LINGUIST List 10.644

Sat May 1 1999

Books: Language Acquisition

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Paul Peranteau, New Titles in Language Acquisition

John Benjamins Publishing announces the publication of these two new titles
in Language Acquisition

Second Language Phonology.
John Archibald
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 17
US & Canada:1 55619 781 0 / USD 59.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of World: 90 272 2484 6 / NLG 118.00 (Hardcover)

This volume explores a variety of aspects of second language speech, with
special focus on contributions to the field made by (primarely) generative
linguists looking at the sounds and sound systems of second language
learners.
Second Language Phonology starts off with an overview of second language
acquisition research in order to place the study of L2 speech in context.
This introductory chapter is followed by an outline of traditional
approaches to investigating interlanguage phonology. The third chapter
consists of a discussion of relevant aspects of a learning theory that
must be included in a treatment of how people learn sound systems. The
next three chapters focus on particular aspects of the mental
represenation of phonological competence; segments, syllables, and stress,
respectively. The penultimate chapter deals with issues related to the
mechanisms that govern the changing of interlanguage grammars over time.
The volume ends with a summary of the issues raised throughout the text.
************************


The Locative Alternation in German.
Its structure and acquisition.
Ursula Brinkmann
Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 15
US & Canada: 1 55619 778 0 / USD 79.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of world: 90 272 2481 1 / NLG 158.00 (Hardcover)

This monograph deals with the locative alternation in German, a change in
the argument structure of verbs like spray and load. Like most argument
structure changes, the alternation is both productive and constrained: new
forms may be derived, but not from all candidate verbs. This raises a
learnability problem: how can children determine, in the absence of
negative evidence, which verbs participate in the alternation? The
Locative Alternation in German tries to answer this question by providing
an in-depth analysis of the conditions that verbs must meet in order to
participate in the alternation. Most importantly, transitive verbs must
allow speakers to presuppose the existence of their theme argument. This
condition requires the theme to be incremental so that it can be conceived
of as nonindividuated (or unbounded) when the verb is used in the
alternative syntactic frame. The Nonindividuation Hypothesis splits
locative verbs into two types, mass verbs (like spray) and count verbs
(like load), and it predicts that children acquire the alternation first
for mass verbs, whose theme must be a substance and so is nonindividuated
by default. Support for this hypothesis is provided in the empirical part
of the book, which also provides evidence against claims in the literature
that children acquire the alternation by drawing on an innate Affectness
Linking Rule.




			John Benjamins Publishing Co. 
Offices:	Philadelphia			Amsterdam:
Websites: 	http://www.benjamins.com	http://www.benjamins.nl
E-mail:		servicebenjamins.com		customer.servicesbenjamins.nl
Phone:		+215 836-1200			+31 20 6762325
Fax: 		+215 836-1204			+31 20 6739773

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