Learnability and Cognition The Acquisition of Argument Structure 1st Edition by Steven Pinker ISBN 0262518406 ‎ 978-0262518406

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Product details: 

ISBN 10: 0262518406 ‎ 

ISBN 13: 978-0262518406

Author:  Steven Pinker 
A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, “The Secret Life of Verbs.”

Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was set by the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly subtle distinctions: pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water sound natural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into the glass sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected for uttering odd sentences, and they don’t just parrot back the correct ones they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses of verbs, and explores that theory’s implications for language, thought, and the relationship between them.

As Pinker writes in a new preface, “The Secret Life of Verbs,” the phenomena and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions, he notes, provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientific understanding, political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go into obscenity.

Table of contents: 

1. A Learnability Paradox
1.1 Argument Structure and the Lexicon
1.2 The Logical Problem of Language Acquisition
1.3 Baker’s Paradox
1.4 Attempted Solutions to Baker’s Paradox

2. Constraints on Lexical Rules
2.1 Morphological and Phonological Constraints
2.2 Semantic Constraints
2.3 How Semantic and Morphological Constraints Might Resolve Baker’s Paradox
2.4 Evidence for Criteria-Governed Productivity
2.5 Problems for the Criteria-Governed Productivity Theory

3. Constraints and the Nature of Argument Structure
3.1 Overview: Why Lexical Rules Carry Semantic Constraints
3.2 Constraints on Lexical Rules as Manifestations of More General Phenomena
3.3 A Theory of Argument Structure
3.4 On Universality

4. Possible and Actual Forms
4.1 The Problem of Negative Exceptions
4.2 Transitive Action Verbs as Evidence for Narrow Subclasses

5. Representation
5.1 The Need for a Theory of Lexicosemantic Representation
5.2 Is a Theory of Lexical Semantics Feasible?
5.3 Evidence for a Semantic Subsystem Underlying Verb Meanings
5.4 A Cross-linguistic Inventory of Components of Verb Meaning
5.5 A Theory of the Representation of Grammatically Relevant Semantic Structures
5.6 Explicit Representations of Lexical Rules and Lexicosemantic Structures
5.7 Summary

6. Learning
6.1 Linking Rules
6.2 Lexical Semantic Structures
6.3 Broad Conflation Classes (Thematic Cores) and Broad-Range Lexical Rules
6.4 Narrow Conflation Classes and Narrow-Range Lexical Rules
6.5 Summary of Learning Mechanisms

7. Development
7.1 Developmental Sequence for Argument Structure Alternations
7.2 The Unlearning Problem
7.3 Children’s Argument Structure Changing Rules Are Always Semantically Conditioned
7.4 Do Children’s Errors Have the Same Cause as Adults?
7.5 Acquisition of Verb Meaning and Errors in Argument Structure
7.6 Some Predictions about the Acquisition of Narrow-Range Rules
7.7 Summary of Development

8. Conclusions
8.1 A Brief Summary of the Resolution of the Paradox
8.2 Argument Structure as a Pointer between Syntactic Structure and Propositions: A Brief Comparison with a “Connectionist” Alternative

8.3 The Autonomy of Semantic Representation
8.4 Implications for the Semantic Bootstrapping Hypothesis
8.5 Conservatism, Listedness, and the Lexicon
8.6 Spatial Schemas and Abstract Thought

 

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Tags: Steven Pinker, Learnability and Cognition, The Acquisition of Argument