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Semantic bootstrapping is a linguistic theory of child language acquisition which proposes that children can acquire the syntax of a language by first learning and recognizing semantic elements and building upon, or bootstrapping from, that knowledge. [1]
Syntactic ergativity is quite rare, and while all languages that exhibit it also feature morphological ergativity, few morphologically ergative languages have ergative syntax. As with morphology, syntactic ergativity can be placed on a continuum, whereby certain syntactic operations may pattern accusatively and others ergatively.
Semantic bootstrapping is a linguistic theory of language acquisition which proposes that children can acquire the syntax of a language by first learning and recognizing semantic elements and building upon, or bootstrapping from, that knowledge. [8] According to Pinker, [8] semantic bootstrapping requires two critical assumptions to hold true:
For example, under semantic bootstrapping, learning word meanings to understand the difference between physical objects, agents and actions is used to acquire the syntax of a language. [3] However, prosodic bootstrapping also attempts to explain how children acquire the syntax of their language, but through prosodic cues. [ 4 ]
In linguistic typology, active–stative alignment (also split intransitive alignment or semantic alignment) is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the sole argument ("subject") of an intransitive clause (often symbolized as S) is sometimes marked in the same way as an agent of a transitive verb (that is, like a subject such as "I" or "she" in English) but other times in the same way ...
In linguistic typology, split ergativity is a feature of certain languages where some constructions use ergative syntax and morphology, but other constructions show another pattern, usually nominative–accusative. The conditions in which ergative constructions are used vary among different languages.
The child increasingly chooses the irregular form, beating the overregularized one, because the child only experiences the irregular form. Maratsos argues that because children often use both the irregular and overregularized forms of the same verb, even in the same speech sample, the blocking theory proposed by Marcus proves problematic.
This idea underlies early notions of ‘deep’ vs. ‘surface’ (or ‘syntactic’ vs. ‘morphological’) ergativity (e.g. Comrie 1978; [2] Dixon 1994 [1]): many languages have surface ergativity only (ergative alignments only in their coding constructions, like case or agreement) but not in their behavioral constructions or at least not ...