Maria Teresa Guasti, Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar.

Abstract

The pervasive influence of Chomskyan Transformational Generative (TG) Grammar on experimental studies of child language acquisition continues to remain the most dominant framework of analysis. In past decades there has been manifold increase in cross-linguistic studies of how children coming from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds acquire similar syntactic structures as hypothesized by the models of TG grammars, particularly the theory of Principles and Parameters, operating under the specifications of Universal Grammar (UG). In spite of recent alternative theoretical developments, such as Cognitive Linguistics, Optimality Theories (OT) or Construction Grammar, theories such as Government and Binding and Principle and Parameters remain the working models among the majority of researchers in child language. The book under review, Language Acquisition: The Growth of Grammar ,b y Maria Teresa Guasti is a skillful assembly of current empirical developments in the field of child language acquisition coupled with forceful argumentation of theoretical issues. The book is clearly written with the intention of giving more empirical credibility to Chomskyan ideas as they are currently practiced in the discipline of developmental psycholinguistics. No doubt, such a work deserves a blurb at the back cover of the book by the grand master himself. Chomsky writes of the book, ‘‘the study of language acquisition has made remarkable progress in recent years with major contribution to linguistics and general cognitive science as well’’. Here Chomsky is absolutely right to have highlighted the mutual exchanges and support that has happened between theory builders in linguistics and empirical researchers in a beneficial manner. Detractors have been silenced forever under the grounds of faulty research design and bad interpretation. This book testifies to this fact on every page where the author supports the theory with calculative use of data where they completely agree with the broad mentalist theories of generative enterprise. Hence one has to be convinced even though one remains skeptical of many of the mentalist