Esmaeil Safaei Asl; Rezamoead Sahraei
Abstract
Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a theory which is very strong and so flexible that it addresses various research areas such as ‘language development in children’, ‘educational linguistics’, ‘computational linguistics’, and ‘clinical linguistics’. One ...
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Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a theory which is very strong and so flexible that it addresses various research areas such as ‘language development in children’, ‘educational linguistics’, ‘computational linguistics’, and ‘clinical linguistics’. One of the other research applications of the mentioned theory is ‘language typology’. The research area of language typology within SFG is called ‘systemic functional typology’ or ‘systemic typology’ in short. In this paper, along with briefly introducing the book “Language Typology: A Functional Perspective”, we have tried to present a profile of ‘systemic typology’. To do so, at first, we have briefly reviewed the dominant approaches to language typology, i.e., holistic typology and partial typology, and the studies conducted in the framework of those approaches. Then parallel with the chapters of the book “Language Typology: A functional perspective”, we have mentioned the key points in systemic typology. Since the main objective of systemic typology is ‘to achieve empirical generalizations’, a large part of the introduction of systemic typology in this paper has been devoted to typological generalizations. In the end, an analysis of ‘word order typology’ has been touched upon, too.
Abstract
There are two different views on the nature of Universal Grammar at birth; namely, the lexical view and Full Tree view. Lexicalists contend that UG is incomplete, and maturity is the main factor for its development. But the advocates of Full Tree view insist on the child’s language tree being complete/full ...
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There are two different views on the nature of Universal Grammar at birth; namely, the lexical view and Full Tree view. Lexicalists contend that UG is incomplete, and maturity is the main factor for its development. But the advocates of Full Tree view insist on the child’s language tree being complete/full since the beginning, and believe interaction and input to be the reason for its actualization and development. Both views firmly believe that in the process of language acquisition, the child learns lexical categories before the functional ones.The consequence of this shared idea is a belief in a lack of representation of functional nodes, such as TP, CP, TopP, and FP in the early child syntax. Longitudinally studying the process of learning Persian of a Persian-speaking child, this study assesses this shared idea, and, presents several considerable evidence, to show that in the acquisition of Persian, firstly, the functional categories are learnt concurrently with the lexical categories, not after them, and, secondly, the functional nodes are fully discernable in child language, and the activity of functional categories is so extensive that it is even possible to present evidence of the child’s access to information structure.
