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Carroll, ed., Language, thought and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, 134–59. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1956) Xrakovskij, Victor S., ed. 2001. Typology of imperative constructions. Munich: LINCOM. (Revised and expanded translation of Victor S. Xrakovskij, ed., Tipologija impera- tivnyx konstrukcij. St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1992) Yu, Ning. 1998. The contemporary theory of metaphor: A perspective from Chinese. Am- sterdam: John Benjamins. cognitive linguistics and linguistic typology 1091 chapter 41 COGNITIVE LINGUISTICS AND FIRST LANGUAGE ACQUISITION michael tomasello 1. Introduction Human beings are the only organisms on planet Earth who actively attempt to direct and share the attention of conspecifics to outside entities. In human ontogeny this begins nonlinguistically, as human infants employ a variety of nonlinguistic means of attention-directing and attention-sharing, including such things as pointing to interesting events and holding up objects to show them to other people. These species-unique communicative behaviors set the stage for language acqui- sition by establishing the ‘‘referential triangle’’ (me-you-it, or alternatively, speaker- listener-topic) within which all future linguistic communication will take place. Some time after their first birthday, infants begin to make their first serious attempts to acquire and use pieces of a conventional language. These attempts are not aimed at learning words, quite simply because infants at this age do not know what words are (see Wittgenstein’s 1953 critique of the assumption that the young child ‘‘already knows a language, just not this one’’). They are aimed at learning the com- municative behaviors by means of which adults attempt to manipulate other per- sons’ attention, namely, utterances. Children thus learn first to comprehend and produce whole utterances they have heard other people using, although they may do this initially in child-like form (e.g., they may learn just one part of the adult’s utterance to express the entire communicative intention—a so-called holophrase). Over time, children then learn to extract from these utterances words and other functionally significant pieces of language for future use as constituents in other ut- terances. In addition, as in all areas of their cognitive and social development, chil- dren gradually begin to construct abstract categories and schemas—out of both whole utterances and utterance constituents such as words and phrases—for compre- hending and producing linguistic creations that they have never before heard. This process operates differently for different languages, of course, although with some universal features across languages as well. To investigate the acquisition process in more detail, what is needed most ur- gently is an adequate description of precisely what it is children are attempting to acquire—that is, a description of both language in general and the specific language being acquired by a given child in particular. Generative Grammar, with its abstract, essentialistic, quasi-mathematical categories that cannot change ontogenetically, is obviously of no help. The most useful descriptions for developmental researchers come from Functional and Cognitive Linguistics, because these approaches allow researchers to talk explicitly about the symbols, conceptualizations, and communi- cative functions that constitute human linguistic competence, and they allow them to do this in a way that can be adapted flexibly to changes that occur over developmental time. In this chapter, I review some of the best-known and most interesting work on language acquisition from within the framework of Functional-Cognitive Lin- guistics, broadly construed. This includes most importantly work on (i) meaning and conceptualization and (ii) usage and grammar (grammatical constructions). Although the term is often used more narrowly, I will call this general theoretical approach ‘‘usage-based’’ to emphasize the assumption common to all functional and cognitive approaches that linguistic structure emerges from use, both his- torically and ontogenetically. This is as opposed to the dominant view in the field of language acquisition today in which ‘‘core’’ grammatical competence is innately given, and all that develops is peripheral skills involving the lexicon, pragmatics, information processing, and the like (e.g., Pinker 1994). 2. Meaning and Conceptualization in Child Language Lakoff (1990) argues that what distinguishes Cognitive Linguistics most clearly from other approaches to human language is the cognitive commitment, which enjoins linguists to perform their analyses in theoretical terms compatible with other research cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1093 in the cognitive sciences. Similarly, Langacker (1987a) argues that languages are best described and explained exclusively in terms of more basic processes of human cog- nition and communication. This foundational role for general cognition does not preclude the possibility, of course, that acquiring a particular language may lead the people of a particular cultural group to construe the world to some extent in their own individual way. Developmental research has approached the issue from both of these perspectives, that is, in terms of the cognitive foundations of language ac- quisition and in terms of the role of language acquisition in shaping cognitive development. 2.1. Image Schemas and Word Meanings Mandler (1992) attempted to specify some of the most important conceptualiza- tions that enable human infants to acquire a language. Along with the conceptu- alization of objects, infants must also conceptualize the dynamic and relational aspects of their experience such as animacy, containment, support, and the like. Mandler posited that these more dynamic aspects of infant condition are best characterized in terms of image schemas as investigated by Johnson (1987), Lakoff (1987), Langacker (1987a), and Talmy (1988). For example, Mandler proposed that to account for the cognitive dimensions of early language we must posit that young children understand a number of different kinds of motion, both inanimate and animate (illustrated in figure 41.1). These image schemas are based in children’s perception of the world, but they are more general and abstract than any particular perceptual experience; they are conceptualizations that result from a process of ‘‘perceptual analysis’’ in which the commonalities across a number of specific ex- periences are extracted. Mandler (1992: 587) thus proposes that ‘‘image schemas provide a level of representation intermediate between perception and language that facilitates the process of language acquisition.’’ Other image schemas she dis- cusses are well-known examples from the Cognitive Linguistics literature, such as containment, force, part-whole, link, path, and so on. Following cognitive linguists still further, she also hypothesizes that such logical relations as if-then derive from these concrete, perceptually based image schemas. Focusing on the earliest stages of language acquisition, Gentner (1982) and Gentner and Boroditsky (2001) provided a plausible explanation for why many children acquiring many different languages typically learn nouns earlier than verbs. In brief, her answer was that the nouns children learn early in development are prototypically used to refer to concrete objects, and concrete objects are more easily individuated from their environmental surroundings than are states, actions, and processes. Gentner’s hypothesis may be seen as providing developmental support for Langacker’s (1987b) analysis in which nouns are seen as words used to construe some experience as a ‘‘bounded entity’’ whereas verbs are used to construe some experience as a state or process (e.g., explosion vs. explode), with nouns being autonomous and verbs being dependent (in the sense of only being comprehensible 1094 michael tomasello as the state or activity of a preexisting participant of some type). Gentner’s analysis and data thus show that words for autonomous entities, that is, nominals, are generally learned first and that the prototype of a nominal referent is a spatially discrete individual object—with the noun category later extending from this prototype to less concrete bounded entities. In the case of verbs, I attempted to specify—using Langacker-like image-schema diagrams—the particular conceptualizations underlying one English-speaking child’s early use of verbs (Tomasello 1992). I began with the premise that young children do not conceptualize the world in the same way as adults. Therefore, in providing de- scriptions of the conceptualizations underlying children’s language, it was necessary to invoke a specific theory of the nature of those cognitive structures at a particular period of ontogeny. Invoking Piaget’s ([1935] 1952,[1937] 1954)theoryofinfantcog- nition, I proposed that the meanings of particular verbs could be specified in terms of four basic conceptual elements: space, time, causality, and objects. That is, following Langacker (1987b), a verb was seen as depicting a process that unfolded in a series of discrete sequential steps, typically with an object changing location or state across this time (with perhaps the causal source of that motion integrally involved as well). The hypothesized conceptualizations underlying this child’s early language thus had the virtue of being things that, insofar as Piaget’s cognitive theory is correct, he or she could potentially have constructed from his or her own experience as the child at- tempted to comprehend and use these words in communicating with adults. Fig- ure 41.2 provides for some examples. The diagram for get indicates t hat some per- son [P] acts as an agent to bring an object [o] from Location X to himself or herself. The diagram for back indicates that an object left the child’s sphere of influence (to Locations X) and that he or she now wants it to return (manner unspecified). The Figure 41.1. Mandler’s (1992) analysis of some important dynamic image schemas un- derlying early language development ([A] represents a source of self-generated motion) cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1095 diagrams for have and give indicate possession (shaded circles), with the main differ- ence being that give is more specific about where the object is now (P1’s possession) and how P2 comes to possess it (P1 causes). Finally, the diagram for share indicates that the child wishes to possess an object simultaneously with another person for some time, whereas the diagram for use indicates that he or she wants for the moment exclusive control but not possession—the child will return it later. As development proceeded, more complex conceptualizations were constructed on the basis of both nonlinguistic and linguistic experience. Budwig (1989) explicitly investigated the causality and agency underlying some of children’s earliest utterances. Specifically, she investigated how young English- speaking children refer to the self. It turns out that in the second and third years of life, children say such non-adult-like things as Me jump and My build tower, along with some adult-like things such as I like peas. In a detailed analysis of how the children used these different words, Budwig determined that the words me and my were used most often for prototypical agency, whereas I was used most often for references to self as experiencer. Invoking prototype theory, Budwig claimed that agent and experiencer are two different ways to construe the role of the self in various activities. Essentially, the agent is a causal source—in terms of Talmy’s (1988) ‘‘force-dynamic schema’’—in a way that experiencer is not. There has been no systematic work on the metaphorical dimensions of young children’s early language. Although there are some studies of young children’s un- derstanding of explicit metaphors (Winner 1988) and a few theoretical speculations Figure 41.2. Hypothesized conceptualizations underlying one child’s early use of some verbs of possession 1096 michael tomasello about ‘‘primary metaphors’’ that might apply to children (Grady and Taub 1996), there is basically nothing like a systematic study of how young children relate, for example, concrete uses of prepositions as in out of the box to less concrete uses as in out of her mind—and indeed there is very little research on children’s under- standing of abstract words and expressions in general. The one main exception is Johnson’s (1999) ‘‘constructional grounding’’ hypothesis, in which young children are aided in the acquisition of, for example, the epistemic meaning of see (e.g., I see your point) by first being exposed to uses of see that are ambiguous between the perceptual and epistemic meanings (e.g., Let’s see what’s in the box). There are good reasons for the relative neglect of these issues, as in all cases it is very difficult to determine the extent to which children are understanding an expression as meta- phorical rather than as straightforwardly conventional. But there should be ways using experimental methods to make such determinations, and so this would seem to be an area of developmental research wide open for exploration by cognitive linguists. 2.2. Social Cognition, Perspective-Taking, and Culture The acquisition of language also has important foundations in children’s social cognition. Most importantly, the ability to understand linguistic symbols as devices for directing attention emerges out of young children’s broader nonlinguistic skills for participating with adults in joint attentional interactions (Bruner 1983). These may be different to some degree in different cultures. In Tomasello (1999), I argue that the very same social cognitive skills that enable children to follow into and direct adult attention nonlinguistically are also responsible for children’s ability to understand the different perspectives and con- struals that linguistic symbols embody. In general, all of the different kinds of con- struals outlined by Langacker (1987a), Fillmore (1988b), Talmy (1996), and others, are part and parcel of language acquisition practically from the beginning. Clark (1997), in particular, has documented the myriad different ways that young children may indicate different perspectives linguistically. In general, children learn quite early to make distinctions based on granularity-specificity (chair, furniture, thing), perspective (chase-flee, buy-sell), function (father, lawyer, guest), spatial perspective (here-there, come-go), and many other of the categories of linguistic construal outlined by cognitive linguists. Clark (1997: 1) concludes: ‘‘The many-perspectives account of lexical acquisition proposes that children learn to take alternative per- spectives along with the words they acquire, and, therefore, from the first, readily apply multiple terms to the same objects or events.’’ Clancy (2003) demonstrated that young children use some of these same social- pragmatic skills in more extended discourse. In particular, she showed that young Korean-speaking children make many of the same kinds of referential choices as adults in verb-argument constructions, and thus they create the same kinds of ‘‘preferred argument structure’’ configurations in which new information as cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1097 embodied in lexical nouns occurs mostly in intransitive subjects and transitive objects (S and O), not in transitive subjects (A). However, as Berman and Slobin (1994) showed in their large-scale study, there is still much work to be done. In a cross-linguistic investigation of preschool children’s ability to narrate a relatively complex story with multiple interrelated events, they found that young children have great difficulties in using their fledgling perspective-taking abilities in more complex discourse interactions and narratives. In documenting the greater skills of school-age children as compared with preschool children, they note that ‘‘younger children take fewer expressive options because: (a) cognitively, they cannot con- ceive of the full range of encodable perspectives; (b) communicatively, they cannot fully assess the listener’s viewpoint; and (c) linguistically, they do not command the full range of formal devices’’ (Berman and Slobin: 1994: 15). The overall conclusion of their mammoth study is that children’s perspective-taking skills in language result from a complex interaction of their cognitive and communicative skills and the symbolic resources provided by the particular language they are learning. Recent research has also demonstrated that particular languages play an in- strumental role in leading young children to conceptualize and perspectivize the world in particular ways. Of special importance empirically is the work of Choi and Bowerman (1991). They showed that very young children, still in their second year of life, conceptualize spatial relationships differently depending on the language they are learning. Thus, young English-speaking and Korean-speaking children conceptualize differently basic spatial relations of containment and support be- cause English encodes these with prepositions such as in and on , whereas Korean uses verbs that indicate such different kinds of things as ‘tight fitting’ and ‘loose fitting’. Also of interest is the empirical work of Brown (2000) and de Leo ´ n(2000), who have shown that Gentner’s (1982) hypothesis of the developmental primacy of nouns over verbs may not hold for some Mayan languages in which verbs play a much more important communicative role than nouns in child-adult discourse. Recent theoretical and empirical work by Sinha and Jensen de Lo ´ pez (2000; re- viewed in chapter 49 of this volume) extends this same perspective to a varied array of other basic spatial concepts. Sinha (this volume, chapter 49) argues that just as language may be said to emerge from cognition embodied in the human body, it may also be said to emerge from cognition embodied in the culture at large. 3. Usage and Grammar in Child Language Perhaps the central problem in the study of child language acquisition from a functional-cognitive point of view is the problem of how children create complex and abstract linguistic constructions in the language they are learning. Of most 1098 michael tomasello direct application are the ideas of Langacker (1987a) on constructional schemas, Fillmore (1988a) and Goldberg (1995) on constructions, and Bybee (1995) on the role of frequency-based processes such as token frequency (entrenchment) and type frequency. Also important is cross-linguistic work demonstrating the great variety of grammatical constructions that human beings can create and learn (e.g., Dryer 1997; Croft 2000). 3.1. Cognitive and Functional Bases In a major statement on the cognitive bases of children’s early grammatical de- velopment, Slobin (1985–97) proposed that young children’s prelinguistic cogni- tion was organized into a small number of basic experiential scenes. Following the lead of Fillmore’s (1977a, 1977b) ideas on the everyday interactional scenes and frames that structure human language, Slobin proposed that much of children’s early language was structured by (i) the Manipulative Activity Scene, in which an animate agent causes a change of state in an inanimate patient, and (ii) the Figure/ Ground scene, in which a person or object moves along some spatial path. Fol- lowing the lead of Talmy (e.g., 1985, 1988), Slobin further proposed that certain of the concepts in these scenes were designated universally and a priori to be especially conducive to grammatical rather than to lexical expression. Grammatical devel- opment then consisted of children learning how their particular language encoded these privileged concepts, with the acquisition process taking place in the context of a number of cognitive operating principles that reflected general cognition— which played a role in determining such things as order of acquisition, ease of acquisition, and so forth. In one of the most important papers in the modern study of child language acquisition, Slobin (1997) modified his views significantly. As a result of the decade of cross-linguistic work that he has conducted or collected together in his series of edited volumes (e.g., Slobin 1985–97, 1997) and taking into account typologi- cal work in general, Slobin’s revised view is that there is much too much variation across languages (and much too rapid changes within languages) for any set of privileged grammaticalizable notions to be designated by Mother Nature ahead of time. In this view, universals of language structure emerge from the simultaneous interaction of universals of human cognition, communication, and vocal-auditory processing. The particularities of particular languages—as embodied in historically constituted constructions of various types—then present children with a problem space within which these universal abilities operate and create grammatical struc- ture. The importance of Slobin’s new view—solidly grounded in the largest body of cross-linguistic work collected to date—is its demonstration that language ac- quisition is a complex constructive process, requiring virtually all of the child’s cognitive resources. The more cognitive side of this view is elaborated in Tomasello and Brooks (1999), which characterizes children’s early linguistic productions holistically in cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1099 . approached the issue from both of these perspectives, that is, in terms of the cognitive foundations of language ac- quisition and in terms of the role of language acquisition in shaping cognitive development. 2.1 Therefore, in providing de- scriptions of the conceptualizations underlying children’s language, it was necessary to invoke a specific theory of the nature of those cognitive structures at a particular period. is the cognitive commitment, which enjoins linguists to perform their analyses in theoretical terms compatible with other research cognitive linguistics and first language acquisition 1093 in the