The Comparative Method of Language Acquisition Research

Clifton Pye (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

304 Seiten

2017
University of Chicago Press (Verlag)
978-0-226-53961-4 (ISBN)

Artikel merken

The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, Clifton Pye shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. Both an overview of lessons Pye has gleaned from more than thirty years of studying how children learn Mayan languages as well as a strong case for a novel method of researching crosslinguistic language acquisition more broadly, this book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage to untangling the complexities of first language acquisition. Pye here applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. His holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children's lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so.
More than this, he expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages' variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, he argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one's native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

Clifton Pye is associate professor of linguistics at the University of Kansas, where he studies the crosslinguistic language acquisition among indigenous languages of the Americas with a primary interest in the acquisition of the verb complex.

Erscheinungsdatum	29.01.2018
Reihe/Serie	Emersion: Emergent Village resources for communities of faith
Sprache	englisch
Maße	16 x 23 mm
Gewicht	482 g
Themenwelt	Schulbuch / Wörterbuch ► Wörterbuch / Fremdsprachen
	Sonstiges ► Geschenkbücher
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft ► Sprachwissenschaft
ISBN-10	0-226-53961-X / 022653961X
ISBN-13	978-0-226-53961-4 / 9780226539614
Zustand	Neuware