Dan Isaac Slobin

See Volume I (0-89859-367-0) for full description and TOC.

Volume 2: Theoretical Issues

The Crosslinguistic Study of Language Acquisition

Michael Tomasello

These essays should appeal to international scholars in the fields of developmental psycholinguistics, cognitive science, crosslinguistic research, and both child and adult language disorders. It is an overview of many areas of cognitive science, and will be of classroom use at the graduate level in course seminars in any of these topics.

Essays in Honor of Elizabeth Bates

Beyond Nature-Nurture

Jiansheng Guo

Julie Gerhardt

Amy Kyratzis

This collection of essays is a representative sample of the current research and researchers in the fields of language and social interactions and social context. The opening chapter, entitled "Context in Language," is written by Susan Ervin-Tripp, whose diverse and innovative research inspired the editors to dedicate this book to her honor. Ervin-Tripp is known for her work in the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies. She has played a central role in the definition and establishment of psycholinguistics, child language development, and sociolinguistics, and has been an innovator in terms of approaches and methods of study. This book covers a wide range of research interests in the field, from linguistically oriented approaches to social and ethnography oriented approaches. The issue of the relationships between forms and structures of language and social interactions is examined in studies of both adult and child speech. It is a useful anthology for graduate students studying language and social interaction, as well as for researchers in this field.

Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-tripp

Social interaction, Social Context, and Language

Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp

First Published in 1996. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Essays in Honor of Susan Ervin-Tripp

Social Interaction, Social Context, and Language

An essential handbook for professionals and advanced students in the field. Volume 1 contains comprehensive studies on the acquisition of 15 different languages (from ASL to Samoan) -- written by top researchers on each topic. Volume 2 concentrates on theoretical issues, emphasizing current linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Unique in its approach toward individual languages and in its comparative perspective, this book is a hallmark of a rapidly growing area of interdisciplinary, international research.

Volume 1: the Data

Charles Albert Ferguson

Studies of Child Language Development

In this final volume in the series, the contributors attempt to "expand the contexts" in which child language has been examined crosslinguistically. The chapters build on themes that have been touched on, anticipated, and promised in earlier volumes in the series. The study of child language has been situated in the disciplines of psychology and linguistics, and has been most responsive to dominant issues in those fields such as nativism and learning, comprehension and production, errors, input, and universals of morphology and syntax. The context has primarily been that of the individual child, interacting with a parent, and deciphering the linguistic code. The code has been generally treated in these volumes as a system of morphology and syntax, with little attention to phonology and prosody. Attention has been paid occasionally to the facts that the child is acquiring language in a sociocultural setting and that language is used in contexts of semantic and pragmatic communication. In addition, there has been a degree of attention paid to the interactions between language and cognition in the process of development. As for individual differences between children, they have been discussed in those studies where they could not be avoided, but such variation has rarely been the focus of systematic attention. Differences between individual languages have been of great interest, but these differences have not often been placed in a framework of systematic typological variation. And although languages and their grammars change over time, the focus of attention on the individual child learner has generally led to neglect of explanatory principles that are best found on the level of linguistic diachrony, rather than the level of innate ideas or patterns of learning and cognition in the individual child. The chapter authors seek to explore these neglected contexts in more depth.

Volume 5: Expanding the Contexts

Continuing the tradition of this series, which has become a standard reference work in language acquisition, Volume 4 contains chapters on three additional languages/language groups--Finnish, Greek, and Korean. The chapters are selective, critical reviews rather than exhaustive summaries of the course of development of each language. Authors approach the language in question as a case study in a potential crosslinguistic typology of acquisitional problems, considering those data which contribute to issues of general theoretical concern in developmental psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. Each chapter, therefore, provides the following: * Grammatical Sketch of Language. Brief grammatical sketch of the language or language group, presenting those linguistic facts which are relevant to the developmental analysis. * Sources of Evidence. Summary of basic sources of evidence, characterizing methods of gathering data, and listing key references. * Overall Course of Development. Brief summary of the overall course of development in the language or language group, giving an idea of the general problems posed to the child in acquiring a language of this type, summarizing typical errors, domains of relatively error-free acquisition, and the timing of acquisition--areas of the grammar that show relatively precocious or delayed development in crosslinguistic perspective. * Data. Specific developmental aspects of the language examined in depth, depending on each individual language and available acquisition data. * Conclusions. An interpretive summary of theoretical points raised above, attending to general principles of language development and linguistic organization suggested by the study of a language of this type, plus comparisons with development of other languages.

Ruth A. Berman

This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes--more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages--and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages--English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish--impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers, null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse--beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age, and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook,Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer Mayer. (An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages.) The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing new insights into questions of language and thought.

A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study

Relating Events in Narrative

Karl Zimmer

Turkish is a member of the Turkic family of languages, which extends over a vast area in southern and eastern Siberia and adjacent portions of Iran, Afganistan, and China. Turkic, in turn, belongs to the Altaic family of languages. This book deals with the morphological and syntactic, semantic and discourse-based, synchronic and diachronic aspects of the Turkish language. Although an interest in morphosyntactic issues pervades the entire collection, the contributions can be grouped in terms of relative attention to syntax, semantics and discourse, and acquisition.

Dan Isaac Slobin

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