First Verbs: A Case Study of Early Grammatical Development

by Michael Tomasello

First Verbs is a detailed diary study of one child's earliest language development during her second year of life. Using a Cognitive Linguistics framework, the author focuses on how his daughter acquired her first verbs, and the role verbs played in her early grammatical development. The author argues that many of a child's first grammatical structures are tied to individual verbs, and that earliest language is based on general cognitive and social-cognitive processes, especially event structures and cultural learning.

384 pages, Paperback

First published March 27, 1992

About the author

Michael Tomasello is an American developmental and comparative psychologist. He is a co-director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.