Minimum of Language Acquisition

A well-respected syntactician in the tradition of Noam Chomsky, Dr. Joseph Galasso has two recent publications on young children’s utterances that postulate the nature of the innate language capability based on actual data: “Small Children’s Sentences are ‘Dead on Arrival’: Remarks on a Minimalist Approach to Early Child Syntax” in Journal of Child Language Acquisition and Development and the monograph “From Merge to Move: A Minimalist Perspective on the Design of Language and its Role in Early Child Syntax (LINCOM Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 59. 238pp. 2016). A follow-up monograph on syntax was published in 2019 entitled “Recursive Syntax: A Minimalist Perspective on Recursion as the Core Property of Human Language and tis Role in the Generative Grammar Enterprise: (with Special Notes on Dual Mechanism Model, Problems of Projection, Proto-language, Recursive Implementation in AI, and the Brain”). His work has appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (2016) (eds. Jeffrey L. Lidz, William Snyder, and Joe Pater) and most recently in the 2022 edition of the Oxford Bibliographies in Linguistics edited by Elena Babatsouli.

Dr. Galasso is a faculty member in the departments of English and Linguistics at California State University, Northridge, and serves as an adjunct faculty member of linguistics at California State University, Long Beach.