The book is concerned with the child's acquisition of names (by which is meant words that refer to objects - including proper names, common nouns in some uses, and pronouns in some uses). Four chapters in the book's first section, Matters Mainly Psychological, describe empirical observations that explore how a child copes with the fact that many different name-like words can be applied to a single object. A second major section, Matters Mainly Linguistic, contains chapters on phonology, the learning of grammatical categories, the definite and indefinite articles, and the plural. A third section, Matters Mainly Philosophical, focuses entirely on the complex issues of reference and meaning. A final chapter reflects on the implications of the book for developmental psychology.An MIT Press/Bradford Book.

Rhyming text depicts a father sharing with his child such things as seven words that all mean blue and the name of every kind of cloud.

Why is a horse called a horse? and not a giraffe or a flapdoodle? Discover philosophy with Plato!

Most research on children's lexical development has focused on their acquisition of names for concrete objects. This is the first edited volume to focus specifically on how children acquire their early verbs. Verbs are an especially important part of the early lexicon because of the role they play in children's emerging grammatical competence. The contributors to this book investigate: * children's earliest words for actions and events and the cognitive structures that might underlie them, * the possibility that the basic principles of word learning which apply in the case of nouns might also apply in the case of verbs, and the role of linguistic context, especially argument structure, in the acquisition of verbs. A central theme in many of the chapters is the comparison of the processes of noun and verb learning. Several contributors make provocative suggestions for constructing theories of lexical development that encompass the full range of lexical items that children learn and use.

Jabir ibn Hayyan, for a long time the reigning alchemical authority both in Islam and the Latin West, has exercised numerous generations of scholars. To be sure, it is not only the vexed question of the historical authorship and dating of the grand corpus Jabirianum which poses a serious scholarly challenge; equally challenging is the task of unraveling all those obscure and tantalizing discourses which it contains. This book, which marks the first full-scale study of Jabir ever to be published in the English language, takes up both challenges. The author begins by critically reexamining the historical foundations of the prevalent view that the Jabirian corpus is the work not of an 8th-century individual, but that of several generations of Shi'i authors belonging to the following century and later. Tentatively concluding that this view is problematic, the author, therefore, infers that its methodological implications are also problematic. Thus, developing its own methodological matrix, the book takes up the second challenge, namely that of a substantive analysis and explication of a Jabirian discourse, the Book of Stones. Here explicating Jabir's notions of substance and qualities, analyzing his ontological theory of language and unraveling the metaphysics of his Science of Balance, the author reconstructs the doctrinal context of the Stones and expounds its central theme. He then presents an authoritative critical edition of a substantial selection of the text of the Stones, based on all available manuscripts. This critical edition has been translated in its entirety and is provided with exhaustive commentaries and textual notes -- another pioneering feature of this book: for this is the first English translation of a Jabirian text to emerge in print after a whole century. An outstanding contribution is that it announces and presents an exciting textual discovery: the author has found in the Stones a hitherto unknown Arabic translation of part of Aristotle's Categories. Given that we have so far known of only one other, and possibly later, classical Arabic translation of the Greek text, Haq's discovery gives this book an historical importance.