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The Acquisition of Preposition Stranding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Joyce Hildebrand
Joyce Hildebrand*
Affiliation:
University of Calgary
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Extract

This study examines the acquisition of a familiar and widely studied syntactic phenomenon, preposition stranding, within the framework of transformational generative grammar. According to Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG), children begin the acquisition task with an innate knowledge of universal principles of grammar. Many of these principles have open parameters with marked and unmarked options which must be set by children on the basis of their linguistic input. The marked setting entails the unmarked setting in that if a language allows the marked structures it will also allow the relevant unmarked structures, but the reverse is not necessarily true.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Spring 1987 , pp. 65 - 85
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1987

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