Constructing a Language: A Usage-Based Theory of Language Acquisition

By Michael Tomasello. 2003

1,444 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Language and Linguistics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/41cb530e203e7e27fd8ea857c98135b042a1cd86

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Citations in the corpus

The English Resultative as a Family of Constructions (2004, background): “…is emerging is that the grammar contains the property resultative as an overarching generalization, but particular subclasses, constrained in all sorts of different ways, are learned individually (see also Boas 2000, and for a learning theory in which this is expected see Tomasello 2000, 2003).”
The myth of language universals: language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. (2009, background): “In constructivist usagebased approaches, children are assumed to build up syntactic categories and structures of their language gradually, using cues such as frequency and regularity of specific constructions (e.g., Lieven et al. 2003; Tomasello 2003a; 2009).”
Why Don't Apes Point? (2006, background): “It is also relevant that in a systematic review of ape vocal and gestural communication, Tomasello (2003b) considers their ability to adjust for different audiences and notes that the audience effects that exist are based on whether others are present or not in the immediate context, or whether…”
Object relatives made easy: A cross-linguistic comparison of the constraints influencing young children's processing of relative clauses (2007, background): “Maratsos and Chalkley ( 1980 ) first discussed this possibility with respect to language learning, and it is now embodied in theories of acquisition such as Tomasello's ( 2003 ) constructivist approach (‘functional distributional analysis’), emergentist approaches such as those outlined by Seidenber”
Beyond formalities: The case of language acquisition (2005, background): “Tomasello (2003) also argues that connectionist accounts – at least in their current form in which almost everything is based on distributional analysis with no account of communicative function – are not sufficient to account for language acquisition.”
Embodied Sentence Comprehension (2005, background): “fictional situation (e.g., Langacker, 1987; Tomasello, 2003 ).”
Avoiding dative overgeneralisation errors: semantics, statistics or both? (2014, background): “We assume that speakers acquire a construction by abstracting across concrete exemplars of the construction that they have stored in memory (an assumption shared by most usage- and exemplar-based accounts of acquisition; e.g., Bod, 2009; Gahl & Yu, 2006; Goldberg, 1995; Langacker, 1987; Tomasello, 2”
Cognitive pragmatics: The mental processes of communication (2010, background): “Language production emerges gradually in children in the months following the first birthday just because they need that these fundamental skills of intentionreading are firmly in place (Tomasello 2003).”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “Unlike in the case of SF, who learned strategies to perfectly unpack chunks from within chunks to reproduce the original string of digits, language comprehension typically employs lossy compression to chunk the input.”
Visual perception and the statistical properties of natural scenes. (2008, background): “In this case, there are just two relevant states of the environment (distal stimuli): ω = fruit and ω = leaf , and due to variations in lighting and reflectance, a large number of possible wavelength spectra (proximal stimuli) for each distal stimulus.”
The gap is social: Human shared intentionality and culture (2010, background): “…than do chimpanzees for copying the unnecessary “style” of an instrumental action (Carpenter and Tomasello, unpubl. data), and in acquiring linguistic conventions, children are not just driven by communicative efficacy but also by the desire to do it the way the others do it (Tomasello 2003).”
Indeterminacy in language acquisition: the role of child directed speech and joint attention (2004, background): “In this context, learning scenarios such as those presented by Goldberg (1995) and Tomasello (1999, 2003) become highly plausible.”
Children's understanding of the agent-patient relations in the transitive construction: Cross-linguistic comparisons between Cantonese, German, and English (2009, methodology): “…functional constituents are not as consistently aligned as those in English, while they are available more often than in Cantonese (see Gentner and Medina 1998 and Tomasello 2003: 166 on the importance of a consistent alignment of the functional items for structure mapping and schematization).”
Fast Mapping but Poor Retention by 24-Month-Old Infants. (2008, background): “From a more social-constructionist position (Tomasello, 2003), one might argue that the basis of this effect is that the ostensive naming event makes it more obvious to the child that the experimenter intended to name the novel object.”
Second Language Use, Socialization, and Learning in Internet Interest Communities and Online Gaming (2009, background): “…key insights from earlier work by Peirce (1955), Wittgenstein (1953), Whorf (1956), and Garfinkel (1967) and bringing them into contact with current scholarship by linguists and communication theorists such as Rommetveit (1974, 1992), Hopper (1998), Hanks (1996), and Tomasello (2003), among others.”