A01_RICH4603_04_SE_A01.QXD

(Chris Devlin) #1

genetic epistemology n
a term used to describe the theories of developmental psychology of
the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896–1980). Piaget listed several different
stages which children pass through in mental development. The first stage
is the sensorimotor stage, from birth to about 24 months, when children
understand their environment mainly by acting on it. Through touch and
sight children begin to understand basic relationships which affect them
and objects in their experience. These include space, location of objects,
and the relationships of cause and effect. But children cannot yet make
use of abstract concepts. The next three stages are a movement towards
more abstract processes. During the pre-operational stage, from around
two to seven years, children develop the symbolic function, which includes
such skills as language, mental imagery, and drawing. Children also begin
to develop the mental ability to use concepts dealing with number,
classification, order, and time, but use these concepts in a simple way. The
concrete operational stage from about seven to eleven years is the period
when children begin to use mental operations and acquire a number of con-
cepts of conservation. During the formal operational stage (from around
eleven onwards) children are able to deal with abstract concepts and
propositions, and to make hypotheses, inferences, and deductions. Since
the mental processes Piaget studied are important for language devel-
opment, linguists and psycholinguists have made use of Piaget’s ideas in
studying how mental development and linguistic development are related.


genitive case n
the form of a noun or noun phrase which usually shows that the noun or
noun phrase is in a possessive relation with another noun or noun phrase
in a sentence.
For example, in the German sentence:
Dort drüben ist das Haus des Bürgermeisters
Over there is the house of the mayor
the mayor’s house
in the noun phrase des Bürgermeisters, the article has the inflectional
ending -es and the noun has the inflectional ending -sto show that they are
in the genitive case because they refer to the owner of das Haus.
In the English sentence:
She took my father’s car
some linguists regard my father’s as an example of the genitive case.
see also case^1


genitive relative clause n
also GEN
see noun phrase accessibility hierarchy


genetic epistemology
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