Naslov
Can we device a new measure for child language development?

Autori
Palmović, Marijan

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Radovi u zbornicima skupova, cjeloviti rad (in extenso), znanstveni

Izvornik
VI. International Conference of Language Examination and Applied Linguistics / Kukorelli, Katalin - Dunaújváros : Reinald van Dijhorst grafikaja, 2004, 148-157

Skup
VI. International Conference of Language Examination and Applied Linguistics

Mjesto i datum
Dunaújváros, Mađarska, 18.03.2004. - 20.03.2004

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
child language; syntax; MLU; morphology; RRG

Sažetak
It is a well known fact that the mean lenght of utterance is not a good measure of syntactic development in languages with rich morphology. In Croatian, for example, a child starts with two morphemes with his first utterance. Grammatical morphemes are unavoidable and have no intuitive relation with the language growth as in English where na additional morhpeme means the acquisition of sme gramatical relation, e.g. past tense. A new measure will be sketched. It is based on Role and Reference Grammar and connects syntactical development with the diversity of verbal classes (according to Aktionsarten). The different Aktionsarten "activate" different logical structures and, finally, different constituent structure of the sentence (that are given as sentence "templates" in RRG). The measure simply consists of attaching a number to every verbal class that occurs in the child language corpus. Additionally, the proposed measure takes into account clauses that occur early in the child language development (sentences such as "I want to drink"). The score is simply corrected with the points that are given according to the Interclausal Relations Hierarchy (IRH). IRH captures our intuition about the degree of sentence complexity very well. The measure is so conceived that it neglects the word order (which is free in Croatian). Examples will be given to show how the proposed measure works.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

POVEZANOST RADA