Includes bibliographical references and index.

Front Matter -- Copyright page -- Note on Supplementary Material -- Foreword* / Eve V. Clark and Dan I. Slobin -- Preface / Thomas Fuyin Li and Yan Ding -- Introduction and Overview -- Spatial Semantics in Languages and Language Learners -- Mechanisms of Semantic Category Construction in First Language Acquisition -- The Crosslinguistic Categorization of Everyday Events: The Case of “Cutting and Breaking” -- Special Meanings for Grammatical Morphemes? -- Noun Semantics and “Natural Ontology” in Language Acquisition -- Verb Learning and Argument Structure -- Language Typology and “Thinking for Speaking” -- Learning about End-State Entailment in German versus Mandarin Chinese -- Crosslinguistic Semantic Variation and Whorfian Hypothesis -- Websites for Cognitive Linguistics and CIFCL Speakers -- Back Matter -- About the Series Editor.

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In her Beijing lectures, Melissa Bowerman presents a lucid introduction and account of her research on a range of topics: how children acquire the semantics of spatial terms, how they construct categories and acquire the semantics of nouns, and how they master the semantics of verbs in early language acquisition. Bowerman also covers the learning of argument structure and expressions of end-state, with special attention to the adult speech that guides children, and hence also the role of typology in acquisition; how cross-linguistic variation affects, for example, how speakers represent ‘cutting’ and ‘breaking’ in different languages, and the relation of the Whorfian Hypothesis to cross-linguistic variations in the semantics of languages. Bowerman’s over-riding concern throughout is with how children come to master the first language being spoken to them by their parents and caregivers.

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