Bootstrapping (syntactics)
Bootstrapping (also semantic bootstrapping ; English for boot loop , in a sense: pulling yourself out of your own boots [out of the swamp] ) describes a concept in linguistics and developmental psychology developed by Steven Pinker and Lila Gleitman that tries to explain how children learn to speak Recognize the meaning of unknown terms. Children use existing language knowledge to build up new language knowledge, also on a different language level. Certain linguistic information thus represents entry aids that facilitate the acquisition of further language structures. This includes the idea that children can derive word meanings on the one hand from non-verbal communication and on the other hand from the context of the new terms, from references to already known people or things or even from the grammar used .
The underlying idea is that children are able to link certain semantic categories - like "person" or "thing" - with the help of a series of linking rules . The use of these rules leads the children (together with innate knowledge of word categories) to the discovery of syntactic rules. Syntactic bootstrapping thus refers to derived information about syntactic properties of words in their position in the sentence and the application of this information to new cases with the same syntactic positions.
Individual evidence
- ↑ S. Pinker: Language learnability and language development . Harvard University Press Cambridge 1984.
- ^ LR Gleitman: The structural sources of verb meanings . In: Language Acquisition 1, 1990, pp. 3-55.
- ↑ Ch. Kauschke: Children's language acquisition in German. Processes, research methods, explanatory approaches . De Gruyter 2012, p. 3.
- ↑ Rosemarie Tracy: Linguistic structural development: Linguistic and cognitive psychological aspects of a theory of first language acquisition . Tübingen 1991, ISBN 3-8233-4711-X .