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Sentence First, Arguments Afterward collects the important papers of Lila Gleitman, a pioneer of the field of cognitive science. The book explores language from the perspective of language acquisition, linguistic relativity, and the very nature of syntax and semantics. Gleitman reveals insights that are important both for their perspective on the history of the field and for current practice in the study of language and thought.
List of contents
- Section I. PRELIMINARIES
- Foreword by Noam Chomsky
- Chapter 1. From Structuralism to Cognitive Science: Lila R. Gleitman's Contributions to Language and Cognition, Jeffrey Lidz
- Section II. WHAT DO THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?
- Chapter 2. The Impossibility of Language Acquisition (And How They Do It), Lila R. Gleitman, Mark Y. Liberman, Cynthia A. McLemore, and Barbara H. Partee
- Chapter 3. A Study in the Acquisition of Language: Free Responses to Commands, Elizabeth F. Shipley, Carlota S. Smith, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 4. The Emergence of the Child as Grammarian, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, and Elizabeth F. Shipley
- Chapter 5. Language Use and Language Judgment, Henry Gleitman and Lila R. Gleitman
- Section III. WHERE DOES LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE COME FROM? INPUT AND INNATENESS
- Chapter 6. Mother, I'd Rather Do It Myself: Some Effects and Non-Effects of Maternal Speech Style, Elissa L. Newport, Henry Gleitman, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 7. Beyond Herodotus: The Creation of Language by Linguistically Deprived Deaf Children, Heidi Feldman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 8. Every Child an Isolate: Nature's Experiments in Language Learning, Lila R. Gleitman and Barbara Landau
- Section IV. HARD WORDS AND SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING A: ESTABLISHING PLAUSIBILITY
- Chapter 9. Structural Sources of Verb Learning, Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 10. On the Semantic Content of Subcategorization Frames, Cynthia Fisher, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman
- Chapter 11. Human Simulations of Vocabulary Learning, Jane Gillette, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, and Anne Lederer
- Section V. HARD WORDS AND SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING B: BUT IS IT TRUE?
- Chapter 12. Understanding How Input Matters: Verb Learning and the Footprint of Universal Grammar, Jeffrey Lidz, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman
- Chapter 13. Hard Words, Lila R. Gleitman, Kimberly Cassidy, Anna Papafragou, Rebecca Nappa, and John C. Trueswell
- Chapter 14. When We Think About Thinking: The Acquisition of Belief Verbs, Anna Papafragou, Kimberly Cassidy, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Section VI. EASY WORDS? NOT SO EASY
- Chapter 15. How Words Are (and Are Not) Learned by Observation, Tamara N. Medina, John C. Trueswell, Jesse Snedeker, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 16. Propose But Verify: Fast Mapping Meets Cross-Situational Word Learning, John C. Trueswell, Tamara N. Medina, Alon Hafri, and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 17. Quality of Input Predicts Child Vocabulary Three Years Later, Erica A. Cartmill, Benjamin F. Armstrong III, Lila R. Gleitman, Susan Goldin-Meadow, Tamara N. Medina, and John C. Trueswell
- Chapter 18. The Easy Words: Reference Resolution in a Malevolent Referent World, Lila R. Gleitman and John C. Trueswell
- Section VII. WORDS AND CONCEPTS
- Chapter 19. What Some Concepts Might Not Be, Sharon Armstrong, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman
- Chapter 20. Why Stereotypes Aren't Even Good Defaults, Andrew C. Connolly, Jerry A. Fodor, Lila R. Gleitman, and Henry Gleitman
- Chapter 21. "Similar" and Similar Concepts, Lila R. Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Carol Miller, and Ruth Ostrin
- Chapter 22. The Emergence of the Formal Category "Symmetry" in a New Sign Language, Lila R. Gleitman, Ann Senghas, Molly Flaherty, Marie Coppola, and Susan Goldin-Meadow
- Chapter 23. Turning the Tables: Spatial Language and Spatial Reasoning, Peggy Li and Lila R. Gleitman
- Chapter 24. Relations Between Language and Thought, Lila R. Gleitman and Anna Papafragou
About the author
Lila R. Gleitman is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, among other honors. She was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993 and won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017. Spanning six decades, Gleitman's work has shaped our understanding of language and cognition, as well as the relation between these domains. She is best known for her work showing that children's sensitivity to syntactic structure plays a critical role in their acquisition of verb meanings.
Jeffrey Lidz is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, having previously held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and CNRS Paris. Lidz's research explores language acquisition from the perspective of comparative syntax and semantics, focusing on the relative contributions of experience, extralinguistic cognition, and domain-specific knowledge in learners' discovery of linguistic structure. Lidz was co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (2016) and is Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.
Summary
Sentence First, Arguments Afterward collects the most important papers of Lila Gleitman's career, spanning over 50 years of work. These papers explore the nature of linguistic knowledge in children and adults by asking how children acquire language, how language and thought are related, the nature of concepts, and the role of syntax in shaping the direction of word learning. With an exclusive foreword by Noam Chomsky and an essay by Jeffrey Lidz contextualizing Gleitman's work in the emergence of the field of cognitive science, this book promises to be valuable both for its historical perspective on language and its acquisition and for the lessons it offers to current practitioners.
