First verbs : a case study of early grammatical development

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Bibliographic Information

First verbs : a case study of early grammatical development

Michael Tomasello

Cambridge University Press, 1992

  • : hbk.

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Note

Includes bibliographical references (p. 275-284) and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

During the second year of his daughter's life, Michael Tomasello kept a detailed diary of her language, creating a rich database. He made a careful study of how she acquired her first verbs and analysed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author argues persuasively that the child's earliest grammatical organization is verb-specific (the Verb Island hypothesis). He argues further that early language is acquired by means of very general cognitive and social-cognitive processes, especially event structures and cultural learning. The richness of the database and the analytical tools used make First Verbs a particularly useful and important book for developmental psychologists, linguists, language development researchers and speech pathologists.

Table of Contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • 1. Introduction
  • 2. In the beginning was the verb
  • 3. Methods and an introduction to T's language
  • 4. Change of state verbs and sentences
  • 5. Activity verbs and sentences
  • 6. Other grammatical structures
  • 7. The development of T's verb lexicon
  • 8. The development of T's grammar
  • 9. Language acquisition as cultural learning
  • References
  • Appendix
  • Index.

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