First verbs

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.