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.