Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure
in
- Citation:
- Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure. , Cambridge: The MIT Press
"A monumental study that sets a
new standard for work on learnability."
—Ray Jackendoff
Abstract:
In tackling a learnability paradox that has challenged scholars for more than a decade—how children acquire predicate-argument structures in their language—Steven Pinker synthesizes a vast literature in the fields of linguistics and psycholinguistics, and outlines explicit theories of the mental representation, the learning, and the development of verb meaning and verb syntax. He describes a new theory that has some surprising implications for the relation between language and thought.