Introduction

In this chapter, we explore how different languages describe events of putting things in places, and how children begin to talk about such events in their very early multi-word utterances. Our aim in focusing on the domain of “putting” events is to allow us to identify some important semantic and psycholinguistic factors that influence the course of acquisition. The overarching question is to determine the extent to which the development of linguistic event representations is influenced by the particular language the child is learning. Events of “putting” are frequently discussed in interactions between caregivers and children, providing us with a rich crosslinguistic database in a high-frequency semantic domain. By examining language-specific characteristics of early event representations, we can make inferences about the cognitive resources and abilities that children bring to the task of learning how to talk about events in their native language.

A major motivation for working crosslinguistically is to investigate the role of language typology in children's mapping of meanings onto forms – in this case, the expression of particular sorts of transitive motion events. In his well-known typology of how languages encode motion events, Talmy (1991, 2000b) distinguishes between ‘satellite-framed’ languages and ‘verb-framed’ languages on the basis of the element in the clause where information about path is characteristically encoded. Our analyses show that this typological distinction does play an important role in the course of language acquisition, but other features that crosscut this typology play a role as well.

Human languages, broadly speaking, provide two kinds of meaningful elements, using both to create grammatical constructions. On the one hand, there are morphemes that make reference to the objects and events of experience, and on the other, there are morphemes that relate these bits of experience to each other and to the discourse perspectives of the speaker. Linguistic theories of all stripes honor this duality, using such distinctions as “material content” vs. “relation” (Sapir 1921/1949), “lexical item” vs. “grammatical item” (Lyons 1968), or, most commonly, “content word” vs. “function word” (or, to include both free and bound morphemes, “functor”). Typically, the first class includes nouns and verbs, and usually also adjectives; the second class includes free morphemes such as conjunctions and prepositions, and bound morphemes, such as affixes marking such categories as number, case, tense, and so forth. It has generally been claimed that: (1) functors express a limited and universal set of meanings (“grammaticizable notions”), and (2) functor classes are small and closed, while content word classes are large and open. The first claim has led to proposals that the set of meanings is, in some sense, “prespecified” for language; the second has led to proposals that this collection of morphemes plays a critical role in both the acquisition and processing of language.

The child encounters culture, to a great extent, through speech. The content of speech conveys the norms, the values, the accumulated knowledge and folkways of the society. However, the form of speech - that is, structured language – bears an uncertain relation to culture. Linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers have taken every possible position on the role played by linguistic form in the thought and behavior of individuals and social groups. In my own comparative research on child language development I have sought to avoid these uncertain issues by attending to the acquisition of linguistic form itself, characterizing my approach as cross-linguistic, but not as cross-cultural. This approach is based on the empirical finding – from our early cross-cultural research (Slobin, 1970, 1973) – that patterns of grammatical development are strikingly similar in widely differing cultural settings; and on the psychological conviction that the course of language development is determined by biological and cognitive factors that are common to our species. Thus I have made use of linguistic diversity as a kind of “natural experiment” in which the world presents children with different tasks to solve.