LINGUIST List 14.1370

Tue May 13 2003

Qs: Prosodic Weakening; Syntactic Acquisition

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  1. corinna.anderson, prosodic weakening
  2. joko.kpolmed.ac.id>, Syntactic acquisition in preleinguistic development

Message 1: prosodic weakening

 Date: Mon, 12 May 2003 23:23:46 -0400
From: corinna.anderson <corinna.andersonyale.edu>
Subject: prosodic weakening


Dear Linguists, 

I'm researching different kinds of vowel reduction and prosodic 
weakening (devoicing, deletion) in unstressed syllables. For the sake 
of perspective, I am wondering if any language exists which does not 
allow two vowels in consecutive syllables to be reduced or weakened. 

In other words, if some kind of rhythmic weakening targets a certain 
type of vowel (short, reduced, in an open syllable, etc) in a given 
language, what happens if several eligible syllables (or just two) 
occur in sequence? I am not so interested in English or Russian vowel 
reduction, but more along the lines of Syriac, or even Old Slavic. I am 
particularly interested in cases of regular syncope in languages with 
or without iterative stress, both historical and synchronic. 

I'll be very grateful for your responses and of course I'll be happy 
to share and/or post a summary if there is interest. Thank you in 
advance for your help. 

Corinna
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Message 2: Syntactic acquisition in preleinguistic development

 Date: Tue, 13 May 2003 12:37:43 +0700 (WIT)
From: joko.kpolmed.ac.id> <joko.kpolmed.ac.id>
Subject: Syntactic acquisition in preleinguistic development


Dear all,

Most discussions on early syntactic development (both monolingualism
and bilingualism) what I have found so far start with children's
two-word utterances. In my opinion, the development of syntactic
acquisition has even started when children are in the prelinguistic
development. This is in accordance with the fact that children are
able to comprehend adults' utterances (usually simple utterances such
as my utterances to my daughter of 1;2 years old "Close the drawer"
and she closes the drawer or "Give it to daddy" and she gives what she
is holding to me if she wants to and she says no while shaking her
head if she doesn't want to).

Is there anybody here who likes to explain the syntactic acquisition
in prelinguistic development and how we can relate it to the later
syntactic development.

cheer,
Joko Kusmanto
State Polytechnic of Medan
Jl. Almamater No. 1 Kampus USU
Medan 20155, Sumut - Indonesia
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