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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Functional Categories in Learner Language

Functional Categories in Learner Language

Dimroth, Christine
Jordens, Peter

Hardcover

Series: Studies on Language Acquisition [Sola], Book 37

Linguistics

ISBN10: 3110216167
ISBN13: 9783110216165
Publisher: de Gruyter Mouton
Published: Oct 16 2009
Pages: 359
Weight: 1.50
Height: 0.81 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English

Language acquisition is a developmental process. Research on spontaneous processes of both children learning their mother tongue and adults learning a second language has shown that particular stages of acquisition can be discriminated. Initially, learner utterances can be accounted for in terms of a language system that is relatively simple. In studies on second language acquisition this learner system is called the Basic Variety (Klein and Perdue 1997). Utterance structure of the Basic Variety is determined by a grammar which consists of lexical structures that are constrained, for example, by semantic principles such as The NP-referent with highest control comes first and a pragmatic principle such as Focus expression last. At some point in acquisition this lexical-semantic system is given up in favour of a target-like system with morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of finiteness, topicality, the determiner system, etc. Insights into how this process evolves may also provide an answer to the question of why it takes place. Within this functional perspective on language acquisition research focuses on questions such as the following.

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