The Logic of Language Development in Early Childhood [Paperback]

1 Introduction.- 2 Description of the Project: Cognitive and Social Determinants of Language Acquisition.- 2.1 General and Long-Term Goals of the Language Acquisition Project.- 2.2 The Children under Observation: Meike, Kerstin, and Simone.- 2.2.1 Social Data.- 2.3 The Method of Gathering Data.- 2.3.1 Tape Recordings.- 2.3.2 Transcriptions.- 3 A Quantitative Analysis of the Early Linguistic Development of Meike and Simone.- 3.1 A Survey of the Individual Corpora of Utterances of Meike and Simone.- 3.2 Quantitative Features of Corpora I to III for Meike and Simone.- 3.2.1 MLU Values.- 4 Problems in the Transformational Analysis of Early Child Language.- 4.1 The Pivot-Grammar Approach.- 4.1.1 Characteristics of the Pivot-Grammar Approach.- 4.1.2 Criticism of the Pivot-Grammar Approach.- a) Distributional Evidence for Pivot Grammar.- b) The Universality of Pivot Grammar.- 4.2 Empirical Arguments for a Transformational Descriptive Model.- 4.2.1 The Descriptive Inadequacy of a Phrase Structure Grammar.- 4.2.2 Constructional Homonyms.- 4.3 The Method of Rich Interpretation.- 4.3.1 Semantic Analyses of Early Child Language.- 4.3.2 Discovery Procedures.- 4.4 Reduction Transformations.- 4.4.1 The Definition and Description of Reduction Transformations.- 4.4.2 Criticism of Reduction Transformations.- 5 Aspects of the Early Linguistic Development of Meike and Simone.- 5.1 A Sketch of a Model for the Description of a Childs Communicative Intentions.- 5.2 Illocutionary Acts and Terminal Intonation Contours.- 5.2.1 Preliminary Considerations.- 5.2.2 A Model for the Description of Terminal Intonation Contours in Adult Language.- 5.2.3 The Ontogenesis of Terminal Intonation Contours.- 5.2.4 Some Contrasting Arguments on the Role of Terminal Intonation Contours at the Stage of One-Word Utterances.- 5.2.5 A Description of the Terminal Intonation Contours of Meike and Simone.- 5.2.6 A Reliability Test of the Description of Terminal Intonation Contours.- 5.2.7 Correspondence between Tló‡