally explicit analyses of major syntactic phenomena in English and Spanish.
This volume offers new perspectives on the tension between the rich patterns of language variation that emerge from comparative studies and the quest for simple theoretical primitives. The chapters explore the debate between Cartography and Minimalism: on the one hand, the need for detailed and articulated descriptions of the clausal architecture, and on the other, the endeavor to reduce the theoretical apparatus to fundamental computational mechanisms. The first part of the book begins with a reflection on the goals of modern linguistic theory, and investigates the principles of human language, in an effort to subsume the regularities of particular grammars under a small set of morphosyntac...