Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

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Format: Paperback
Pages: 408
Edition: Revised ed.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 01 Mar 2005
ISBN 10: 0674017641
ISBN 13: 9780674017641
Book Overview: Constructing a Language is the best book on language development since Roger Brown's A First Language. Tomasello has taken full advantage of the research that has been done in the thirty years since Brown's landmark book, to give us a full account of language acquisition, from the first signs of intentional communication in prespeech through the most complex syntactic constructions children produce. The book rebuilds bridges between child language and linguistic theory -- but in place of generative grammar, Tomasello ties the study of emergent language to a usage-based approach derived from cognitive and functional linguistics. He is particularly persuasive in showing how it solves the essential problem of how children get from here to there, as they move by analogy from item-based phrases and word islands to richer constructions. Tomasello's book presents a comprehensive and well-articulated theory of the language-learning process that is more complete and richer in its heuristic value than any other attempt of its kind. It will be difficult to refute and impossible to ignore. -- Elizabeth Bates, University of California at San Diego Certain to be a landmark in the language sciences, this book persuasively argues that all of our fundamental knowledge of language can be learned on the basis of what we hear, with recourse only to general basic cognitive abilities: intention reading and pattern-finding. No hard-wired language instinct is required. Tomasello's synthesis of linguistics and psychology will permanently change the debates about the developmental origins of language. -- Adele Goldberg, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign