LINGUIST List 11.2509

Tue Nov 21 2000

Books: Language Acquisition/Generative Studies

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Paul Peranteau, Language Acquisition & the Form of the Grammar, Events and Predication

John Benjamins Publishing announces these two new works


Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar.
David LEBEAUX (NEC Research Institute, Princeton NJ)
US & Canada: 1 55619 858 2 / USD 75.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of world: 90 272 2565 6 / NLG 150.00 (Hardcover)

Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think
the ideal organization of the grammar, given its need to be
learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form
of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child
adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional
division between language acquisition and syntax, this influential
work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure, bringing
syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase
structure composition operations are proposed, Adjoin-, which adjoins
adjuncts into the structure, and Project-, which fuses open class and
closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept
of subgrammars, successively larger grammars that take the child from
the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest
to those in the areas of syntax, language acquisition, learnability,
and cognitive science in general.

***************************

Events and Predication.
A new approach to syntactic processing in English and Spanish.
Montserrat SANZ (Kobe City University of Foreign Studies)
Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 207

US & Canada: 1 58811 001 X / USD 68.00 (Hardcover)
Rest of World: 90 272 3714 X / NLG 136.00 (Hardcover)

Studies on the syntactic consequences of event type in languages have
shown that Aktionsart plays a role in Universal Grammar. This book
contributes to the exploration of the syntax/semantics interface by
presenting a thorough comparison of event and predicate types in
English and Spanish. The mapping between event and syntactic predicate
types, including detransitives, is given a minimalist account based on
the functional categories that embed event features and on a careful
analysis of the features checked by objects. As the book delves into
the theoretical issue of how parameters are characterized, it presents
the most comprehensive account to date of event type phenomena in
Spanish, an innovative analysis of the clitic SE and a re-definition
of unaccusativity. The theory is then applied to the ongoing issues in
the sentence processing literature. A proposal is made for an update
of the current data in light of these latest linguistic discoveries.



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