The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Part 114 pdf

terms of Fillmorean scenes and Goldbergean constructions. We argue that children
do not proceed by first learning words and then learning how to glue them together
with grammar, but rather from the beginning they are attempting to learn whole
adult utterances/constructions to express whole communicative intentions—which
they must later decompose into constituent elements (see also Tomasello 1998, and
commentaries). The more functional side of this view is elaborated by researchers
such as Bates and MacWhinney (1982, 1989), who have focused on the cues (in-
cluding their validity and reliability) that particular grammatical constructions
present to young children. They propose that languages are shaped both historically
and ontogenetically by a ‘‘competition’’ among various linguistic cues, with the
only constructions that can survive being those that present their speakers with
clear, reliable, and efficient symbolizations. In their cross-linguistic work, Bates and
MacWhinney have been able to identify the grammatical markers that children
learning specific languages find to be most valid and reliable, for example, word
order for English speakers’ marking of grammatical relations and case for German
speakers’ marking of grammatical relations.
3.2. Constructional Schemas
It is standard practice in Generative Grammar approaches to child language ac-
quisition to observe a child utterance and assume that it instantiates the same
abstract constructional schema for the child as it does for the adult (as described
in Generative Grammar terms, of course). This is basically equivalent to observing
a Tagalog utterance and analyzing it within the framework of Latin or English
grammar. The proper procedure, if we are interested in the actual psychological
processes underlying a particular child’s use of a particular piece of language, is to
look systematically at all of this child’s uses of that piece of language and, from this
more systematic distributional evidence, to make hypotheses about underlying
structure.
Using this more systematic method, it has now been demonstrated beyond a
reasonable doubt that young children’s early syntactic constructions are highly
concrete, that is to say, organized around individual lexical items or phrases. For
example, in Tomasello (1992), I investigated my English-speaking daughter’s early

use of verbs. I found that during exactly the same developmental period some verbs
were used in only one type of constructional schema and that schema was quite
simple (e.g., Cut X), whereas other semantically similar verbs were used in more
complex schemas of several different types (e.g., Draw X, Draw on Y, Draw X for Y,
Z draw on Q). In addition, morphological marking (e.g., for past tense) was also
very uneven across verbs. Within a given verb’s development, however, there was
great continuity, with new uses almost always replicating previous uses with only
one small addition or modification (e.g., the marking of tense or the adding of a
new participant role); there appeared to be no transfer of structure across verbs.
The hypothesis was thus that children have an early period in which each of their
1100 michael tomasello
verbs forms its own island of organization in an otherwise unorganized language
system (the Verb Island hypothesis), thereby serving to define lexically specific
syntactic categories such as ‘hitter’, ‘thing hit’, and ‘thing used to hit with’ (as
opposed to subject, object, and instrument) (see also Lieven, Pine, and Baldwin
1997).
A number of systematic studies of children learning languages other than English
have also found early item-based organization. For example, in a study of young
Italian-speaking children, Pizzuto and Caselli (1992, 1994) found that of the six pos-
sible person-number forms for each verb in the present tense, about half of all verbs
were used in one form only, and an additional forty percent were used with two or
three forms. Of the ten percent of verbs that appeared in four or more forms,
approximately half were highly frequent, highly irregular forms that could only have
been learned by rote—not by application of an abstract schema or rule. In a similar
study of one child learning to speak Brazilian Portuguese, Rubino and Pine (1998)
found adult-like subject-verb agreement patterns only for the parts of the verb
paradigm that appeared with high frequency for particular verbs (and not for oth-
ers). The clear implication of these findings is that Romance-speaking children do
not master the whole verb paradigm for all their verbs at once, but rather they only
master some endings with some verbs—and often different ones with different

verbs. (For additional findings of this same type, see Berman and Armon-Lotem 1995
for Hebrew; Allen 1996 for Inuktitut; Serrat 1997 for Catalan; Behrens 1998 for Dutch;
Stoll 1998 for Russian; and Gathercole, Sebastia
´
n, and Soto 1999 for Spanish). It
should also be noted that syntactic overgeneralization errors such as Don’t fall me
down—which might be seen as evidence of more general and categorical syntactic
knowledge—are almost never produced before about 2.5 to 3 years of age (see Pinker
1989).
Experiments using novel verbs have also found that young children’s early
productivity with syntactic constructions is highly constrained. Thus, when 2-to
3-year-old children are taught a novel verb in one construction (e.g., intransitive,
passive) and are then encouraged in various ways to use it in another construction
(e.g., transitive), they have great difficulties. They can use a novel verb in a tran-
sitive construction if that is the way they hear it used; it is just that children this
young do not seem to have an abstract and verb-general transitive construction
that readily assimilates verbs that have not been heard in that construction (Akhtar
and Tomasello 1997; Tomasello and Brooks 1998; see Tomasello 2000, for a review).
As they get older, children become quite skillful in experiments such as these,
demonstrating that once they have acquired more abstract linguistic skills children
are perfectly capable of demonstrating their productivity with novel verbs (Mar-
atsos et al. 1987; Pinker, Lebeaux, and Frost 1987). In a similar set of studies dem-
onstrating a similar developmental progression, Akhtar (1999) found that if 2.5-to
3.5-year-old children heard such things as The bird the bus meeked, when given new
toys they quite often repeated the pattern and said such things as The bear the cow
meeked—only consistently correcting to canonical English word order at 4.5 years
of age. This behavior is consistent with the view from the other kinds of nonce-verb
cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1101
studies that when 2-to3-year-olds are learning about meeking they are just learn-
ing about meeking; they do not assimilate this newly learned verb to some more

abstract, verb-general linguistic category or construction that would license a
canonical English transitive utterance.
The general conclusion is clear. In the early stages, children mostly use lan-
guage the way they have heard adults using it; they learn via imitation, where
imitation is characterized not as blind mimicking but as reproducing the same
behavior for the same purpose as someone else (one form of ‘‘cultural learning’’;
Tomasello, Kruger, and Ratner 1993). This leads to an inventory of item-based
utterance schemas, with perhaps some slots in them built up through observed type
variation in that utterance position (see below). The reason that children do not
operate with more abstract linguistic categories and schemas is quite simply be-
cause they have not yet had sufficient linguistic experience in particular usage events
to construct these adult-like linguistic abstractions.
Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, this same item-based approach is also
quite revealing in the case of many of children’s more complex constructions as
well. For example, Da˛browska (2000) looked in detail at one child’s earliest uses of
Wh-questions in English. Her most general finding was that eighty-three percent of
this child’s questions during her third year of life came from one of just twenty
formulas such as Where’s thing? Where thing go? Can I process?Isitproperty?
and so forth. Relatedly, Rowland and Pine (2000) attempted to explain why English-
speaking children sometimes invert the subject and auxiliary in Wh-questions and
sometimes not—leading to errors such as Why they’re not going? What they found
was that the child they studied from age 2 to 4 consistently inverted or failed to invert
particular Wh-word–auxiliary combinations. She thus consistently said such incor-
rect things as Why I can ? What she will ? What you can ?,butatthesame
time she also said such correct thing s as How did ? How do ?Whatdo ? In all,
of the fifty particular Wh-word–auxiliary pairs this child produced, forty-seven of
them were produced either a hundred percent correctly or a hundred percent incor-
rectly. Both of these studies of children’s questions thus show again the item-based
nature of children’s early constructions, in this case for a set of constructions that
develop well into the preschool years.

Children’s use of passive constructions in English also shows some item-based
effects. Thus, Budwig (1990) found that young children use both be-passives and
get-passives relatively early in development (mostly without the by-phrase). How-
ever, they use these two constructions for two different functions. Get-passives are
mostly used to indicate negative things happening to animate agents (e.g., It got
smashed), whereas be-passives are most often used adjectivally or in cases where the
agent is simply not important (e.g., It was tied up). Because of this difference of
function, the two constructions are used with two completely different sets of verbs.
(This finding is thus reminiscent of the findings of Pine and Lieven 1997, that young
children’s earliest use of the English articles a and the is with almost completely
nonoverlapping sets of nouns—because these two articles occur in different con-
structions and have very different functions in them.) Israel, Johnson, and Brooks
1102 michael tomasello
(2000) also analyzed the development of English passives, with particular atten-
tion to the passive participle. They found evidence for a version of Johnson’s con-
structional grounding hypothesis (see above) as children tended to begin with
stative participles (e.g., Pumpkin stuck), then use some participles ambiguously
between stative and active readings (e.g., Do you want yours cut?), then finally use
the active participles characteristic of the full passive (e.g., The spinach was cooked
by Mommy).
Finally, Diessel and Tomasello (2000) investigated young English-speaking
children’s earliest relative clauses. Surprisingly, these did not turn out to be what are
often thought of as prototypical relative clauses used to restrict referents with all
kinds of nominals. Instead, virtually all of children’s earliest relative clauses had
as the main clause a presentational construction with a copular verb, for example,
It’s a , There’s a , Where’s the ?, Here are the , and so on. The relative
clause then served to provide new information about the predicate nominal (ob-
ject) (see Lambrecht 1988 and Fox and Thompson 1990 for some similar analyses of
many adult relative clauses in informal adult conversation). This led to such utter-
ances as That’s the toy I found, Here’s the one that’s empty, and so forth. Unlike in

adult written discourse and most experiments with young children, there were
virtually no relative clauses modifying subjects. The main point in the current con-
text is that even this very complex construction is firmly based in a set of simpler
constructions (copular presentationals) that children have mastered as item-based
constructions some time before relative clauses are first acquired and produced.
3.3. Usage-Based Syntax
The imitative learning of particular linguistic forms cannot be the whole story of
language acquisition, however, since children do at some point go beyond what
they have heard from adults and create novel yet canonical utterances. They do this
first by creating ‘‘slots’’ in otherwise item-based schemas (Tomasello et al. 1997),
leading to verb-island and related constructions. It is not known precisely how they
create such slots, but one possibility is that they observe variation in that utterance
position in the speech they hear around them, and so induce the slot on the basis
of ‘‘type frequency.’’ In general, in usage-based models the token frequency of an
expression in the language learner’s experience tends to entrench the constituent
items as a unit, enabling the user to access and fluently use the expression as
a whole, for example, the common English discourse reply I-dunno (Langacker
1988; Krug 1998; Bybee and Scheibman 1999). On the other hand, the type frequency
of an expression, that is, the number of different forms (items) in which the
language learner experiences the expression or some element of the expression,
determines the creative possibilities, or productivity, of the construction (Bybee
1985, 1995). Together, these two types of frequency—along with the corresponding
child learning processes—may explain the ways in which young children acquire
the use of specific linguistic expressions in specific communicative contexts
cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1103
and then generalize these expressions to new contexts based on the various kinds of
type variations they hear—including everything from type variation in a single slot
to type variation in all of the constituents of a complex construction.
Another possibility—not mutually exclusive but rather complementary to this
process—is that abstract constructions are created by a relational mapping across

different verb island constructions (Gentner and Markman 1997). For example, in
English the several verb island constructions that children have with the verbs give,
tell, show, send, and so forth, all share a ‘transfer’ meaning, and they all appear in
a structure: NP þ V þ NP þ NP. The specific hypothesis is thus that children make
constructional analogies based on similarities of both form and function: two ut-
terances or constructions are analogous if a ‘‘good’’ structure mapping is found
both on the level of linguistic form and on the level of communicative function.
Precisely how this might be done is not known at this time, but there are
some proposals that a key element in the process might be some kind of ‘‘critical
mass’’ of exemplars, to give children sufficient raw material from which to con-
struct their abstractions (Marchman and Bates 1994). From another perspective,
Goldberg, Casenhiser, and Sethuraman (2004) propose that all of the most basic
verb-argument constructions of English have one or more basic verbs, usually a
‘‘light verb,’’ as their central sense (e.g., give for the ditransitive), and they provide
some evidence that many children learn their first verb-argument constructions
with this central verb for this central sense (see Ninio 1999 for a similar proposal).
The only experimental study of children’s construction of an abstract con-
structional schema is Childers and Tomasello (2001). We investigated the linguistic
skills and representations underlying English-speaking 2.5-year-olds’ production
of transitive utterances such as He’s kicking it. The main study was a training study in
which children heard several hundred transitive utterances in three separate sessions.
Half the children learned new English verbs (and so increased their transitive verb
vocabularies during training), whereas the other half heard only verbs they already
knew. Within these groups, some children heard all of the utterances with full nouns
as agent and patient, whereas others heard utterances with both pronouns (i.e., He’s
verb-ing it) and full nouns as agent and patient. They were then tested to see if they
could creatively produce a transitive utterance with a nonce verb. Children were best
at generalizing the transitive construction to the nonce verb if they had been trained
with pronouns and nouns, regardless of the familiarity of the trained verbs. That is,
the consistent pronoun frame He’s ve r b-ing it seemed to facilitate children’s for-

mation of a verb-general transitive schema to a greater degree than the learning of
additional transitive verbs alone, in the absence of such a stabilizing frame. This
suggests that children construct their early abstract constructions out of both (i)
particular lexical or morphological items and patterns and (ii) observed type varia-
tion (with some functional consistency) in particular utterance constituents. A
possible graphic depiction of the process may be seen in figure 41.3 (based on
Da˛browska 2000, who based hers on Langacker 1987a).
As constructions become more abstract, their generalizing tendencies must also
be constrained; all verbs cannot be used in all constructions (see Pinker 1989). One
1104 michael tomasello
hypothesis is that they do this by becoming more entrenched and resistant to flex-
ible use (see Bybee 1995). In the only experimental investigation of this process,
Brooks et al. (1999) modeled the use of a number of fixed-transitivity English verbs
for children from 3.5 to 8 years—verbs such as disappear that are exclusively in-
transitive and verbs such as hit that are exclusively transitive. There were four pairs
of verbs, one member of each pair typically learned early by children and used often
by adults (and so presumably more entrenched) and one member of each pair
typically learned later by children and used less frequently by adults (less en-
trenched). The four pairs were: come-arrive, take-remove, hit-strike, disappear-
vanish (the first member of each pair being more entrenched). The finding was that,
in the face of adult questions attempting to induce them to overgeneralize, children
of all ages were less likely to overgeneralize the strongly entrenched verbs than the
weakly entrenched verbs; that is, they were more likely to produce I vanished it than
I disappeared it. This finding suggests not only that children say what they hear, but
that the more they hear it, the more it seems to them that this is the only way it can
Figure 41.3. Three levels of schematicity in the child’s constructional schemas
(TR ¼ trajector; LM ¼ landmark)
cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1105
be said. Brooks and Tomasello (1999) demonstrated that the alternative con-
structions children have available to meet discourse demands (e.g., in the above

example, the availability of I made it disappear) also play an important role in
constraining abstract constructions. After four years of age, children also rely on
generalizations about which semantic classes of verbs (as identified by Pinker 1989)
participate in which abstract constructions.
Given that children are acquiring linguistic constructions of various shapes and
sizes and degrees of abstraction throughout early development (i.e., building their
linguistic inventories), we may now ask about their ability to put these construc-
tions together creatively in order to adapt to the exigencies of particular usage
events. Lieven et al. (2003) addressed this issue in a naturalistic study of one 2-year-
old child learning English. The novelty was that this child’s language was recorded
using extremely dense taping intervals—five hours per week for six weeks, roughly
five to ten times denser than most existing databases of child language and ac-
counting for approximately eight to ten percent of all of the child’s utterances
during this period. In order to investigate this child’s constructional creativity, all of
her 500þ utterances produced during the last one-hour taping session at the end
of the six-week period were designated as target utterances. Then, for each target
utterance, there was a search for ‘‘similar’’ utterances produced by the child (not the
mother) in the previous six weeks of taping. The main goal was thus to determine
for each utterance recorded on the final day of the study what kinds of syntactic
operations were necessary for its production, that is to say, in what ways did the
child have to modify things she had previously said (her ‘‘stored linguistic expe-
rience’’) to produce the thing she was now saying. We may call these operations
‘‘usage-based syntactic operations’’ since they explicitly assume that the child does
not put together each of her utterances from scratch, morpheme by morpheme, but
rather, she puts together her utterances from a motley assortment of different kinds
of preexisting psycholinguistic units.
And so, following the usage-based models of Bybee (1995), Croft (2000), and
Langacker (2000), the question was how this child was able to ‘‘cut and paste’’
together her previously mastered linguistic constructions (mostly item-based in
one way or another) in order to create a novel utterance in a specific usage event.

What was found by this procedure was that:

over 3/4 of the utterances the child produced on this day were things she
had previously said before (some of these being conversational routines
such as Bye-bye, but others were less formulaic utterances);

of the creative utterances, almost 3/4 consisted of repetitions of an estab-
lished utterance schema plus other linguistic material ‘‘filled in’’ to slots or
‘‘added on’’ to the beginning or end; for example, the child had said many
scores of times previously Where’s the X?, but on the target tape she said
creatively Where’s the butter?;

a small minority of utterances (5% of the total utterances) differed from things
she had said before in more than one way; these mostly involved the com-
bination of ‘‘filling in’’ and ‘‘adding on’’ to an established utterance schema.
1106 michael tomasello
It is also important that there was almost perfect functional consistency across
different uses of this child’s utterance schemas; the child filled the slot with the same
kind of linguistic items or phrases across the six-week period of study. The overall
picture is thus that the young child’s linguistic creativity occurs in the context of her
already well-established item-based constructions.
This ‘‘cut-and-paste’’ approach is also used by young children to construct some
of their more complex utterances a bit later in their development. For example, in
Diessel and Tomasello (2001), we looked at young English-speaking children’s
earliest utterances with sentential complements from 2 to 5 years of age. We found
that virtually all of them were composed of a simple sentence schema that the child
had already mastered, combined with one of a delimited set of matrix verbs (see
also Bloom 1991). These matrix verbs were of two types. First were epistemic verbs
such as think and know. In almost all cases, children used I think to indicate their
own uncertainty about something, and they basically never used the verb think in

anything but this first-person present-tense form; that is, there were virtually no
examples of He thinks , She thinks , or the like, virtually no examples of I don’t
think , I can’t think , or the like, and virtually no examples of I thought ,
I didn’t think , or the like. And there were almost no uses with a complementizer
(virtually no examples of I think that ). It thus appears that for many young
children I think is a relatively fixed phrase meaning something like ‘maybe’. The
child then pieces together this fixed phrase with a full proposition as a sort of
evidential marker, but not as a ‘‘sentence embedding’’ as it is typically portrayed in
more formal analyses. The second kind of matrix verbs were attention-getting verbs
like Look and See, used in conjunction with full finite clauses. In this case, children
used these ‘‘matrix’’ verbs almost exclusively in imperative form (again almost no
negations, no nonpresent tenses, no complementizers), suggesting again an item-
based approach not involving syntactic embedding. Thus, when examined closely,
children’s earliest complex sentences look much less like adult sentential comple-
ments (which are used most often in written discourse) and much more like various
kinds of ‘‘pastiches’’ of various kinds of established item-based constructions (see
Hopper 1998).
4. Conclusion

From the beginning, the study of language acquisition has been a central com-
ponent in the Generative Grammar paradigm, and even today issues of ‘‘learn-
ability’’ play a central role in the theory. This is ironic, of course, because in Gen-
erative Grammar nothing essential is really acquired; the ‘‘core’’ aspects of grammar
are biologically given and only the ‘‘peripheral’’ aspects of linguistic competence
are actually learned. Equally ironic, however, is the fact that the study of language
acquisition—as exemplified in the many studies reviewed here—has not played a
cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1107
central role in the Cognitive Linguistics paradigm. The irony in this case derives
from the fact that Cognitive Linguistics stresses language use, entrenchment, con-
structional schema formation, and other usage-based processes that obviously have

their origins in childhood, but empirical studies of how these things actually take
place have traditionally not been considered of direct relevance for theory.
But things are beginning to change. The study of language acquisition is be-
coming more prominent both in the publications and in the meetings of cognitive
linguists, as developmentalists see that they need a workable theory of adult lin-
guistic competence and cognitive linguists see that there is something to be gained
from studying simpler forms of linguistic competence and how they evolve into
more complex forms ontogenetically. Hopefully, this convergence will accrue to
the benefit of people who are mainly concerned with linguistic theory, of people
who are mainly concerned with language history, and of people who are mainly
concerned with children’s development. Future research should concentrate on the
usage-based mechanisms by means of which both children and adults both acquire
and creatively modify the linguistic constructions they have inherited historically
from previous users of their language.
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