Abstract not found

This paper is designed to illustrate and consider the relations between three types of metarepresentational ability used in verbal comprehension: the ability to metarepresent attributed thoughts, the ability to metarepresent attributed utterances, and the ability to metarepresent abstract, non-attributed representations (e.g. sentence types, utterance types, propositions). Aspects of these abilities have been separately considered in the literatures on “theory of mind”, Gricean pragmatics and quotation. The aim of this paper is to show how the results of these separate strands of research might be integrated with an empirically plausible pragmatic theory. 1

The majority of studies in children’s acquisition of syntax have focused on production. However, research suggests that infants understand more about their language than they are themselves producing. The current work focused on one aspect of early syntax, the inflectional marker, –s, which functions both as a plural nominal inflection and the 3 ii rd person singular verbal inflection, in the receptive domain. The properties of the use of such inflectional markers by young children have generated a great deal of theoretical interest in the production literature. Experiments 1 and 2 tested 19-month-olds ’ sensitivity to this marker in singular, plural, and ungrammatical contexts, using the Headturn Preference Procedure. These infants preferred listening to grammatical passages when compared with uninflected ungrammatical passages, but showed no preference when compared with doubly inflected ungrammatical passages. This finding contradicts those in the productive domain, in which young children are much more likely to produce errors of omission than

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The paradigm of generative approaches to language acquisition is the focus of critical attention here. Although much ink has been spent on the comparative merits of different approaches, this can detract from attention to the details within a paradigm. Thus what is not part of this paper is any attempt to compare competing paradigms in language acquisition research. The task of reviewing twenty years of intense research is too grandiose: instead, four representative lines of empirical work with broad theoretical significance and a substantial cross-linguistic base are chosen to illustrate how debates within the paradigm are structured. Theoretical and methodological commitments of researchers can be seen to vary considerably, and most importantly, to interact. The goal is a selective map to reveal the structure of arguments, and to ask whether we are making progress. The paper is structured as follows. In Section 1.1 the two basic principles that provide the title to this paper are introduced, together with a sketch of the reasons why the four empirical examples are chosen. In Section 1.2 a more complete history of the principles is given, after which in Section 2, the general character of the arguments used

The acquisition of complex sentences: a case study in

Abstract not found

The presence of complement clause constructions in child speech marks the beginning of the child’s entrance into the more complex aspects of grammar. Since complement clauses are lexically-specified, individual complement taking verbs (CTVs) must be tagged with information about the kinds of complements they can license; their acquisition suggests that

Human linguistic communication differs from the communication of other animal species in three main ways. First, and most importantly, human linguistic communication is symbolic. Linguistic symbols are social conventions by means of which one individual attempts to share attention with other individuals by directing their attentional or mental states to something in the outside world. Other animal species do not communicate with one another using linguistic symbols, most likely because they do not understand that conspecifics have attentional or mental states that they could attempt to direct or share (Tomasello, 1998a, 1999). This mental dimension of linguistic symbols gives them unparalleled communicative power, enabling their users to refer to and to predicate all kinds of diverse perspectives on objects, events, and situations in the world. The second main difference is that human linguistic communication is grammatical. Human beings use their linguistic symbols together in patterned ways, and these patterns, known as linguistic constructions, come to take on