Literature on acquisition of spatial particles in English
Karla Vrbova
karla.vrbova at centrum.cz
Mon Jan 12 19:33:14 UTC 2009
Dear Mr Snyder,
thank you very much for responding to my question! This sounds very good and I am going to read the article and the book.
Best wishes
Karla
______________________________________________________________
> Od: william.snyder at uconn.edu
> Komu: info-childes at googlegroups.com
> Datum: 09.01.2009 19:32
> Předmět: Re: Literature on acquisition of spatial particles in English
>
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. "
/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
> >
>
>
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/info-childes/attachments/20090112/f9957e59/attachment.htm>
More information about the Info-childes
mailing list