Meaning in acquisition semantic structure, lexical organization, and crosslinguistic variation

I n this chapter, I examine three problems: the acquisition of tense and aspect, the acquisition of cryptotypes, and the development of lexical structure. The central issue in all three problems is how the child discovers word meanings in a lexical system, and what mechanisms are at work in the process of this discovery. In each case, the problem domain involves the learning of semantic structures that are important for the use of grammatical morphology or lexical categories. In examining these three cases, I argue that structured semantic representations of the lexicon can emerge as a natural outcome of the meaning-form and the meaning-meaning mappings in language acquisition.