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

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Constructions A Construction Grammar Approach To Argument Structure

Thank you very much for downloading knowledge of language its nature origin and use. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their favorite books like this knowledge of language its nature origin and use, but end up in harmful downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some infectious virus inside their desktop computer.

Knowledge Of Language Its Nature Origin And Use

CROFT, W.: Radical Construction Grammar. Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective

Regularity and Idiomaticity in Grammatical Constructions: The Case of Let Alone

This dictionary provides a valency description of English verbs, nouns and adjectives. Each entry contains a comprehensive list of the complementation patterns identified on the basis of the largest corpus of English available at the present time. All examples are taken directly from the COBUILD/Birmingham corpus. The valency description comprises statements about the quantitative valency of the lexical units established, an inventory of their obligatory, contextually optional and purely optional complements as well as systematic information on the semantic and collocational properties of the complements. An outline of the model of valency theory used in this dictionary is provided in the introduction. Key Features unique reference work with no comparable publication on the market English is the world's most important lingua franca and the most frequently learned second language

A Valency Dictionary of English: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Complementation Patterns of English Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives

Definition et typologie des collocations a l'aide d'exemples tires de guides touristiques anglais

What are collocations: Sandy beaches or false teeth?

Contents: I. The new generation of English learners' dictionaries: historical background - assessment of specific features - the perspective of the user: Anthony P. Cowie, Learners' dictionaries in a historical and a theoretical perspective. - Flor Aarts, Syntactic information in OALD5, LDOCE3, COBUILD2 and CIDE. - Michael Klotz, Word complementation in English learners' dictionaries: A quantitive study of CIDE, COBUILD2, LDOCE3 and OALD5. - Gabriele Stein, Exemplification in EFL dictionaries. - Robert F. Ilson, The treatment of meaning in learners' dictionaries - and others. - Henri Bejoint, Compound nouns in learners' dictionaries. - Brigitta Mittmann, The treatment of collocations in OALD5, LDOCE3, COBUILD2 and CIDE. - Paul Bogaards, Access structures of learners' dictionaries. - Kerstin Popp, Lexical units, suffixation, suffixes in OALD5, LDOCE3, COBUILD2 and CIDE. - David Heath, The treatment of international varieties. - John Ayto, Lexical evolution and learners' dictionaries. - Klaus-Dieter Barnickel, Political correctness in learners' dictionaries. - Andre Moulin, The Advanced Learners' Dictionary: syntax cum semantics. - Gisela Boehner, Classroom experience with the new dictionaries: OALD5, LDOCE3, COBUILD2, CIDE. - Burkhard Dammann, Teacher's demands on learners' dictionaries. - II. Learners' dictionaries - other dictionaries: Franz-Josef Hausmann, Semiotaxis and learners' dictionaries. - Jonathan Crowther, Encyclopedic learners' dictionaries. - Dieter Goetz, On some differences between English and German (with respect to lexicography). - Thomas Herbst, The English Valency Dictionary: linguistic theory and user-friendliness. - III. Dictionaries - corpora - perspectives: Della Summers, Coverage of spoken English in relation to learners' dictionaries, especially the "Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English". - Rosamund Moon, Needless and haystacks, idioms and corpora: gaining insight into idioms, using corpus analysis. - Jan Svartvik, Corpora and dictionaries. - Geoffrey Leech/Hillary Nessi, Moving towards perfection: the learners' (electronic) dictionary of the future.

The perfect learners' dictionary (?)

This article outlines why valency theory and Goldberg's theory of argument structure constructions should be combined. In the light of empirical valency research it is argued that the amount of item-specificity to be observed in language must be accounted for in a theory of complementation and that generalizations concerning parallels between semantic properties of verbs and their occurrence in particular valency patterns must be treated with a certain degree of caution. It is suggested that one way of combining the two approaches is to make use of specific formal categories and to introduce a valency realisation principle in a theory of argument structure constructions.

The Status of Generalizations: Valency and Argument Structure Constructions

In recent years, research on valency has led to important insights into the nature of language. Some of these findings are published in this volume for the first time with up-to-date accounts of language description and new reflections on language, above all for English and German. The volume also presents examples of contrastive analysis, which are of use for all those who deal professionally with these two languages. Furthermore, the articles in the psycholinguistic and computational linguistics section demonstrate the applicability and value of valency theory for these approaches and shed light on a fruitful cooperation between theoretical and descriptive linguistics and applied disciplines. The papers cover the following aspects of valency analysis: (i) theoretical aspects of the valency approach in relation to related theories of complementation (dependency syntax, FrameNet, case roles), (ii) descriptive aspects of valency and complementation, (iii) valency as a concept for the description of cognitive processes in syntactic processing, (iv) contrastive aspects of valency, above all for English and German, and (v) possible computational applications of the valency concept in fields such as automatic syntactic recognition or language processing. The volume combines papers of representatives from different linguistic schools on the topic of complementation. One of the aims is to show how concepts developed for the analysis of one language, in the case of valency often German, can be applied to other languages such as English.

Thomas Herbst

Papers

A Valency Dictionary of English: A Corpus-Based Analysis of the Complementation Patterns of English Verbs, Nouns and Adjectives

What are collocations: Sandy beaches or false teeth?

The perfect learners' dictionary (?)

The Status of Generalizations: Valency and Argument Structure Constructions

Valency : theoretical, descriptive, and cognitive issues