The Logic of Language Development in Early Childhood

1 Introduction.- 2 Description of the Project: Cognitive and Social Determinants of Language Acquisition.- 2.1 General and Long-Term Goals of the Language Acquisition Project.- 2.2 The Children under Observation: Meike, Kerstin, and Simone.- 2.3 The Method of Gathering Data.- 3 A Quantitative Analysis of the Early Linguistic Development of Meike and Simone.- 3.1 A Survey of the Individual Corpora of Utterances of Meike and Simone.- 3.2 Quantitative Features of Corpora I to III for Meike and Simone.- 4 Problems in the Transformational Analysis of Early Child Language.- 4.1 The Pivot-Grammar Approach.- 4.2 Empirical Arguments for a Transformational Descriptive Model.- 4.3 The Method of Rich Interpretation.- 4.4 Reduction Transformations.- 5 Aspects of the Early Linguistic Development of Meike and Simone.- 5.1 A Sketch of a Model for the Description of a Child's Communicative Intentions.- 5.2 Illocutionary Acts and Terminal Intonation Contours.- 5.3 Propositional Acts and Word Order.- 5.4 Context-Referential Acts and Ellipsis.- 6 Conclusion.- 6.1 Summary.- 6.2 Final Comments on the Logic of Language Development in Early Childhood.- 7 Appendix.- 7.1 Glossary of the Notations Used in the Transcripts.- 7.2 Context of Items Used in the Intonation Test.- 7.3 Context of Items Used in the Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis.- References.- Author Index.