Congratulations to Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (faculty), Mihaela Pirvulescu (faculty, Department of French), and Yves Roberge (faculty, Department of French) on the publication of their co-authored book, Direct Objects and Language Acquisition, now available from Cambridge University Press!
Direct object omission is a general occurrence, observed in varying degrees across the world's languages. The expression of verbal transitivity in small children begins with the regular use of verbs without their object, even where object omissions are illicit in the ambient language. Grounded in generative grammar and learnability theory, this book presents a comprehensive view of experimental approaches to object acquisition, and is the first to examine how children rely on the lexical, structural and pragmatic components to unravel the system. The results presented lead to the hypothesis that missing objects in child language should not be seen as a deficit but as a continuous process of knowledge integration. The book argues for a new model of how this aspect of grammar is innately represented from birth.
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