University Readers

This handbook essentially delivers two books in one. On one hand, linguistic informed phenomena are presented to the reader in general terms — topics related to Child Language Acquisition, Language Impairment, as well as the Brain-Language Corollary. On the other hand, the handbook presents as its fundamental core the kind of theoretical syntax that has come to be regarded amongst Chomskyan linguists.

What “Feature Theory” Grammar allows us to do is essentially break down the components of traditional “parts-of-speech” words to a finer-grained analysis. This lets us tinker with certain sub-particles of the word in order to see how one isolated feature might project and contribute to a phrase over another. It is not too far of the mark then to suggest that “Feature Theory” is in fact a linguistics response to a “Periodic Table” of language.

Joseph Galasso is on both the English and Linguistics Faculty at California State University, Northridge and serves as an Adjunct Faculty of Linguistics at California State University, Long Beach. He has written one book on Child Language Acquisition, The Acquisition of Functional Categories (IULC Publications, 2003) and has written several papers on topics related to early child syntax. He is often invited to lecture as well as to edit chapters of textbooks related to linguistics and child language acquisition. Joseph Galasso holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Essex (1999).