The acquisition of relational categories of English

Date

1993-08

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Abstract

This study is based on the acquisition of basic grammatical categories by children acquiring English as their first language. In this study the acquisition of basic categories of verbs and nouns and their relations are investigated, such as actor-action relationships and animate/inanimate subject relationships. The purpose of this study is to investigate how children acquire these relations and how they classify different subject and verb meanings in order to acquire semantic and syntactic knowledge of language. Schlesinger's Semantic Hypothesis is tested by means of the data from a two-year-old boy complied by Kuczaj (1987). Results show that although this boy seems to have a wide animate agent category, there were no findings that would support semantic assimilation starting with the motion agent category.

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Keywords

Language acquisition, English language -- Grammar

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