Six groups of expressions make up T's change of state verbs: (1) presence, absence, and recurrence of objects; (2) presence, absence, and recurrence of activities; (3) exchange and possession of objects; (4) location of objects; (5) movement of objects; and (6) state of objects. In the six sections of this chapter, I provide a discursive summary of T's use of the particular verbs that fall into each of these six categories (along with some notes on parental usage) – a total of 78 relational words and verbs. I should emphasize at the outset that these categories are not meant to depict anything in T's grammar but are meant only to be heuristics to aid researchers in categorizing the individual verbs. For readers who are interested only in a brief account of individual verbs, each of the six sections ends with a summary text, figure, and table that provide an overview of the semantics and syntax of the verbs falling into that category. An exhaustive list of the diary entries on which these summaries and analyses are based is given in the appendix, organized into the same six sections as the text. Examples from T's speech are often accompanied by a specification of her age in months and days, for example, 19.22.

Presence, absence, and recurrence of objects

T's expressions falling into this general category were those whose conceptual representations involved in some way an absent object. In the traditional literature (e.g., Bloom, 1973), this encompasses the semantic categories existence, non-existence, and recurrence.