First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development Book

	Acknowledgments
1	Introduction	1
1.1	Cognitive Linguistics and the developmental approach	2
1.2	The importance of verbs	6
1.3	Plan of the monograph	7
2	In the beginning was the verb	9
2.1	Children's first verbs	9
2.2	Children's first sentences	20
2.3	Goals and hypotheses of the study	29
3	Methods and an introduction to T's language	30
3.1	The diary	30
3.2	Determining meaning	33
3.3	Semantic analysis of verbs	35
3.4	Syntactic analysis of sentences	38
3.5	T's earliest language	40
4	Change of state verbs and sentences	44
4.1	Presence, absence, and recurrence of objects	44
4.2	Presence, absence, and recurrence of activities	60
4.3	Exchange and possession of objects	69
4.4	Location of objects	82
4.5	Movement of objects	91
4.6	State of objects	101
5	Activity verbs and sentences	114
5.1	Activities involving objects	115
5.2	Activities not involving objects	135
6	Other grammatical structures	147
6.1	Sentences without verbs	148
6.2	Grammatical morphology	154
6.3	Complex sentences	179
6.4	Summary	185
7	The development of T's verb lexicon	187
7.1	Cognitive bases of T's early verbs	187
7.2	Contexts for early verb learning	204
7.3	Processes of early lexical development	209
7.4	Summary	219
8	The development of T's grammar	222
8.1	Constructing sentences: Symbolic integration and syntactic devices	225
8.2	Constructing a grammar: The Verb Island hypothesis	238
8.3	Processes of early grammatical development	257
8.4	Summary	262
9	Language acquisition as cultural learning	264
9.1	Summary of major findings	264
9.2	A speculation on the human capacity for language	267
9.3	Later development	271
9.4	Conclusion	273
	References	275
	Appendix	285
	Index	371