ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book highlights the conviction that the theoretical approaches of Cognitive and Functional Linguistics were the ones most likely to lead to progress in discovering how human beings comprehend, produce, and acquire a natural language. To the author it is clear that cognitive and functional approaches to language structure have led to the most significant progress in the last fifteen years in the study of first language acquisition. Psychology has traditionally not focused on cultural-historical phenomena, and so one could argue that the insight that language structure emerges from language use over historical time is more a sociological than psychological phenomenon. But this is simply an artifact of the way that contemporary scientific boundaries are drawn, as the processes that generate historical changes in language structure over time clearly have bases in fundamental processes of human cognition, social interaction, and psycholinguistic processing.
