How does a biologically-programmed language faculty interact with language experience in the acquisition of language across the world? Bringing together linguistic theory, language typology, and cross-linguistic experimental results from parallel studies of development in language acquisition, this book reports new research on the nature of the human competence for language acquisition. It investigates the acquisition of complex sentence formation through relativization -a fundamental comp...

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars.The issues sur...

Universal Grammar (UG) is a theory of both the fundamental principles for all possible languages and the language faculty in the "initial state" of the human organism. These two volumes approach the study of UG by joint, tightly linked studies of both linguistic theory and human competence for language acquisition. In particular, the volumes collect comparable studies across a number of different languages, carefully analyzed by a wide range of international scholars.The issues sur...