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Seller: Joseph Burridge Books, Dagenham, United Kingdom
Soft cover. Condition: New. vi, 165, [1] pages ; 21 cm. The present study investigates the acquisition of so-called functional categories in English children between the ages of two and three. The study is carried out within the generative framework and takes as its starting-point Radford's (1988; 1990) hypothesis that initial child grammars are afunctional. The present work argues in favour of the Weak Continuity Hypothesis. According to this approach to language development, the X-bar system is part of Universal Grammar, while the acquisition of functional categories has to be triggered. The issue of triggers is extensively discussed in the study, and it is argued that, due to the lack of inflectional morphology in English, the development of functional categories is initially triggered by free rather than bound morphemes in this language. Furthermore, it is proposed that the acquisition of functional categories does not only involve a triggering mechanism of the kind discussed in the present study, but also a setting of parameters in the form of determining the strength of the N- and V-features associated with these categories (in the sense of Chomsky, 1992).Tromsø Studies in Linguistics 17. Seller Inventory # PGNOV99
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