This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti published over the last ten years or so, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies on (modes of) language acquisition through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part I presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the domain of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part II offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics.

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of syntactic and semantic bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition.

"This book collects some of the most significant articles by Adriana Belletti, offering readers a useful tool to see the mutual enrichment between linguistic theory and experimental studies through her work. The volume explores domains of theoretical morphosyntax in the generative tradition and theoretically guided studies on language acquisition. An Introduction specific to this volume contextualizes these contributions within ongoing developments in the field. Part One presents studies inspired by the illuminating interchange between linguistic theory and experimentation in the field of language acquisition, leading to the formulation of explicit research questions tested experimentally and guiding in the proper interpretation of the results. Part Two offers refined, detailed theoretical analyses of domains in which peripheral positions in the clause structures are crucially involved to express discourse contents, in sometimes not standard ways during development. Demonstrating how refined linguistic analyses play a crucial role in interpretating the peculiar shape of developmental data, this book will be of interest to scholars in syntax, language acquisition, and theoretical linguistics"--

In this book leading scholars examine the intricate ways in which Merge and formal features, two factors in the Minimalist Program, interact to generate well-formed derivations in natural language. The authors combine grammatical theory with the analysis of data drawn from a wide range of languages.

Syntactic Carpentry: An Emergentist Approach to Syntax presents a groundbreaking approach to the study of sentence formation. Building on the emergentist thesis that the structure and use of language is shaped by more basic, non-linguistic forces—rather than by an innate Universal Grammar—William O'Grady shows how the defining properties of various core syntactic phenomena (phrase structure, co-reference, control, agreement, contraction, and extraction) follow from the operation of a linear, efficiency-driven processor. This in turn leads to a compelling new view of sentence formation that subsumes syntactic theory into the theory of sentence processing, eliminating grammar in the traditional sense from the study of the language faculty. With this text, O'Grady advances a growing body of literature on emergentist approaches to language, and situates this work in a broader picture that also includes attention to key issues in the study of language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and agrammaticism. This book constitutes essential reading for anyone interested in syntax and its place in the larger enterprise of cognitive science.

Language Acquisition and the Form of the Grammar attempts to re-think the ideal organization of the grammar, given its need to be learned. The book proposes a fundamental connection between the form of the adult grammar and the sequence of grammars which the child adopts in first language acquisition. Challenging the conventional division between language acquisition and syntax, this influential work constructs a new understanding of phrase structure, bringing syntactic data to bear on phrase structure composition. Two new phrase structure composition operations are proposed, Adjoin-α, which adjoins adjuncts into the structure, and Project-α, which fuses open class and closed class structures. The author also introduces the novel concept of subgrammars, successively larger grammars that take the child from the initial state to the adult grammar. This work will be of interest to those in the areas of syntax, language acquisition, learnability, and cognitive science in general.

This book brings together many of Peter Culicover's most significant observations on the nature of syntax and its place within the architecture of human language. Over four decades he has sought to understand the cognitive foundations of linguistic theory and the place of syntactic theory in explaining how language works. This has led him to specific proposals regarding the proper scope of syntactic theory and to a re-examination of the empirical basis of syntactic analyses, which reflect judgements reflecting not only linguistic competence but the complexity of the computations involved in acquiring and using language. After a brief a retrospective the author opens the book with the Simpler Syntax Hypothesis, an article written with Ray Jackendoff, that proposes significant restrictions on the scope of the syntactic component of the grammar. The work is then divided into parts concerned broadly with representations, structures, and computation. The chapters are provided with contextual headnotes and footnote references to subsequent work, but are otherwise printed essentially as they first appeared. Peter Culicover's lively and original perspectives on syntax and grammar will appeal to all theoretical linguists and their advanced students.