This chapter provides an introduction to and an overview of the themes and content of the monograph.

This chapter overviews broad issues related to language acquisition research and answers fundamental questions related to first language acquisition, such as What is language? and How do children learn their first language? It begins by introducing some components of language, such as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, pragmatics, and discourse. It also discusses language varieties (e.g., American English vs. Indian English) and explains their legitimacy. Then, the chapter addresses language learning during the first years of a child’s life. It also discusses bilingualism, especially of those who start learning multiple languages in their early years (simultaneous bilingualism). In order to understand second language acquisition for the rest of the textbook, the chapter focuses on a question: How are children able to learn a language without formal instruction? In order to answer this question, multiple language acquisition theories will be discussed.

The introduction to this volume describes its content. It also provides the rationale for including selected topics and provides comments on the manner of presentation adopted in this volume.

Slavic languages are notorious for rich inflectional systems, allowing substantial freedom in word order. Aside from SVO word order, canonical for the great majority of Slavic languages, orders with arguments surfacing in non-canonical positions are also allowed. We consider two such orders – OVS and OSV. The two orders stem from two different types of argument reordering with distinct syntactic, interpretive and prosodic properties. The first is linked to neutral prosody and is licenced by the object being construed as interpretively prominent compared to the subject. The object undergoing this type of reordering binds into the subject and takes scope over it. This reordering is possible only if the thematic prominence relations of arguments are identified by means other than their relative structural position. The second type is linked to marked prosody and is licenced by the displaced object being disambiguated as contrastive. In this type of reordering the object cannot bind into the subject or take scope over it. This type of reordering is possible only if the object carries a strong prosodic marker.

This chapter provides an overview of the inventory, formation, and use of synthetic and periphrastic tense and mood forms in modern Belarusian, Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian, Bulgarian, Czech, Macedonian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Slovene, Lower and Upper Sorbian, and Ukrainian. It addresses both characteristics common to all modern languages and features of individual languages.

Syntax is perhaps one of the most successful projects in the history of theoretical linguistics. It’s also garnered the most philosophical attention. Thus, this chapter focuses on syntactic metatheory. It surveys a number of prominent frameworks from minimalism to construction grammar, dependency grammar, lexical functional grammar and head-driven phrase structure grammar.The main aim is to find a common argument structure and strategy across diverse theoretical positions. In the tradition of recent work on scientific modelling in the philosophy of science, the approach that’s adopted in this chapter works from a bottom-up review of the cross-framework literature. I’ll make a case for a general explanatory strategy or scientific project at the core of linguistic syntax. The core idea is that this general scientific strategy is relatively stable across syntactic frameworks. In other words, the chapter aims to address the question of what minimalism, dependency grammar, radical construction grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and lexical functional grammar have in common. The answer is a general formal strategy that focuses on rules in creating structural units, captures recursive phenomena, and, most importantly, treats syntactic information as explanatorily autonomous from other systems.

This chapter addresses the major syntactic (and partly semantic) topic of argument structure. Argument structure alternations have been central in the development of syntactic theory since Chomsky’s original transformational approach to passivization, and particularly since Fillmore’s work on ‘Case’ relations. In Pāṇinian grammar, the kāraka system provides a highly sophisticated model of argument structure, which has influenced developments in the modern Western tradition, and which also differs from modern argument structure approaches in interesting ways. The kāraka system is explained and illustrated, and compared and contrasted with modern approaches to argument alternations.

We shed light on the question of how narrow information (F) and contrastive focus (CF) are intonationally and syntactically realized by heritage speakers (HSs) of Peninsular Spanish (PS) who have German as their second L1, and compare their data to those of monolingual speakers (MSs) of PS. Results from a production experiment show clear differences between the groups with respect to preferred syntactic strategies and, consequently, the intonational realization of focal pitch accents. The preferred strategy of HSs is stress shift, followed by p-movement and simple clefts, for both focus types. Conversely, MSs mostly use different strategies for each focus type; that is, pseudo-clefts and p-movement for F, and simple clefts and focus fronting for CF. Interestingly, stress shift is not a relevant option. The attested differences support the view that the interface between discourse on one hand, and syntax and phonology on the other, is challenging for bilingual speakers (Sorace, 2011).

A few years after his adoption of both a syntactical method and a principle of tolerance in the early thirties, Carnap turned to semantics when he learned about Tarski’s work on the definition of a truth predicate. How significant is this semantical turn? Carnap scholars have so much emphasized that The Logical Syntax anticipates Tarskian semantics that they tended to minimize the importance of Carnap’s adoption of a semantical approach. As a consequence, his semantical turn has not always been given the importance it deserves. Its meaning, scope and consequences have also often been misunderstood. This paper contributes to a re-evaluation of Tarski’s influence on Carnap in view of the fact that Carnap is far from having just followed Tarski’s way. We examine some specificities of Carnap’s approach of semantics. We also discuss what is left of the syntactic method after the adoption of semantics and what the relations between syntax and semantics become from the late thirties on. The following topics are given specific attention: languages, formal systems, and calculi; truth, L-truth, and L-validity; L-states, L-ranges, and state descriptions. We also analyze the impact of semantics on the principle of tolerance.

Chapter 6 presents an overview of the organization of the mental grammar. We will focus on general architectural properties of the mental grammar, that is, the units and rules that every grammar must have to capture the sound form, meaning, and syntactic structure of words and sentences. I will suggest that the grammar functions like a checking device in that it tells the language user whether linguistic expressions are well-formed (i.e., grammatical, in accordance with the rules of grammar). There is some technical detail (and many linguistic terms), but at the very least the reader will be left with the conviction that languages are quite complex. It is explained how languages allow people to express any thought they might have, drawing attention to the pivotal notion of recursivity. This chapter sets the stage for being amazed that children have pretty much full control of their language by the age of 4. By learning what a mental grammar might look like, the reader can form an idea of what it is that the child needs to acquire. Without such information, it would be difficult to discuss the role of nature and nurture in language.