1 Usage-Based Linguistics

2 Origins of Language

2.1 Phylogenetic Origins

2.2 Ontogenetic Origins

2.3 Children's First Utterances

2.4 Summary

3 Words

3.1 Early Words and their Uses

3.2 Processes of Word Learning

3.3 Theories of Word Learning

3.4 Summary

4 Early Syntactic Constructions

4.1 The Nature of Constructions

4.2 Early Constructional Islands

4.3 Marking Syntactic Roles

4.4 Summary

5 Abstract Syntactic Constructions

5.1 Abstract Constructions

5.2 Constructing Constructions

5.3 Constraining Constructions

5.4 Theories of Syntactic Development

5.5 Summary

6 Nominal and Clausal Constructions

6.1 Reference and Nominals

6.2 Predication and Clauses

6.3 Learning Morphology

6.4 Summary

7 Complex Constructions and Discourse

7.1 Complex Constructions

7.2 Conversation and Narrative

7.3 Summary

8 Biotogicat, Cultural, and Ontogenetic Processes

8.1 Dual Inheritance

8.2 Psycholinguistic Processes of Acquisition

8.3 Psycholinguistic Processes of Production

8.4 The Development of Linguistic Representations

8.5 Summary

9 Toward a Psychology of Language Acquisition

References

Acknowledgments

Index