Acquisition of Morphosyntax

3 Credits · Level: Graduate

This course provides an introduction to child language acquisition from the perspective of linguistic theory. We will focus on how to account for the complex and abstract linguistic knowledge that children develop, and on how that account is both informed by and contributes to linguistic theory. Topics to be covered include: the notion of Universal Grammar and how it has evolved over the past several decades; issues of learnability (including a hypothesized ‘poverty of the stimulus’ and the role of negative evidence in language development); the hypothesized role of linguistic parameters in language learning (including acquisition studies of specific parameters and more general questions concerning the evolution and validity of parameter theory for language acquisition); more recent Minimalist approaches to language acquisition; the acquisition of morphosyntactic functional categories and features; and the extent to which knowledge of language at earlier stages of language development is of the same type or ‘continuous’ with the kind of knowledge mature native speakers possess.