Introduction to Linguistic; The Acquisition Of Morphology and Syntax

The Acquisition Of Morphology  and Syntax

It is not until about the age of 12 months that a child will begin to consistently produce words of  the language it is learning. it is at this stage that we can begin to examine the development of syntax and morphology in children’s speech.

1.                  The One – Word Stage

The first words uttered by one-year-old child typically name people, objects, pets and other familiar and important parts of this environment. The child’s vocabulary soon comes to include verbs and other useful words as nouns including no, gimme, and mine). Often a phrase used by adults will become a single word in the speech of a child, such as allgone and whasat? The single words produced at this stage are used as more than just labels for objects or events, they may be used for naming, commenting, requesting, inquiring, and so on. In fact, this level of development has been called the holophrasticb stage – a holophrase being a one – word sentence. Children at this stage are limited to a word at a time in their production, but they understand and probably  intend the meaning of more than a single word. Certainly children can understand the utterances of other people  even when they consist of much more than one word. The intonation children use on their one – word utterances may be that of question, and ordinary or emphatic statement, or an imperative. If children do consistently use these adult – like intonation patterns (and researchers disagree about whether they do or not), it would seem even more likely that “holophrastic” is an appropriate name for this stage.

2.                   The Two – Word Stage

Between approximately 18 and 24 months of age, children begin to use two – word utterances. At first they may seem to be simply two one – word sentences produced one right after the other. There may be a pause between them, and each word may be a separate intonation contour. Before long, however, the two words  are produced without pausing and with a single intonational pattern.

Children at this stage do not just produce any two words in any order; rather, they adopt a consistent set of word orders which convey an important part of the meaning of  their utterances. At this of  level of development, the structure of  utterances is determined by semantic relationships, rather than adults syntactic ones. Only word order is used to express these semantic relations; only later are additional syntactic devices added  to the basic word order rules. Most of the utterances produced by a child at this stage will express a semantic relations like one of the following:

agent + action                          baby sleep

action + object                         kick ball

action + locative                      sit chair

entity + locative                      teddy bed

possessor + possession            mommy book

entity + attribute                     block red

demonstrative + entity                        this shoe

words such as more and ‘nother may be used as modifiers of nounds (more juice, ‘nother cup) to indicate or request recurrence. Here and there may be used as demonstrative or locatives. Some children of this stage of development also use pronouns. For the most part,  however, their speech lacks function morphemes and words. These function morphemes include prepositions, auxiliary, verbs, articles, and inflectional affixes.

These little function morphemes are omitted during this stage and even after the child begins to produce more than two words at a time. Because of this omission, this speech of young children is often called telegraphic. When you send a telegram or run a classified ad, every word you include costs you money. Therefore, you only put in the words  you really need, and not the ones that carry no new information. Children follow the same principle of economy. The words they use and the order in which they use them convey the relevant information; function morphemes would be redundant. Of course, pronouns, more, ‘nother, and the other word mentioned earlier carry independent meanings and can fill one of the positions in the semantic relations listed above. Eventually, of course, children do acquire the full set of function morphemes of their language – the “syntactic devices” mentioned above that supplement the expression of semantic relations through  word order rules.