Premium
Language acquisition and language change
Author(s) -
Lightfoot David
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
wiley interdisciplinary reviews: cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.526
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1939-5086
pISSN - 1939-5078
DOI - 10.1002/wcs.39
Subject(s) - variation (astronomy) , computer science , grammar , rule based machine translation , second language acquisition , language change , language acquisition , context (archaeology) , linguistics , work (physics) , natural language processing , history , engineering , mechanical engineering , philosophy , physics , archaeology , astrophysics
Children acquire a mature language system and sometimes this system differs from that of their parents. This is a significant part of language change and understanding acquisition is key to understanding this kind of change in people's internal grammars. I outline one approach to language acquisition, based on children finding cues expressed in the input they are exposed to. This enables us to understand historical change in grammars: change in external language sometimes triggers a new internal grammar as cues come to be expressed differently. Work on language variation, acquisition, and change converges, and these three areas are mutually dependent; empirical work in one area may enrich understanding more generally, opening the way to new kinds of empirical work. Seen this way, language is a complex system and language change can be treated productively in the context of complexity science. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition