Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays

Sentence First, Arguments Afterward collects the most important papers of Lila Gleitman's career, spanning over 50 years of work. These papers explore the nature of linguistic knowledge in children and adults by asking how children acquire language, how language and thought are related, the nature of concepts, and the role of syntax in shaping the direction of word learning. With an exclusive foreword by Noam Chomsky and an essay by Jeffrey Lidz contextualizing Gleitman's work in the emergence of the field of cognitive science, this book promises to be valuable both for its historical perspective on language and its acquisition and for the lessons it offers to current practitioners.

Lila R. Gleitman is Professor Emerita of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science, among other honors. She was president of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993 and won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017. Spanning six decades, Gleitman's work has shaped our understanding of language and cognition, as well as the relation between these domains. She is best known for her work showing that children's sensitivity to syntactic structure plays a critical role in their acquisition of verb meanings.

Jeffrey Lidz is Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, having previously held positions at Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, and CNRS Paris. Lidz's research explores language acquisition from the perspective of comparative syntax and semantics, focusing on the relative contributions of experience, extralinguistic cognition, and domain-specific knowledge in learners' discovery of linguistic structure. Lidz was co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics (2016) and is Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.