Syntactic Development

Anat Ninio's important new book places the syntactic learning process under close scrutiny. The focus is on the characteristics of the linguistic input and resultant output, which, she shows, are surprisingly similar in their global features. Unique to this book is its reliance on very large English corpora of parental speech and child utterances, hand-analyzed for core grammatical relations, revealing surprising new facts about the input and output of syntactic development. Drawing on mainstream linguistic theory (the Minimalist Program, Dependency Grammar), Complexity Theory (self-organization), and quantitative linguistics (corpus-based linguistics, Zipf curves), it analyzes the input and output languages both theoretically and empirically, building on the contribution of the different source theories in a detailed and explicit manner. This book presents a highly novel perspective on the acquisition of syntax, one which will be required reading for those in the field of developmental psycholinguistics.