Input and Second Language Acquisition: The Roles of Frequency, Form, and Function Introduction to the Special Issue (original) (raw)

California Linguistic Notes Volume XXXV No. 2 Spring, 2010

Chomsky (1986b) employs a feature value approach in the specification of universal lexical categories ([+V, +N]). The verbal category is identified by [+V,-N] feature combination while the noun is specified by the features; [+N,-V]. The verb is a universal category with categorical features that are in direct opposition to the categorical features of the noun. The verb is therefore understood to be exclusively verbal; void of any nominal traits just as the noun is unambiguously nominal without any verbal traits. Interestingly, evidence from our data show that the feature specification of the Edo verb does not conform to Chomsky's universal categorical distinction. We show in this paper that the Edo verb is a complex component consisting of a combination of lexical units with categorial and semantic features that complement each other to represent a single semantic verbal element. These lexical units sometimes introduce features that contrast with the standard specification of verbal features, yet

Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis

Journal of Memory and Language, 2007

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been given to the appropriateness of using any particular set of corpus frequencies in modeling human language. We provide a comprehensive set of structural frequencies for a variety of written and spoken corpora, focusing on structures that have played a critical role in debates on normal psycholinguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition, and compare our results with those from several recent papers to illustrate the implications and limitations of using corpus data in psycholinguistic research.