Description
Book SynopsisBetween the ages of one-and-a-half and two years children start to form elementary phrases and clauses. This stage of their linguistic development provides the first clear evidence that they have begun to develop a grammar of the language being acquired. It is therefore of paramount importance for any attempt to construct a theory of language acquisition.
Drawing data from a corpus of more that 100,000 spontaneous utterances, Andrew Radford demonstrates that the fundamental characteristic of children''s earliest structures is that they are essentially lexical and thematic in nature. They show evidence of the acqusition of lexical but not functional categories, and of thematic but not nonthematic constituents. This hypothesis provides a unified account of a wide range of phenomena in early child English including children''s nonmastery of determiners, possessives, pronouns, missing arguments, expletives, case, binding, tense, agreement, auxiliaries, infinitives, complementisers, and
Table of Contents
Preface.
1. Aims and Approaches.
2. Categorization in Early Child English.
3. Lexical Category Systems in Early Child English.
4. Absence of a Determiner System in Early Child English.
5. Absence of a Complementizer System in Early Child English.
6. Absence of an Inflection System in Early Child English.
7. Absence of a Case System in Early Child English.
8. The Grammar of Missing Arguments in Early Child English.
9. The Overall Structure of Early Child Grammars of English.
10. Explanations and Implications.
Bibliography.
Index.
