LINGUIST List 26.866

Wed Feb 11 2015

Books: The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Becker

Editor for this issue: Sara Couture <saralinguistlist.org>

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Date: 06-Feb-2015
From: Lianne Taylor <ltaylorcambridge.org>
Subject: The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Becker
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Title: The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure
Subtitle: Animacy and Thematic Alignment
Series Title: Cambridge Studies in Linguistics
Published: 2014
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
                http://cambridge.org

Book URL: http://www.cambridge.org/9781107007840

Author: Misha Becker
Hardback: ISBN: 9781107007840 Pages: 330 Price: U.K. £ 65.00
Abstract:

This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language processing, conceptual development, language acquisition, and computational modeling, exposing readers to these different kinds of data in an accessible way. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of Syntactic and Semantic Bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition. This is a must-read for researchers in language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics.

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics
                            Language Acquisition
                            Linguistic Theories
                            Psycholinguistics
                            Syntax
                            Typology

Written In: English (eng)

See this book announcement on our website:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/books/get-book.cfm?BookID=80933

	---------------------------------- Publishing Partner ----------------------------------
	Cambridge University Press	http://us.cambridge.org
	----------------------------- Major Supporting Publishers -----------------------------
	Akademie Verlag GmbH	http://www.oldenbourg-verlag.de/akademie-verlag
	Bloomsbury Linguistics (formerly Continuum Linguistics)	http://www.bloomsbury.com
	Brill	http://www.brill.nl
	Cambridge Scholars Publishing	http://www.c-s-p.org
	Cascadilla Press	http://www.cascadilla.com/
	Classiques Garnier	http://www.classiques-garnier.com/
	De Gruyter Mouton	http://www.degruyter.com/
	Edinburgh University Press	http://www.euppublishing.com
	Elsevier Ltd	http://www.elsevier.com/
	Equinox Publishing Ltd	http://www.equinoxpub.com/
	European Language Resources Association (ELRA)	http://www.elra.info/
	Georgetown University Press	http://www.press.georgetown.edu/
	John Benjamins	http://www.benjamins.com/
	Lincom GmbH	http://www.lincom-shop.eu/
	MIT Press	http://mitpress.mit.edu/
	Multilingual Matters	http://www.multilingual-matters.com/
	Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG	http://www.narr.de/
	Oxford University Press	http://www.oup.com/us
	Palgrave Macmillan	http://www.palgrave.com/
	Peter Lang AG	http://www.peterlang.com/
	Rodopi	http://www.rodopi.nl/
	Routledge (Taylor and Francis)	http://www.routledge.com/
	Springer	http://www.springer.com/
	University of Toronto Press	http://www.utpjournals.com/
	Wiley-Blackwell	http://www.wiley.com/
	--------------------------- Other Supporting Publishers ---------------------------
	Association of Editors of the Journal of Portuguese Linguistics	http://www.fl.ul.pt/revistas/JPL/JPLweb.htm
	International Pragmatics Assoc.	http://ipra.ua.ac.be/
	Linguistic Association of Finland	http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/sky/
	Morgan & Claypool Publishers	http://www.morganclaypool.com/
	Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT)	http://www.lotpublications.nl/
	Seoul National University	http://j-cs.org/index/index.php
	SIL International Publications	http://www.sil.org/resources/publications
	Universitat Jaume I	http://www.uji.es/CA/publ/
	University of Nebraska Press	http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/
	Utrecht institute of Linguistics	http://www-uilots.let.uu.nl/

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