Is literary language a development of ordinary language?

Contemporary literary linguistics is guided by the 'Development Hypothesis' which says that literary language is formed and regulated by developing only the elements, rules and constraints of ordinary language. Six ways of differentiating literary language from ordinary language are tested against the Development Hypothesis, as are various kinds of superadded constraint including metre, rhyme and alliteration and parallelism. Literary language differs formally, but is unlikely to differ semantically from ordinary language. The article concludes by asking why the Development Hypothesis might hold

THE CHILD AND THE WORLD: How Children acquire Language

HOW CHILDREN ACQUIRE LANGUAGE Over the last few decades research into child language acquisition has been revolutionized by the use of ingenious new techniques which allow one to investigate what in fact infants (that is children not yet able to speak) can perceive when exposed to a stream of speech sound, the discriminations they can make between different speech sounds, differentspeech sound sequences and different words. However on the central features of the mystery, the extraordinarily rapid acquisition of lexicon and complex syntactic structures, little solid progress has been made. The questions being researched are how infants acquire and produce the speech sounds (phonemes) of the community language; how infants find words in the stream of speech; and how they link words to perceived objects or action, that is, discover meanings. In a recent general review in Nature of children's language acquisition, Patricia Kuhl also asked why we do not learn new languages as easily at 50 as at 5 and why computers have not cracked the human linguistic code. The motor theory of language function and origin makes possible a plausible account of child language acquisition generally from which answers can be derived also to these further questions. Why computers so far have been unable to 'crack' the language problem becomes apparent in the light of the motor theory account: computers can have no natural relation between words and their meanings; they have no conceptual store to which the network of words is linked nor do they have the innate aspects of language functioning - represented by function words; computers have no direct links between speech sounds and movement patterns and they do not have the instantly integrated neural patterning underlying thought - they necessarily operate serially and hierarchically. Adults find the acquisition of a new language much more difficult than children do because they are already neurally committed to the link between the words of their first language and the elements in their conceptual store. A second language being acquired by an adult is in direct competition for neural space with the network structures established for the first language

From phonetics to phonology : The emergence of first words in Italian

This study assesses the extent of phonetic continuity between babble and words in four Italian children followed longitudinally from 0; 9 or 0; 10 to 2;0-two with relatively rapid and two with slower lexical growth. Prelinguistic phonetic characteristics, including both (a) consistent use of specific consonants and (b) age of onset and extent of consonant variegation in babble, are found to predict rate of lexical advance and to relate to the form of the early words. In addition, each child's lexical profile is analyzed to test the hypothesis of non-linearity in phonological development. All of the children show the expected pattern of phonological advance: 'Relatively accurate first word production is followed by lexical expansion, characterized by a decrease in accuracy and an increase of similarity between word forms. We interpret such a profile as reflecting the emergence of word templates, a first step in phonological organization