6 Ergebnisse.

An argument that children are born to assign structures to their ambient language, which feeds a view of language variation not based on parameters defined at UG.In this book, David Lightfoot argues that just as some birds are born to chirp, humans are born to parse--predisposed to assign linguistic structures to their ambient external language. This approach to language acquisition makes two contributions to the development of Minimalist thin...

This book presents the latest thinking on the nature and causes of language change. The authors consider how far changes in morphology (e.g. inflectional word endings) cause changes in syntax (e.g. word order). They examine such phenomena from the perspective of current syntactic and psycholinguistic theory, in particular addressing the issues raised by the hypothesis that grammatical change is driven by how children acquire language.

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David Lightfoot addresses the crucial question of what it takes to set a parameter--of what kind of experience is needed to trigger the emergence of a natural kind of grammar.

This study offers one of the first systematic accounts of syntactic change and will be of interest to a wide range of linguists.