Lexical Representation and Acquisition Theory
نویسنده
چکیده
The role and nature of syntactic categories in language acquisition is unresolved. While many researchers assume that children have innate knowledge about syntactic categories which helps them to acquire syntax, others assume that children’s early syntactic theories are semantically based and learned. In this paper I will summarize evidence against both a syntactic and a semantic basis for children’s syntactic categories, and work out the implications of a Construction Grammar approach for the acquisition of syntactic categories. This approach is based on the insight that words as such do not have a syntactic category, but that their category assignment depends on the context they occur in. In this view, syntactic categories are the result of schematization and frequency effects. In this view, children’s early productions will be lexically specific in the sense that they can be correct without having an abstract and adult-like mental representation. And they are language-particular, since each language instantiates its own set of relevant properties for the classification of words into categories.
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