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The acquisition of syntactic structure : animacy and thematic alignment /

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure.

Detalles Bibliográficos
Clasificación:Libro Electrónico
Autor principal: Becker, Misha, 1973- (Autor)
Formato: Electrónico eBook
Idioma:Inglés
Publicado: Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2014.
Colección:Cambridge studies in linguistics.
Temas:
Acceso en línea:Texto completo
Tabla de Contenidos:
  • Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title Page; Imprints; Contents; List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1 Introduction; 2 syntax of displacing and non-displacing predicates; 2.1 Raising-to-subject and subject control; 2.1.1 The structure of raising; 2.1.2 The structure of control; 2.1.3 Raising-to-object and object control: expect vs. persuade; 2.2 Tough-constructions; 2.2.1 Structure of tough-constructions; 2.2.2 Related constructions; 2.2.3 Structure of control adjective constructions; 2.3 Unaccusatives and unergatives; 2.3.1 A semantically-driven syntactic distinction.
  • 2.3.2 Formal representations of unaccusativity2.4 Passive; 2.4.1 Structure of passive; 2.4.2 A different displacing predicate; 2.5 The learning problem; 3 Argument hierarchies; 3.1 The Animacy Hierarchy; 3.1.1 Linguistic effects of animacy: morphosyntax and argument structure; 3.1.2 Animacy, agency, degree of control, and teleological capability; 3.2 The Thematic Hierarchy; 3.2.1 A brief history of thematic roles; 3.2.2 Formal accounts of thematic role assignment; 3.3 Animacy and thematic roles in opaque constructions; 3.3.1 Raising constructions across languages.
  • 3.3.2 Tough-constructions across languages3.4 Properties of derived subjects; 3.4.1 Argument structure universals, and the ``problem'' of ergativity; 3.5 A learning procedure; 3.6 Summary; 4 Animacy and adult sentence processing; 4.1 Relative clauses; 4.1.1 Reduced relative clauses; 4.1.2 Subject vs. object relative clauses; 4.2 Processing of raising and control; 4.2.1 Sentence completion; 4.2.2 Novel verb learning; 4.3 Psycholinguistic effects of animacy on production of the passive; 4.4 Summary; 5 Animacy and children's language; 5.1 Development of the animacy concept.
  • 5.1.1 Featural properties of animates5.1.2 Behavioral properties of animates; 5.1.3 Intentional properties of animates; 5.1.4 Further conceptual change; 5.1.5 Agency; 5.1.6 Summary; 5.2 Children's use of animacy in learning argument structure; 5.2.1 The power and limitations of semantic bootstrapping; 5.2.2 The power and limitations of Syntactic Bootstrapping; 5.3 Children's acquisition of displacing predicates; 5.3.1 Acquisition of raising and control; 5.3.2 Acquisition of tough-constructions; 5.3.3 Acquisition of unaccusatives; 5.3.4 Animacy and the acquisition of the passive; 5.4 Summary.
  • 6 Modeling the acquisition of displacing predicates6.1 Displacing predicates in the input to children; 6.2 Computational modeling of language acquisition; 6.2.1 Learning as generalization; 6.2.2 Restricting the hypothesis space; 6.3 Hierarchical Bayesian Models; 6.3.1 A model of learning raising and control; 6.3.2 A model of learning tough-constructions; 6.3.3 A model of learning unaccusatives and unergatives; 6.4 Summary of modeling results; 7 Conclusions and origins; 7.1 Origins of knowledge of the animacy distinction; 7.2 Origins of knowledge of linguistic animacy and displacing predicates.