Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

A Study of Thinking

Thank you for downloading constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure. As you may know, people have search numerous times for their favorite readings like this constructions a construction grammar approach to argument structure, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some harmful virus inside their computer.

Constructions A Construction Grammar Approach To Argument Structure

るもので、もっとも普遍的なのは目撃の有無。 ・ Jakobson (1957:147) : a verbal category ‘which takes into account three events ― a narrated event, a speech, and a narrated speech event’. ・ Boas (1938:133) : ‘while for us definiteness, number, and time are obligatory aspects, we find in another language location near the speaker or somewhere else, source of information ― whether see, heard, or inferred ― as obligatory aspects’.

Evidentiality(證據性)をめぐって

This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

Abstract The paper focuses on the main temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish, which are analysed and compared to each other on the basis of their combinability with nouns. Each of the two linguistic systems is strongly rooted in human experience of temperature. First, temperature attributes are chosen relatively to several temperature values or parameters, that are important and salient for humans and have only very approximate physical correlates. Second, physical objects differ considerably as to whether their temperature properties are ever registered by humans, or considered as important and worth mentioning, primarily depending on their function in the human life.

”Some like it hot”: On the semantics of temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish

Abstract The semantic domain of pain seems to be unique in that, crosslinguistically, it includes few predicates that are specifically dedicated to pain (like hurt or ache); instead, the major part of the field is constituted by lexical units drawn from other semantic domains, which are applied to pain through processes of semantic derivation (like my eyes are burning, my throat is scratching). After discussing methodological considerations concerning data collection, the article first analyzes the semantic sources for pain predicates and addresses the issue of their typological consistency, based on data from over 20 languages. It is then demonstrated that the evolution of a pain meaning cannot be reduced to a merely semantic process, since the meaning shift may be accompanied by changes in the morphological, morphosyntactic and/or syntactic properties of the source verb. We suggest the term “re-branding” for the complex meaning changes of this kind and discuss their theoretical relation to the well-established notions of metaphor and metonymy.

Towards a typology of pain predicates

This chapter focuses on lexical typology understood as cross-linguistic research on domain categorization. It first introduces some of the critical issues inherent in such research (section 2), and then turn to the presentation and discussion of four different approaches to lexical typology in sections 3–6: Componential analysis, Natural semantic metalanguage, Denotation-based or etic-grid semantics, Combinatorial lexical typology. Section 7 is devoted to semantic maps as representations of meanings and generalizations in lexical typology, while section 8 suggests a few future directions for lexical typology.

https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-01486051/document

The semantics of lexical typology

Chapter 13. Aquamotion verbs in Slavic and Germanic: A case study in lexical typology

In this paper we describe an open learner corpus of Russian. The Russian Learner Corpus (RLC) is the first corpus with clear distinction between foreign language learners and heritage speakers. We discuss the structure of the corpus, its development and the annotation principles. This paper describes the platform of the RLC which combines online tools for text uploading, processing, error annotation and corpus search.

https://www.ep.liu.se/ecp/130/009/ecp16130009.pdf

Ekaterina Rakhilina

Papers

”Some like it hot”: On the semantics of temperature adjectives in Russian and Swedish

Towards a typology of pain predicates

The semantics of lexical typology

Chapter 13. Aquamotion verbs in Slavic and Germanic: A case study in lexical typology

Building a learner corpus for Russian