Outside -in theories (grammar )

[023BETESL1298]

Could I know motre about The Givon's Functional TypologyTheory and Bates's The Competition Model ?Please give a few examples in teaching grammar.

[Casiopea]

Could I know more about The Givon's Functional Typology Theory and Bates' The Competition Model? Please give a few examples in teaching grammar.

The Competition Model (MacWhinney & Bates, 1989) :

Language has four main facets: word order, vocabulary, word forms and intonation. Whatever the speaker wants to communicate has to be achieved by means of these four. Children learn their mother language by attaching particular weights to particular clues. For example, the English children lay the emphasis on word order while the Russian children on word endings. This model is an example of discovery learning and fails to account realistic language acquisition.

http://www.maxpages.com/thena/ladiscussion4

Tom (Talmy) Givon (many books!)
A functional typology approach to language and grammar. Grammar is not just a system of empty rules, it is a means to an end, an instrument for constructing concise, coherent communication. It is the basic tenet of the functional approach to typology that at least some linguistic universals may be explained by appealing to features of language use. But the mechanics of the mapping between function and distribution are seldom made explicit.

Sorry. No examples. But, you could email Professor Givon at the University of Oregon, Faculty of Linguitics. They have a homepage.

:D

[RonBee]

This page has Givon's email address (as a hyperlink). It also has a link to his webpage. Go to: http://logos.uoregon.edu/faculty/givon.shtml

:)