tailieunhanh - The Teacher’s Grammar BookSecond Edition phần 9

Tham khảo tài liệu 'the teacher’s grammar booksecond edition phần 9', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | COGNITIVE GRAMMAR 217 quently a matter of prosody not grammar. Given the importance of prosody in language production we should find it interesting that formalist accounts of acquisition give relatively little attention to this feature of linguistic performance. Pinker 1995 for example provided a lengthy discussion of language acquisition almost 50 pages but devoted only five paragraphs to prosody. Moreover these five paragraphs are limited to questioning the link between prosody and grammar Do children use prosody to determine grammar As a strong advocate of Chomskian linguistics Pinker concluded that grammar may influence prosody but he then took the strange step of recognizing that the mapping between syntax and prosody is inconsistent p. 164 . More relevant is the question of how children master the rhythmic patterns of their home language in the course of language acquisition. When we examine speech as an acoustical signal it is continuous yet we do not hear speech as a continuous stream we hear it as segments that follow a specific pattern. Numerous studies have shown that infants only a few days old are able to distinguish the prosodic patterns of different languages such as English and Japanese Bagou Fougeron Frauenfelder 2002 Bahrick Pickens 1988 Christophe Morton 1998 Dehaene-Lambertz Houston 1998 . This ability seems congruent with the universal human talent for pattern recognition but it raises interesting and as yet unanswered questions. If language acquisition relies on a process of induction what is there in speech rhythms that children induce Are there rules of prosody Are prosodic patterns simply internalized on the basis of exposure Cognitive grammar does not view language as being the product of children s mastery of grammar but rather views grammar as being a byproduct of language. It follows that grammar is not a theory of language or of mind which makes the question of underlying linguistic structures irrelevant. Grammar from this perspective