Introduction to Language Acquisition

Abstract

In the generative tradition, the study of language acquisition is of great importance for linguistic theory. There are two principal reasons for such a role. First, there is the assumption that the language faculty is innate which is central to generative linguistics and which obviously has to reflect in the properties of language development in the child. Second, there is the notion of ‘explanatory adequacy’ which should oblige any theoretical linguist to show that his or her proposal for an analysis of a particular structure can be learnt. However, the field of language acquisition has long led a life in the shadows of linguistic theory. Fortunately this has changed in the last two decades so that for an introduction to language acquisition I would like to give some background about what was the status quo up to the eighties, what caused the change, and what sort of results have been achieved since then.