Learning the meaning of change-of-state verbs : A case study of German child language (Reprint 2011)

Causative change-of-state verbs like 'to open', 'to fill', and 'to wake' are central to both recent theories of grammatical development and theories of lexical structure.

This book focuses on how German-speaking children learn the meaning of change-of-state verbs.

It offers a thorough characterization of the acquisition of German, embedded in a crosslinguistic perspective.

The author provides a comprehensive review of the acquisition literature on that topic and introduces a new account as to how the meaning of these verbs can be learned.

The empirical backbone of the investigation are a set of carefully designed experimental studies.