Literature on acquisition of spatial particles in English

[William Snyder]

Dear Karla,

I've done quite a bit of work on children's acquisition of English 
spatial particles, and I have a proposal concerning why English differs 
from languages like Czech in this respect.

The generalization seems to be that a language permits separable spatial 
particles (as in _LIFT the book UP_), only if it freely allows the 
creation of novel, endocentric root compounds (as in _zoo book_, for a 
book about the zoo).

I haven't examined Czech, but my guess is that it's similar to Russian 
and Serbo-Croatian in this respect: Instead of a bare root compound like 
"zoo book," one would need to say something more like 'book on zoos' or 
perhaps 'book zoo-GENITIVE'. (Note that genitive modifiers are quite 
different from bare root compounding.) If so, it's expected that Czech 
would resort to something other than separable particles; the 
inseparable prefixes that you mention are one of the options that we 
find in such languages.

For more information about my proposals, and for supporting evidence 
(from children acquisition of English, and from cross-linguistic surveys 
of adult speakers), you can refer to the following:

Snyder, W. (2001) "On the nature of syntactic variation: Evidence from 
complex predicates and complex word-formation. <papers/Snyder_Lg.pdf>" 
/Language/ 77:324-342. [http://web2.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/Snyder_Lg.pdf]

Snyder, W. (2007) /Child Language: The Parametric Approach/. Oxford 
University Press. [Chapter 5]

Very best wishes,

William Snyder

Karla wrote:
> Dear all,
> I am currently working on my master thesis and have troubles to find
> literature. The plan is to compare the acquisition of spatial
> particles in English with the acquisition of spatial verbal prefixes
> in Czech and see whether this comparrison gives support for any
> syntactic analysis of spatial particles/prefixes. Can anyone
> recommend literature relevent to this topic?
>
> All the best,
>
> Karla
> >
>
>   

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