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  • Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition by Michael Tomasello
  • Ronald W. Langacker
Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition. By Michael Tomasello. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. viii, 388. ISBN 0674010302. $45 (Hb).

This is a book that many linguists have been waiting for and that all linguists ought to read. Tomasello outlines a refreshingly new, empirically grounded, and reasonably comprehensive account of language acquisition from a nonnativist perspective. The perspective is quite broad, reflecting the multifaceted research program T and his associates have carried out in recent years. The important findings of this program are presented as part of a wide survey of acquisition studies. Further discussed are such topics as cognitive and social development, language processing, linguistic and cognitive disorders, and the origins of language, as well as the mental, social, and linguistic capacities of primates. The result is a compelling synthesis that situates acquisition in what is cogently argued to be the appropriate biological, psychological, and sociocultural context. In basic agreement with central ideas of cognitive and functional linguistics, the facts of acquisition are interpreted as supporting a usage-based and constructional approach to language structure.

The nine chapters divide naturally into three parts. The first two chapters, ‘Usage-based linguistics’ and ‘Origins of language’, are foundational. The next five chapters examine acquisition at successively later stages and higher levels of organization: ‘Words’, ‘Early syntactic constructions’, ‘Abstract syntactic constructions’, ‘Nominal and clausal constructions’, and ‘Complex constructions and discourse’. General discussion and theoretical conclusions are presented in the last two chapters, ‘Biological, cultural, and ontogenetic processes’ and ‘Toward a psychology of language acquisition’. Also included are references, acknowledgments, and an index.

Ch. 1 observes that the ‘new view of language’ represented by cognitive-functional and usage-based linguistics has ‘truly revolutionary’ implications for theories of language acquisition (6). Familiar arguments for an innate universal grammar are undermined by ‘two fundamental points: (1) Children have at their disposal much more powerful learning mechanisms than simple association and blind induction; and (2) there exist plausible and rigorous theories of language that characterize adult linguistic competence in much more child-friendly terms than does generative grammar’ (3). The most important basis for acquisition is presented by T in Ch. 2: ‘The human adaptation for symbolic communication emerges in human ontogeny … at around 1 year of age [End Page 748] … in the context of a whole suite of new socio-cognitive skills’ (19). Collectively referred to as ‘intention-reading’, these skills include ‘the establishment of joint attentional frames, the understanding of communicative intentions, and a particular type of cultural learning known as role reversal imitation’ (19). This latter makes possible a linguistic symbol, that is, ‘a communicative device understood intersubjectively from both sides of the interaction’ (27).

In Ch. 3, T describes a ‘social-pragmatic’ approach to word learning. It overcomes the problems of ‘constraints theory’ and ‘principles theory’ by focusing ‘on two inherently constraining aspects of the word learning process: (1) the structured social world into which children are born—full of scripts, routines, social games, and other patterned cultural interactions; and (2) children’s social-cognitive capacities for tuning into and participating in this structured social world—especially joint attention and intention-reading’ (87). This accords with the observation that ‘children learn words most readily in situations in which it is easiest to read the adult’s communicative intentions’ (49), notably in the context of cultural routines (88), and explains why acquisition begins when it does: ‘it depends on the ability to share attention with other human beings communicatively and so to form symbols, an ability that emerges near the end of the first year’ (90–91).

The next two chapters discuss the emergence of grammatical constructions, progressing from ‘holophrases’ to ‘pivot schemas’, then to ‘item-based constructions’, and finally to ‘abstract constructions’ invoking general classes. The account hinges on three basic notions. The first is that linguistic structures emerge by schematization from actual language use.

When people repeatedly use the same particular and concrete linguistic symbols to make utterances to one another in ‘similar’ situations, what may emerge over time is a pattern of language use, schematized in...

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