Download or read book The Prefunctional Stage of First Language Acquistion (RLE Linguistics C: Applied Linguistics) written by Ianthi-Maria Tsimpli and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-03 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a theory of first language acquisition in the syntactic framework of the theory of Universal Grammar. It addresses issues related to the earliest stage of development which ends roughly around the child’s second birthday. The theory put forward capitalises on the traditional observation that early child grammars characteristically lack lexical and morphological elements which belong to the ‘closed-class’ system. This book provides an account of the grammatical differences between the set of functional categories and the substantive categories.