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Aim of the course is to provide insight into theoretical and methodological issues in the domain of language acquisition; to engage students in scientific discussion of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues in current language acquisition research; to provide them with a solid and informed background for further specialisation in this area.
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The course provides the theoretical and empirical foundation for current theoretical developments in language acquisition research. It does so by focusing on (morpho-)syntactic and semantic phenomena that illustrate the relation between the so-called "logical problem of language acquisition", i.e., the observation that the knowledge children acquire goes far beyond the input to which they are exposed, and the "problem of actual language development", i.e., how and why children pass through certain developmental stages in their acquisition of their first language or – in the case of (simultaneous) bilingualism – languages. Questions to be addressed include: How is (monolingual and bilingual) first language acquisition guided by the principles of linguistic theory and general cognitive growth? And can the answers and explanations offered be naturally extended to adult and child second language acquisition, when acquisition starts with knowledge of one language (partly) in place? Topics may include: pronominal reference and quantification; binding and control in relation to argument structure; role and rise of functional categories; properties of movement; transfer; effect of age of onset; the role of input quantity and quality, plus other child-internal and child-external factors.
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