Acquiring
Early Syntactic Constructions
Young Children’s Language Competence
In this paper, I am
presenting the key factors of acquiring a first language. Based on Noam Chomsky’s
idea that humans have an inner ability for learning languages, the aim of my
essay is to reveal how first language acquisition is performed in practice, and
what stages children go through while acquiring their mother tongues. In order
to give a specific description of first language acquisition, I am focusing on the
direct antecedents of early syntactic constructions in first language
acquisition, giving an overview of the operation of the holophrastic stage, the
two-word stage, pivot schemas, and item-based constructions. My paper is mainly
based on the researches of Susan H. Foster, Michael Tomasello, and Thomas
Scovel, therefore my essay reviews the acquisition of English as a first
language.
The first
step in the development of early syntax in young children’s language is, as
Thomas Scovel puts it, “[crossing] the linguistic Rubicon at about one year
old” (Scovel, 1998, p. 11) when the production of first words starts. This early stage is called the holophrastic
stage, as the utterances produced consist of single phrases, often interpreted
as individual “skeletal sentences” (Scovel, 1998, p. 13). Children use these
sentences for several reasons such as asking, expressing surprise, commanding,
etc. (Scovel, 1998, p. 13) For instance, the single word “milk” might stand for
asking for some milk to drink or could express surprise if the milk is split
out on the table (Scovel, 1998, p. 13).
After grasping
this initial sense of word-making, children generally shift from the realm of single-word
utterances to the two-word stage where phrases happen to be pronounced within
one single intonation contour marking the words to be part of the same phrase
structure (Foster, 1990, p. 71). Some linguists argue that this phenomenon is
preceded by a transitional stage when children build up strings of words from
single-word utterances (Foster, 1990, p. 72). On the other hand, Branigan
argues that the slight pause inserted in the intonation contour separating the
two items in the string should not be treated as an evidence for the presence
of a transitional stage as the presence of longer pauses only indicate that the
production of words is naturally less fluent at an early age than at later
stages of speech production (as cited in Foster, 1990, p. 72). Branigan’s
argument seems to be proved by the fact that pauses continue to appear even
after production has turned into the multiple-word stage (Foster, 1990, p. 72).
Having
started to produce two-word or multiple-word utterances, children in their 18th
month begin to organise their utterances around one certain word or phrase, a
method which is called pivot schematization (Tomasello, 2003, p. 114–115).
These schemas are rather productive, which might indicate a possible ability
for young children to be capable of creating linguistic categories (Tomasello,
2003, p. 115). The central word in the pivot phrase is called the event-word,
which can bear various types of complements called the participant words.
Although in pivot constructions, there seem to be a consistent ordering pattern
as the pivot word seems to either follow or precede the participant word or in
some cases, it seems not to appear at all, Tomasello et al. argues (2003) that
it would be a far-fetched idea to talk about pivot schemas as syntax-bearing
constructions as, due to the reversibility of word order, pivot schemas do not
indicate the roles of the words in the schema[1] (Tomasello,
2003, p. 95).
Approaching
their second year of age, English children seem to acquire an understanding of
canonical English word order, and they are able to recognise subject and object
roles in sentences like “Make the bunny push the horse” (Tomasello, 2003, p.
117). Also, they begin to produce transitive utterances according to the very
same word order they have examined in adults’ speech before (Tomasello, 2003,
p. 117). These constructions are item-based and are different from pivot
schemas as they seem to bear syntactic marking since syntactic roles are
clearly definable in these constructions. (Tomasello, 2003, p. 117) Tomasello
et al. (2003) observed that the interpretation of syntactic roles depends on
the interpretation of the verbs in the constructions, and these verbs seem
always to be labelled individually in children’s minds. Therefore, Tomasello et
al. (2003) calls this phenomenon the Verb Island hypothesis (Tomasello, 2003,
p. 117).
However, it
is not crystal clear how syntactic categories are built up in children’s minds,
and there is still an ongoing debate about whether they have any knowledge
about these abstract categories, or they simply learn them through the constant
input coming from their environment (Foster, 1990, p. 74). One argument comes
from Noam Chomsky’s theory stating that acquiring any language is an innate
ability of every human being having a special Language Acquisition Device or a
Universal Grammar in their minds which enables them to learn languages (Scovel,
1998, p. 18). Observing how children comprehend the relationship between noun
phrases and verb phrases, some scientists claim that even young children can
think in syntactic categories while others argued that it is rather the
semantic approach, more specifically the action–subject or action–object
interpretation of these phrases that governs children’s understanding of what
roles each phrase bears in the sentence (Foster, 1990, p. 74–75). In addition,
Tomasello et al. (2003) draws attention to the fact that studies on first
language acquisition at an early age should be treated with care, as the impact
of adult influence such as the examiner’s way of constructing experimental
situations and analysing data might lead the results into a false direction
(Tomasello, 2003, p. 142).
Reaching
towards the end of my paper, it can generally be stated that children go
through different stages when approaching to the syntactic level of language
production. The production of their first words starts at about the first year
of age, and children soon begin to use holophrastic phrases as skeletal
sentences expressing a certain purpose of their speech act. Around their 18th
month, children start using two-word utterances; however, many linguists
question the existence of a transitional stage between the usage of single-word
and two-word utterances. Two- or multiple-word constructions are generally
built up as pivot schemas which show a great reversibility in word order;
therefore, as verb order is a key determining factor in identifying syntactic
categories in a sentence in English, they are yet to be called syntactic
constructions. True syntactic constructions begin with the use of item-based
constructions which are generally organised around a verb bearing a central
role in the utterances. However, young children’s early syntactic construction
is a field yet to be studied enough, and more observations are needed in order
to create a more appropriate hypothesis on how the development of early syntactic
constructions happen.
References
Foster, Susan H. (1990): The Communicative Competence of Young
Children. London & New York: Longman. p. 71–75.
Scovel, Thomas (1998): Psycholinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 95–143.
Tomasello, Michael (2003): Constructing a Language: Usage-Based Theory
of Language Acquisition. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard
University Press. p. 7– 19.
[1] Note that this is stated concerning the operation of the
English language, in which word order plays a crucial part in determining the
different roles of phrases and words constructing the sentence. In other
languages such as Hungarian, word order can be more flexible, therefore it does
not have such a central part in determining the syntactic categories within the
sentence. Rather, syntactic categories seem to be marked by inflections in
Hungarian (my note).
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