Semantic Theory versus Semantic “Lumping”
Reply to Bertinetto et al. (2015) The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework: data from Italian and Austrian-German children
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 10295769 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Richard M Weist (SUNY Fredonia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2023 |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 265-274 |
| Publication date | 2023-01-27 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Linguistics (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0024-3949 • E-ISSN: 1613-396X |
| Publisher | Walter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE) |
| DOI | 10.1515/ling-2021-0090 |
| OpenAlex | W4308404647 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
The crosslinguistic investigation of child language has revealed the frequent co-occurrence of certain values of Aktionsart, aspect and tense. Specifically, dynamic-atelic predicates are likely to be observed with unbounded values of aspect in the non-past tense and dynamic-telic predicates with bounded aspect and past tense morphology. This observation has motivated theories of language acquisition that incorporate the semantic structure of predicates in relation to clause structure. Pier Marco Bertinetto and colleagues have claimed that inferences regarding the role of predicate structure in the acquisition process have been erroneously derived from “lumping” together stative and activity predicates. Furthermore, without acknowledging the prior theory of “typological bootstrapping”, they present their presumably unique theory of information processing to explain their Italian and German child language data. The purpose of this reply is to show that the stative-activity “lumping” assertion is a “straw man” argument, and a theory of morphological information processing is both well-known and compatible with semantically based theories of acquisition
Argument (complex analysis) · Assertion · German · Language acquisition · Linguistics · Morpheme · Natural language processing · Predicate (mathematical logic) · Theoretical linguistics · Computer Science · Language Development and Disorders · Philosophy · Psychology · Reading and Literacy Development · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
Tense and aspect
Syntactic–semantic interface in the acquisition of verb morphology
How children talk about what happened
The defective tense hypothesis
The emergence of tense-aspect morphology in Japanese
The emergence of temporal adverbs in child Polish
The role of input vs. universal predispositions in the emergence of tense-aspect morphology
Introduction
Aspects of the roots of language
Memory and Temporal Perspective
First steps toward a usage-based theory of language acquisition
The acquisition of tense and aspect in a morphology-sensitive framework
Finiteness systems and lexical aspect in child Polish and English
The Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology
| Highly cited | No |
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