Research Catalog

Title

First verbs : a case study of early grammatical development / Michael Tomasello.

Author

Tomasello, Michael.

Publication

Cambridge [England] ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

viii, 373 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

• 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 study of how she acquired her first verbs and analyzed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development.
• The vast majority of the child's first multiword utterances contained verbs. These nascent sentences were almost all straightforward combinations of previously produced utterances, containing no productive syntactic devices. When she did begin to use productive syntactic devices and morphological markers, they were invariably tied to specific verbs, implying that the syntagmatic categories involved were such verb-specific categories as "thrower," "thing thrown," etc.
• It is hypothesized that more general syntagmatic categories await the formation of a paradigmatic category of verb, and that this in turn awaits complex sentences in which verbs are treated as mental objects by other predicates.
• The author argues persuasively that the child's earliest language is based on 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.

Subject

• Language acquisition
• Grammar, Comparative and general > Verb
• Cognitive grammar

Bibliography (note)

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

Contents

• 1. Introduction. 1.1. Cognitive Linguistics and the developmental approach. 1.2. The importance of verbs. 1.3. Plan of the monograph -- 2. In the beginning was the verb. 2.1. Children's first verbs. 2.2. Children's first sentences. 2.3. Goals and hypotheses of the study -- 3. Methods and an introduction to T's language. 3.1. The diary. 3.2. Determining meaning. 3.3. Semantic analysis of verbs. 3.4. Syntactic analysis of sentences. 3.5. T's earliest language -- 4. Change of state verbs and sentences. 4.1. Presence, absence, and recurrence of objects. 4.2. Presence, absence, and recurrence of activities. 4.3. Exchange and possession of objects. 4.4. Location of objects. 4.5. Movement of objects. 4.6. State of objects -- 5. Activity verbs and sentences. 5.1. Activities involving objects. 5.2. Activities not involving objects -- 6. Other grammatical structures. 6.1. Sentences without verbs. 6.2. Grammatical morphology. 6.3. Complex sentences.
• 6.4. Summary -- 7. The development of T's verb lexicon. 7.1. Cognitive bases of T's early verbs. 7.2. Contexts for early verb learning. 7.3. Processes of early lexical development. 7.4. Summary -- 8. The development of T's grammar. 8.1. Constructing sentences: Symbolic integration and syntactic devices. 8.2. Constructing a grammar: The Verb Island hypothesis. 8.3. Processes of early grammatical development. 8.4. Summary -- 9. Language acquisition as cultural learning. 9.1. Summary of major findings. 9.2. A speculation on the human capacity for language. 9.3. Later development. 9.4. Conclusion.

ISBN

0521374960 (hardcover)

LCCN

91018029

OCLC

• 23768491
• ocm23768491

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries