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A supplementary textbook outlining fundamentals of the German language and providing help for common obstacles such as declensions, pronoun agreement, time expressions, and letter writing.

The Acquisition of German: Introducing Organic Grammar brings together work on the acquisition of German from over four decades of child L1 and immigrant L2 learner studies. The book's major feature is new longitudinal data from three secondary school students who began an exchange year in Germany with no German knowledge and attained fluency. Their naturalistic acquisition process- with a succession of stages described for the first time in L2 acquisition- is highly similar to that ofyounger learners. This has important implications for German teaching and for the theory of Universal Grammar and acquisition. Organic Grammar, a variant of generative syntax, isoffered as a practical alternative to Chomsky's Minimalism. The analysis focuses on extensive monthly samples of the three students' German development in an input-rich environment. Similar to previous studies, the teenagers build syntactic structure from the bottom up. Two acquired correct word order by the end of the year, the third, who had greater conscious awareness of German grammar, had a divergent route of development, suggesting that language awareness can alter a natural developmental path. The results are addressed in light of recent debates in child-adult differences.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

Insa Gulzow analyzes the acquisition of intensifiers by children acquiring German or English as their first language. Based on a comparative analysis of intensifiers and related expressions in the two languages, she examines the longitudinal production data of six German-speaking and six English-speaking childrenwith regard to when and in which contexts the intensifiers German selbst/selber and English x-self (myself, yourself, himself, etc.) appear. As intensifiers evoke alternatives to the referent of their focus and relate a central referent to more peripheral alternative referents, they are an important linguistic means to structure the participants of a child's early discourse. By integrating intensifiers into their utterances, children can identify themselves as central. The notion of being included or excluded in a certain state of affairs is relevant for children when interacting with their parents and/or other children. In the course of development, children acquire a number of both linguistic and non-linguistic skills that characterize them as increasingly independent and competent agents. In this process, intensifiers are an important linguistic device with which children can negotiate and comment on their participation in a given event. The three parts of the volume consist first, of a detailed analysis of the intensifiers selbst/selber and x-self and related expressions such as allein and by x-self in the two languages. Special attention is given to the fact that in English, intensifiers and reflexive pronouns are identical expressions while in German they are distinct. Second, previous results of comprehension studies are carefully reviewed in order to relate them to the findings in longitudinal production data. Third, a detailed analysis of the children's early use of intensifiers and related expressions is presented.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• 1. Acknowledgements
• 2. List of tables
• 3. List of figures
• 4. List of abbreviations
• 5. Chapter 1. Introduction
• 6. Chapter 2. The developmental problem in second language acquisition
• 7. Chapter 3. The acquisition of the German case system
• 8. Chapter 4. Feature unification and linking in case marking
• 9. Chapter 5. Methodology
• 10. Chapter 6. Results and discussion
• 11. Chapter 7. General conclusion
• 12. References
• 13. Appendix
• 14. Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This is the first book on the acquisition of the German case system by foreign language learners. It explores how learners in their interlanguage progress from the total absence to the presence of a case system. This development is characterized by an evolvement from marking the argument's position to marking the argument's actual function. Theoretically couched within Processability Theory, the book deals with the feature unification and the mapping processes involved in case marking, and critically examines previous findings on German case acquisition. Empirically, the book consists of longitudinal data of 11 foreign language learners of German, which was collected over a period of 2 years. This book will be useful to anyone interested in the acquisition of German and in the acquisition of case systems in general.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

This monographs investigates into the influence of the individual-/stage-level distinction (IL/SL) on order restrictions of multiple prenominal adjectives (AORs). It rejects the restriction regularly postulated-across different research frameworks-that SL-adjectives are being realized farther from the head noun than IL-adjectives, relegating the alleged constraint to an epiphenomenon of more general principles. While formal-theoretic hypotheses on AORs are formulated and put to the test empirically via a large corpus as well as two rating studies, the book also addresses adjective classification, modification patterns, and the IL-SL-debate in general. The preferred prenominal positions of typical SL-adjectives are argued to follow from their nature as absolute-gradable adjectives as well as from the distinction between object- and kind-modification. The empirical studies corroborate these considerations. The book critically discusses and opposes several well-established hypotheses on AORs, sketches a flexible and parsimonious syntax of adjectival modification, and will be of interest to syntacticians and semanticists working on DP-structure, the IL-SL-debate, and adjectival modification.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)