Posted: Feb 23, 2014 5:25 pm
don't get me started wrote:Thanks! I've seen that Wierzbicka has a nativist stance regarding the set of universal primitives. Is nativism the mainstream position about those lexical meanings nowadays?
I'm not sure I'm familiar with the term Nativism when used with Semantics.I know that Wiezbicka is a central figure in Primes and Universals, but I think that there are other fields which deal with semantics from a different starting point. Probably the Cognitive Linguistic school based around the work of Langaker is another important basis for Semantic analysis.
Thanks. Do you have some references about (1) how and when children learn different classes of words, (2) which classes of words are impaired by different neurological conditions?
I've found the following classification of word classes:
"According to the distributional approach to word classes, words are grouped with certain classes mainly on the basis of their morphological and distributional behaviour: words of the same class will generally take the same sort of derivational and inflectional affixes (morphological behaviour), and will generally occupy the same positions or ‘slots’ in a sentence relative to members of other word classes (distributional behaviour)." (Evans & Green, 2006)
Then they talk about the following word classes:
* Nouns
* Verbs
* Adjectives
* Adverbs
* Prepositions
* Determiners
* Pronouns
* Auxiliary verbs
"There are several other closed-class categories that we will not discuss here, mainly including ‘linking’ categories that join sentences, like coordinating conjunctions (and, but), subordinating conjunctions (although, because), discourse connectives (however, therefore) and complementisers (for example, that in she hoped that they would be married in the snow).We will also have little to say about interjections, words like yuk! or wow! that form independent utterances and do not participate in grammatical structure." (Evans & Green, 2006)
Evans, V., & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics: An introduction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.