Jio planning to sell 5G smartphones for Rs 2,500-3,000 a piece: Company official Also concerned with the eternally fascinating problem of how children acquire their first language, but otherwise very different from Kirby’s book, is Stephen Crain and Diane Lillo-Martin, An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. The volume is written within the framework of Chomsky’s version of Universal Grammar (UG) and is directed towards general introductory linguistics courses, as well as courses in language acquisition and the psychology of language. In the introductory part I the authors present several basic facts about language acquisition that serve as a database ‘to test the adequacy of alternative theories oflanguage and mind’ (p. viii); in practice, the one alternative theory examined is behaviorism, as espoused by the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner. After concluding that the behaviorist theory is too simple to account for the complexities of linguistic knowledge, they proceed to an examination of Chomsky’s theory of UG.
Parts II and III describe in some depth constituent structure and transformational syntax, the core components of UG, and apply them to the study of child language. As the data used in these two parts mainly come from English, part IV tries to circumvent the problem of focusing too narrowly on just one natural language by comparing the course of acquisition by children learning English with that taken by children learning languages quite unlike English.
The language selected for illustration is the visual-gestural language used by deaf people in the United States, American Sign Language (ASL). This is argued to be a language with a different structure from English and, in some respects, ‘more like Chinese than like English’ (p. 276). Yet despite their profound differences, which include the ‘modality’ or channel used to convey each of these two languages (vocal-auditory in the case of English; manual-visual in the case of ASL), English and ASL are argued to share a common core of principles, which are acquired in much the same way and are thus likely candidates for linguistic universals. In passing, one may note that visual-gestural languages, including ASL, have recently received considerable attention from members of the cognitive linguistic community, who are aware of their importance for understanding the cognitive basis of grammatical structure. None of their contributions to this topic, however, are mentioned by Crain and Lillo- Martin. Finally, another claim they make is that children are biologically endowed with semantic knowledge, just as they are biologically endowed with syntactic knowledge. Hence the last and fifth part of the volume is devoted to semantics and the philosophy of language, including topics such as compositionality (how the meaning of a sentence or higher-level expression is formed from the meanings of its constituent parts) and intensional semantics.
As in earlier chapters, the technical discussion of these issues is complemented by discussion of empirical investigations into how children acquire knowledge of the principles of the semantic component of UG. On the whole, this new title in the Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics series serves the introductory purposes for which it was designed and will prove useful for students approaching the problem of language acquisition from an orthodox generative perspective. In this reviewer’s opinion, a shortcoming of this book is the simplistic outlook that pervades a number of its statements, such as this one on p. ix: ‘Prior to Chomsky, linguists concentrated much of their efforts on describing the easily observable properties of language: the sound system, the vocabulary, and how some words are derived from others. Linguists in this tradition rarely looked at patterns of sentence structure, which can be very abstract.’
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