Course contents and suggested bibliography

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Melissa Bowerman (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL)

Participants:

Participants should be familiar with basic notions of (nongenerative) syntax and morphology. Background in cognitive/functional/typological approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, language development and/or cognitive development would be useful but is not presupposed.

Overview:

This course focuses on a central puzzle in the study of first language acquisition: how children learn the mappings between elements of form (words, bound morphemes, syntactic patterns, etc.) and elements of meaning. This puzzle, and possible solutions to it, are intricately bound up with our answers to another question: how much variation is there across languages in the semantic structuring of conceptual domains such as space, time, and causality? 

Where languages largely agree – i.e., where there is semantic universality –  it is plausible that language structure reflects deep-seated human perceptual and conceptual propensities.  In line with strong claims for semantic and cognitive universals, language learning has often been characterized as a process in which children formulate concepts on the basis of their nonlinguistic experience with the world, and then look for the linguistic forms with which to express these ideas.  But crosslinguistic research over the past decade has begun to change this view: adult languages vary strikingly in how they categorize and “package” even supposedly very basic meanings, and children are able to home in on language-specific ways of structuring meaning at a remarkably young age. 

Semantic variation, and children’s evident sensitivity to it, raise important challenges for our understanding of language learning.  In this course we will examine problems of form-meaning mapping in first language acquisition with reference to several different conceptual domains, looking at both lexical development and the acquisition of the “grammaticized portion” of language (e.g., spatial adpositions, argument structure, temporal and causative morphology).  Data will be drawn from a variety of languages (e.g., English, Dutch, Spanish, Hebrew, Korean, Japanese, Tzotzil Mayan, Yucatec Mayan, Arrernte), and will encompass both spontaneous speech and experimental studies of comprehension and production.  Patterns of language acquisition will be evaluated with reference to crosslinguistic studies of adult language, e.g. Talmy’s typology for the expression of motion; patterns of grammaticization; work on the semantic typology of space; proposed universals in the domain of argument structure. New evidence will also be considered for an old question: does learning how to structure meanings for a particular native language have consequences for speakers’ nonlinguistic ways of viewing the world?

Some more specific topics:

- Introduction and overview.  Where do the meanings that children link to the forms and patterns of their language come from?  Rise of  cognitive-universalist approaches to form-meaning mapping. Challenges posed by crosslinguistic variation in semantic structure. 

- The case of space: variation in how languages encode space; evidence for rapid language-specific learning.

- Are there “natural” links between predicate semantics and syntax that guide children’s language acquisition?  Hypotheses about how children learn argument structure alternations, and how they use argument structure to home in on the meaning of newly-encountered verbs.  Challenges posed by crosslinguistic variation in argument linking and argument realization.

- Are grammatical morphemes such as tense and aspect markers, nominal inflections, and prepositions “special” in acquisition?  Do children come to the language acquisition task with an a priori sense of restrictions on the kinds of meanings such morphemes are likely to express?

- “Typological bootstrapping”: children’s use of their growing sense of the typological features of the target language to make good guesses about the structure of parts of the language that they have not yet acquired. Expressing motion in verb-framed vs. satellite-framed languages (Talmy). Words for objects and words for substances – do children learning languages with and without numeral classifiers develop different assumptions about what novel nouns mean? 

- Beyond the clause: influence of language typology on the acquisition of discourse and narration styles (“Thinking for Speaking”).

- Does learning a first language affect nonlinguistic cognition?  Recent new perspectives on the old Whorfian question, from domains such as space, temporality, and gender.

Reference works:

Bowerman, M. (1990). Mapping thematic roles onto syntactic functions: Are children helped by innate linking rules? Linguistics, 28, 1291-1330.

            Bowerman, M. and Choi, S. (2001). Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In M. Bowerman and S.C. Levinson (eds.).

Bowerman, M. and Levinson, S.C.(eds.) (2001).Language acquisition and conceptual development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1, 3-55. Reprinted in P. Bloom (ed.) (1994), Language acquisition: Core readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Imai, M. and Gentner, D. (1997). A crosslinguistic study of early word meaning: Universal ontology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62, 169-200.

            Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Slobin, D.I. (1985). Crosslinguistic evidence for the Language-Making Capacity. In D.I.

     Slobin (ed.), The crosslinguistic study of language acquisition, Vol. 2: Theoretical issues. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Slobin, D.I. (1996). From “thought and language” to “thinking for speaking”.  In J.J. Gumperz and S.C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Slobin, D.I. (2001). Form-function relations: How do children find out what they are? In M. Bowerman and S.C. Levinson (eds.).

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical form. In T. Shopen (ed.), Language typology and syntactic description, Vol. III: Grammatical categories and the lexicon. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.