語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

The cultural origins of human cognition

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

Rules and Representations

The paper investigates a number of asymmetries in the behavior of subjects in Germanic, Celtic/Arabic, Romance, and Greek. The languages under investigation divide into two main groups with respect to a cluster of properties, including the availability of pro-drop with referential subjects, the possibility of VSO/VOS orders, the A/A′ status of subjects in SVO orders, the presence/absence of Definiteness Restriction (DR)-effects in unaccusative constructions, the existence of verb-raising independently of V-2, and others. We argue that the key factor in this split is a parametrization in the way the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) is checked: move/merge XP vs. move/merge X0. The first option is taken in Germanic, the second in Celtic, Greek, and Romance. According to our proposal, the EPP relates to checking of a nominal feature of AGR (cf. Chomsky 1995), and move/merge X0 languages satisfy the EPP via V-raising, as their verbal agreement morphology includes the requisite nominal feature (cf. Taraldsen 1978). Moreover, we demonstrate that the further differences that exist between Celtic/Arabic on the one hand and Romance/Greek on the other are related to the parametric availability of Spec,TP for subjects (cf. Jonas and Bobaljik 1993, Bobaljik and Jonas 1996). In Celtic and Arabic, Spec,TP for subjects is licensed, resulting in VSO orders with VP external subjects. In Greek and Romance, Spec,TP is not licensed, resulting in 'subject inverted' orders with VP internal subjects. In other words, we show that within the class of move/merge X0 languages, a further partition emerges which is due to the same parameter dividing Germanic languages into two major classes. We demonstrate that combining the proposed EPP/AGR parameter with the Spec,TP parameter gives four language-types with distinct properties.

Parametrizing Agr: Word Order, V-Movement and Epp-Checking

In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community re- cent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an envi- ronment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or im- migrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage lan- guage studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this popu - lation offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on cur - rent debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.

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Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

1. Introduction PART 1: THE FEATURE STRUCTURE OF TENSE 2. The Tense Systems of Egyptian Arabic, Moroccan Arabic, and Standard Arabic 3. The Categorial Features of Tense 4. Checking the Categorial Features of Tense PART 2: THE FEATURE STRUCTURE OF NEGATION 5. Sentential Negation in the Modern Arabic Dialects 6. Negation in Standard Arabic 7. Negation and Imperatives PART 3: AGREEMENT ASYMMETRIES 8. Subject Verb Agreement Asymmetries References Index

The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects

The guideline of Arabic syntax provides an overview of the major syntatic constructions in Arabic that have featured in recent linguistic debates,and discusses the analyses provided for them in the litarature.

The Syntax of Arabic

Normalement les changements de l'ordre syntaxique sujet-verbe n'affectent pas la relation de l'accord entre ces deux elements. Ce n'est pourtant pas le cas de certaines varietes d'arabe (libanais, marocain, arabe standard), l'A. analyse le cas de ces diverses langues

Agreement, word order and conjunction in some varieties of Arabic

This study presents an investigation of oral narratives collected from heritage Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic speakers living in the United States. The focus is on a number of syntactic and morphological features in their production, such as word order, use of null subjects, selection of prepositions, agreement, and possession. The degree of codeswitching in their narratives was also investigated. The goal was to gain some insights into the Arabic linguistic competence of this group of speakers. The results show that although Arabic heritage speakers display significant competence in their heritage colloquial varieties, there are gaps in that knowledge. There also seems to be significant transfer from English, their dominant language.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0272263110000768

Elabbas Benmamoun

Papers

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

The Feature Structure of Functional Categories: A Comparative Study of Arabic Dialects

The Syntax of Arabic

Agreement, word order and conjunction in some varieties of Arabic

Grammatical Features of Egyptian and Palestinian Arabic Heritage Speakers' Oral Production.