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CONSTRUCTING A LANGUAGE: A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 2004

Susan Foster-Cohen
Susan Foster-Cohen
Affiliation:
University of Canterbury
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Extract

CONSTRUCTING A LANGUAGE: A USAGE-BASED THEORY OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Michael Tomasello. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. viii + 388. $45.00 cloth.

Michael Tomasello has an impressive opus of publications in both child language development and primate research. This book represents a synthesis of that work as well as the exposition of an account of language development, which provides a thought-provoking challenge to the generative enterprise. As such, it is an important contribution to the literature of first language acquisition, and by extrapolation, of SLA, because it offers an account of how learners can extract language from the input without reference to linguistic-specific predispositions. It succeeds in many respects and fails in others, as this review will try to explain.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 2004 , pp. 491 - 493
Copyright
© 2004 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

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