Full Description
This volume contains a collection of studies that survey recent research in developmental linguistics, illustrating the fruitful interaction between comparative syntax and language acquisition. The contributors each analyse a well defined range of acquisition data, aiming to derive them from primitive differences between child and adult grammar. The book covers cross-linguistic and cross-categorial phenomena, shedding light on major developments in this novel and rapidly growing field. Extensions to second language acquisition and neuropathology are also suggested.
Contents
Series list v
List of contributors IX
Editors' acknowledgements X
1 The acquisition of syntax: introduction
Marc-Ariel Friedemann and Luigi Rizzi
2 The acquisition of the Determiner Phrase in
German child language 26
Sonja Eisenbeiss
3 Early French postverbal subjects 63
Marc-Ariel Friedemann
4 Split inflection in neurolinguistics 84
Na 'ama Friedmann and Yosef Grodzinsky
5 An excursion into interrogatives in
Early English and Italian 105
Maria Teresa Guasti
6 Adult null subjects in non pro-drop languages 129
Liliane Haegeman
7 The acquisition of constituent questions and
the requirements of interpretation 170
Cornelia Hamann
8 Accounting for morphological variation in
second language acquisition: truncation or
missing inflection? 202
Philippe Prevost and Lydia White
Null subjects and root infinitives in the child
grammar of French 236
Lucienne Rasetti
10 Remarks on early null subjects 269
Luigi Rizzi
11 The acquisition of verb placement in
Lucernese Swiss German
Manuela Schonenberger
Index
