Children's Discourse: Person, Space and Time across Languages

by Maya Hickmann

Overview

Psycholinguist Maya Hickmann presents an original comparative study of discourse development in English, French, German, and Chinese. Hickmann discusses the main theoretical issues in the study of first language acquisition and provides a wide review of available studies in three domains of child language: person, space and time. Her findings concern the rhythm of language acquisition, its formal and functional determinants, and its universal vs. language-specific aspects. The conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic perspective.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521584418
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2002
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Linguistics , #98
Pages:	412
Product dimensions:	6.34(w) x 9.33(h) x 1.26(d)
Lexile:	1550L (what's this?)

About the Author

Maya Hickmann is Research Director at Laboratoire Cognition et Développement, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and University of Paris V.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction; Part I. Available Theories and Data: 2. Theoretical issues; 3. Crosslinguistic invariants and variations; 4. Coherence and cohesion in discourse development; 5. Children's marking of information status: referring expressions and clause structure; 6. The acquisition of spatial and temporal-aspectual devices; Part II. A Crosslinguistic Study of Children's Narratives: 7. Methodological issues; 8. Animate entities; 9. Space; 10. Time; 11. Conclusions; Appendix.

Editorial Reviews

Review of the hardback: '… this book remains one of the most impressive in the field of language acquisition. The richness of the data from four different languages is truly striking, and linguists in almost any subfield of linguistics are guaranteed to learn much of value from this book.' Linguistics

From the Publisher