Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Argument Structure: Implications for Learnability

✍ Scribed by Melissa Bowerman, Penelope Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 381
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This book offers a unique interdisciplinary perspective on argument structure and its role in language acquisition. 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.

The volume is the outcome of an integrated 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 important contemporary issues in linguistics and language acquisition.

✦ Table of Contents

Front cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
Preface......Page 8
CHAPTER 1. Introduction......Page 10
CHAPTER 2. A Person, a Place, or a Thing? Whorfian Consequences of Syntactic Bootstrapping in Mopan Maya......Page 38
CHAPTER 3. The Pitfalls of Getting from Here to There: Bootstrapping the Syntax and Semantics of Motion Event Coding in Yukatek Maya......Page 58
CHAPTER 4. Making Sense of Complex Verbs: On the Semantis and Argument Structure of Closed-Class Verbs and Coverbs in Jaminjung......Page 78
CHAPTER 5. Figure-Ground Indeterminacy in Descriptions of Spatial Relations: A Construction Grammer Account......Page 98
CHAPTER 6. Learning Verbs without Boots and Straps? The Problem of 'Give' in Saliba......Page 120
CHAPTER 7. Same Argument Structure, Different Meanings: Learning 'Put' and 'Look' in Arrernte......Page 150
CHAPTER 8. Verb Specificity and Arguement Realization in Tzeltal Child Language......Page 176
CHAPTER 9. Interacting Pragmatic Influences pm Children's Arguement Realization......Page 200
CHAPTER 10. Intransitive Verbs in Ewe and the Unaccusativity Hypothesis......Page 222
CHAPTER 11. He died old dying to be dead right: Transitivity and Semantic Shifts of 'Die' in Ewe in Crosslingistic Perspective......Page 240
CHAPTER 12. Acquiring Telicity Crosslinguistically: On the Acquisition of Telicity Entailments Associated with Transitivity......Page 264
CHAPTER 13. The Acquistion of the English Causative Alternation......Page 288
CHAPTER 14. What Adverbs Have to Do with Learning the Meaning of Verbs......Page 318
CHAPTER 15.Event Realization in Tamil......Page 340
Author Index......Page 366
Subject Index......Page 374
Back cover......Page 380

✦ Subjects

Языки и языкознание;Лингвистика;Типология и сопоставительное языкознание;