An investigation of how children balance rules and exceptions when they learn languages."All languages have exceptions alongside overarching rules and regularities. How does a young child tease them apart within just a few years of language acquisition? In this book, drawing an economic analogy, Charles Yang argues that just as the price of goods is determined by the balance between supply and …
'Voice and V' investigates the syntactic structure of voice, using Acehnese as the empirical starting point. A central claim is that voice is encoded in a functional projection, VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP. The book further claims that VoiceP may be associated with phi-features that semantically restrict the external argument position but do not saturate it. Through mino…
"Contributors : Reem Al-Halimi, Robert C. Berwick, J.F.M. Burg, Martin Chodorow, Christiane Fellbaum, Joachim Grabowski, Sanda Harabagiu, Marti A. Hearst, Graeme Hirst, Douglas A. Jones, Rick Kazman, Karen T. Kohl, Shari Landes, Claudia Leacock, George A. Miller, Katherine J. Miller, Dan Moldovan, Naoyuki Nomura, Uta Priss, Philip Resnik, David St-Onge, Randee Tengi, Reind P. van de Riet, Ellen…
Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causalit…
"An original argument to explain the "language gap" between humans and other primates, drawing on research from evolutionary biology, paleobiology, and archaeology"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"An explantion of a knowledge-based system for creating computational agents with human-like language ability"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"This book represents a new approach to language acquisition and to variable properties in language. By taking a novel approach in allowing for an account of the acquisition of variable properties of language and a biologically plausible treatment of language variation, Lightfoot argues against the use of binary parameters, for the centrality of parsing in language acquisition, and for the "ope…
"A short, reader-friendly introduction to the neuroscientific study of language. Written by an emerging star in the field"--OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
"This book answers both the 'what' and the 'why' question raised by indexical shift in crosslinguistic perspective. What are the possible profiles of an indexical shifting language, and why do we find these profiles and not various equally conceivable others? Drawing both from the literature (published and unpublished) and from original fieldwork on the language Nez Perce, Amy Rose Deal puts fo…
A search for a grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics.This work, which has become a classic in music theory since its original publication in 1983, models music understanding from the perspective of cognitive science.The point of departure is a search for the grammar of music with the aid of generative linguistics.The theory, which is illustrated with numerous examples from Wes…