From Telegraphic Speech to Morphological and Syntactic Iconicity. Early Child Speech Development from Polish and English Data

The work of Dr Ewa Konieczna constitutes an important and valuable contribution to the studies of first language acquisition. Although intensive research in this field is being carried out in many countries and is concerned with data coming from a variety of languages, the work of Dr Konieczna – and this should be underlined – avoids overused topics and does not fall into the trap of easy imitation or eclecticism. Her work is original and highly innovative, as regards both the theoretical perspective and the extensive collection of linguistic data used in the study. Juxtaposition, on such a large scale, of specific utterances produced by Polish- and English-speaking children seems to have no precedence in the literature of the subject.
From the review of Prof. dr hab. Bogdan Szymanek

Acknowledgements 9 Introduction 10 CHAPTER I. General overview of first language acquisition theories 14 Introduction 14 1.1. Milestones in first language acquisition research 15 1.1.1. Earliest records of first language acquisition 15 1.1.2. Behaviourism 15 1.1.3. Alternatives to behaviourism 16 1.2. Chomsky’s Universal Grammar 18 1.3. First grammatical analyses 23 1.4. Theories stemming from the UG approach 27 1.5. New developments 30 1.5.1. Minimalism and functional categories 30 1.5.2. Cognitive theories of first language acquisition 32 1.5.3. Modern cognitive approaches to first language acquisition 37 Conclusion 46 CHAPTER II. Omission of content and function words 47 Introduction 47 2.1. Language redundancy 48 2.2. Definition of telegraphic speech 52 2.3. Explanation of omissions 54 2.3.1. Omission of functors 55 2.3.2. Omission of contentives 58 2.4. Ambiguity 75 2.4.1. Ambiguity of telegraphic speech 77 2.4.2. Ambiguity of sentences deprived of content words 96 2.5. Semantic analysis of sentences devoid of content and function words in Polish and English 112 Conclusion 117 CHAPTER III. Morphological and syntactic iconicity in child language 119 Introduction 119 3.1. Historical background 120 3.1.1. Arbitrary and motivated signs 121 3.1.2. Motivated and arbitrary signs in language 123 3.2. Morphological iconicity 127 3.2.1. Natural Morphology 127 3.2.2. Morphological iconicity in the light of the theory of Natural Morphology 131 3.2.3. Images in children’s language 133 3.2.4. Inflectional diagrams in children’s language 137 3.2.5. Derivationaliconicity 164 3.3. Syntacticiconicity 182 3.3.1. The principle of quantity 182 3.3.2. The principle of sequentiality 188 3.3.3. The principle of distance 189 Conclusion 190 Conclusions 192 References 203