Goddard, Cliff (2001). Conceptual primes in early language development. In Martin Pütz, & Susanne Niemeier (Eds.), Applied Cognitive Linguistics: Vol. 1. Theory and language acquisition (pp. 193-227). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI: 10.1515/9783110866247.193
The present study explores certain hypotheses about the nature and identities of the innate concepts which may underpin language acquisition. These hypotheses have arisen from one of the most promising and productive approaches to cognitive semantics – the natural semantic metalangage (NSM) approach originated by Anna Wierzbicka. Though the NSM approach has been responsible for literally hundreds of descriptive studies in lexical and grammatical semantics and pragmatics across a wide range of languages, it has not been applied very extensively to language acquisition. I hope to show, however, that the NSM approach generates interesting research hypotheses on language acquisition and allows for increased precision and testability in the notoriously difficult area of child language semantics. In particular, it enables one to propose concrete and constrained semantic analyses of early “child meanings”, proposals of a kind which are surprisingly sparse in the otherwise abundant literature on early lexical development.
