9 - The acquisition of syntax

Summary

Introduction

Through knowledge of syntax, children can relate the sounds of language to thought, and can produce and comprehend unlimited new sentences with unlimited recursion, e.g., Dr. Seuss's “When tweetle beetles fight …” (chapter 2 (11)).

For syntax as for phonology, children must discover the relevant units, then categorize and combine them. They must link distinct levels of representation and do so in a systematic, productive, but constrained manner. As we saw in chapter 2, children must know the special design features of natural language, i.e., units may move (displacement) or combine through operations on them, and many may be null or “empty.” Appendices 4 and 5 summarize milestones in infants' early acquisition of syntax revealed through their perception and production of language.

What must children acquire?

Table 9.1 summarizes what children must know minimally in order to acquire the syntax of language, i.e., the epistemological primitives of syntactic knowledge.

On the basis of these primitives, children must discover (A) – (G).

The units

Children must discover syntactic units: sentences (or clauses) and phrases, i.e., the smaller units which combine to form sentences. These compose the “constituent structure” of a sentence. All syntactic operations and computations make reference to the clause, the essential syntactic unit.