Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-hbs24 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-12T00:38:51.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Acquisition of Preposition Stranding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Joyce Hildebrand
Joyce Hildebrand*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This study examines the acquisition of a familiar and widely studied syntactic phenomenon, preposition stranding, within the framework of transformational generative grammar. According to Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), children begin the acquisition task with an innate knowledge of universal principles of grammar. Many of these principles have open parameters with marked and unmarked options which must be set by children on the basis of their linguistic input. The marked setting entails the unmarked setting in that if a language allows the marked structures it will also allow the relevant unmarked structures, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 65 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1987

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Brown, Roger 1973 A First Language: The Early Stages. London: George Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Brown, Roger, and Hanlon, Camille 1970 Derivational Complexity and Order of Acquisition in Child Speech. Pp. 11–53 in Cognition and the Development of Language. Hayes, John R., ed. New York: John Wiley and Sons.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam 1977 On WH-Movement. Pp. 71–132 in Formal Syntax. Culicover, Peter, Wasow, Thomas and Akmajian, Adrian, eds. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Chomsky, Noam 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
Felix, Sascha W. 1984 Two Problems of Language Acquisition: On the Interaction of Universal Grammar and Language Growth. Ms.Google Scholar
French, Margot 1984 Markedness and the Acquisition of Pied-piping and Preposition Stranding. Montreal Working Papers in Linguistics 2:131–144.Google Scholar
Hildebrand, Joyce 1985 Markedness, Acquisition and Preposition Stranding: What Are Children Born With? M.A. thesis, University of Calgary.Google Scholar
Hornstein, Norbert, and Weinberg, Amy 1981 Case Theory and Preposition Stranding. Linguistic Inquiry 12:55–91.Google Scholar
Hyams, Nina 1983 The Acquisition of Parameterized Grammars. Ph.D. thesis, City University of New York.Google Scholar
Kayne, Richard S. 1981 On Certain Differences Between French and English. Linguistic Inquiry 12:349–371.Google Scholar
Krause, Marcia, and Goodluck, Helen 1983 Children’s Interpretations of WH-Constructions. Pp. 119–128 in Studies in Generative Grammar and Language Acquisition. Otsu, Yukio et al, eds. Tokyo: International Christian University.Google Scholar
Lempert, Henrietta, and Kinsbourne, Marcel 1980 Preschool Children’s Sentence Comprehension: Strategies With Respect to Word Order. Journal of Child Language 7:371–379.Google Scholar
MacNeill, David 1966 Developmental Psycholinguistics. Pp. 15–84 in The Genesis of Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach.. Smith, F. and Miller, George, eds. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.Google Scholar
McDade, Hiram L., Simpson, Martha A., and Lamb, Donna Elmer 1982 The Use of Elicited Imitation as a Measure of Expressive Grammar: A Question of Validity. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 47:19–24.Google Scholar
O’Grady, William 1987 Principles of Grammar and Learning. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Phinney, Marianne 1981 Syntactic Constraints and the Acquisition of Embedded Sentential Complements. Ph.D. thesis, University of Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven 1984 Language Learnability and Language Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Slobin, Dan I., and Welsh, Charles A. 1973 Elicited Imitation as a Research Tool in Developmental Psycholinguistics. Pp. 485–497 in Studies of Child Language Development. Ferguson, Charles and Slobin, Dan, eds. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.Google Scholar
Tyack, Dorothy, and Ingram, David 1976 Children’s Production and Comprehension of Questions. Journal of Child Language 4:211–224.Google Scholar
Van Riemsdijk, Henk 1978 A Case Study in Syntactic Markedness: The Binding Nature of Prepositional Phrases. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar
White, Lydia 1982 Grammatical Theory and Language Acquisition. Dordrecht: Foris.Google Scholar