Errors of Commission in Child Language
A special issue of Languages (ISSN 2226-471X).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (15 September 2022) | Viewed by 14397
Special Issue Editors
Interests: semantics; pragmatics; language acquisition; grammatical theory; morphology; syntax; language diversity; cognition
Interests: syntax; morphology; heritage languages
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Young children generally make shorter utterances than adults and are felt to commit language errors of omission. However, children occasionally use extra words or morphemes in their utterances or use phrasing that is less concise than the one adults would use. Such errors of commission seem to be rooted in the linguistic and cognitive creativity of the child, especially when commission errors are recurrent across children or even across languages. Currently, work specifically looking at commission errors in different child languages has been rather limited. This Special Issue addresses the need for a broader and more diverse study of commission errors.
We want to approach the task in the spirit of making a map based on a grid of coordinates. On one axis, we place different languages, one per column. On the other axes, we place different domains of language where some preliminary evidence for commission errors exists: the first two areas concern the internal structure of complex events, namely 1) the expression of causation and agency, and 2) the primitive components of change of state and motion events. The other four areas concern the internal structure of propositions: 3) the binary connectives, especially Boolean disjunction (or); 4) negative concepts such as exclusion (only), adjectival antonyms (e.g., short), and negation; 5) quantificational concepts including genericity and distributivity; 6) dependencies most frequently analyzed as variable binding; and 7) all other phenomena.
Contributions should ideally address contiguous areas of this grid, for example, by looking at all the evidence from one language to add an entire column to the Atlas or look at one area across different languages where evidence is available already or address the methodology of identifying recurrent commission errors. Much relevant evidence is available already, for example, in the form of public or private corpus collections or parental reports. However, these data sources have not been systematically analyzed for commission errors. We expect contributions to identify the currently available sources of data, note gaps, and arrive at conclusions that both methodologically and analytically advance the state of the art.
We request that, prior to submitting a manuscript, interested authors initially submit a proposed title and an abstract of 400–600 words summarizing their intended contribution. Please send it to the guest editors at <[email protected]>. Abstracts will be reviewed by the guest editors for the purpose of ensuring proper fit within the scope of the Special Issue. Full manuscripts will undergo double-blind peer-review.
Tentative completion schedule:
- Abstract submission deadline: 30 April 2022
- Notification of abstract acceptance: 31 May 2022
- Full manuscript deadline: 15 September 2022
Prof. Dr. Uli Sauerland
Prof. Dr. Artemis Alexiadou
Prof. Dr. Maria Teresa Guasti
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- language acquisition
- first language
- language production
- language diversity
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