Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Semantic bootstrapping in linguistics refers to the hypothesis that children utilize innately-known conceptual knowledge to create grammatical categories when acquiring their first language. Thus, for example, categories like "type of object/person" maps directly onto the linguistic category "noun", category like "action" onto "verb", etc. It is proposed that this will get children started on their way to acquiring parts of speech, which later can be supplemented by other linguistic information.