EAN: 9783110216202

LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND THE FUNCTIONAL CATEGOR...

Research on spontaneous language acquisition both in children learning their mother tongue and
in adults learning a second language has shown that language development proceeds in a
stagewise manner. Learner utterances are accounted for in terms of so-called 'learner
languages'. Learner languages of both children and adults are language systems that are
initially rather simple. The present monograph shows how these learner languages develop both
in child L1 and in adult L2 Dutch. At the initial stage of both L1 and L2 Dutch  learner
systems are lexical systems. This means that utterance structure is determined by the lexical
projection of a predicate-argument structure  while the functional properties of the target
language are absent. At some point in acquisition  this lexical-semantic system develops into a
target-like system. With this target-like system  learners have reached a stage at which their
language system has the morpho-syntactic features to express the functional properties of
finiteness and topicality. Evidence of this is word order variation and the use of linguistic
elements such as auxiliaries  tense  and agreement markers and determiners. Looking at this
process of language acquisition from a functional point of view  the author focuses on
questions such as the following. What is the driving force behind the process that causes
learners to give up a simple lexical-semantic system in favour of a functional-pragmatic one?
What is the added value of linguistic features such as the morpho-syntactic properties of
inflection  word order variation  and definiteness?

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