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Acquisition of Grammar: What and How Should We

Investigate?

I. M. Schlesinger

To cite this article: I. M. Schlesinger (1971) Acquisition of Grammar: What and How Should We
Investigate?, Word, 27:1-3, 187-194, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1971.11435623

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lM. SCHLESINGER-----------------------

Acquisition of Grammar: What and

How Should We Investigate?*

Recently much of the effort of child-language investigators has been

invested in writing child grammars. It is argued that there is much
diversity between children and that too much leeway is left in
formalizing the grammar of even a single child. As a consequence,
writing a child grammar is fruitless, unless it is part of a develop-
mental theory of child language. A methodological implication of
such an approach is identified. The final part of the article stresses the
need for an investigation of crosslinguistic differences in language
acquisition.

Recent linguistic theory has had a far-reaching influence on research

on child language, and it can hardly be denied that this influence has been
largely beneficiai, resulting in greater sophistication of psychological
investigations of child grammar and providing it with a theoretical back-
bone. What this article deals with is a not-too-wholesome side effect of
linguistics, namely, the recent trend in which several writers have set
themselves the objective of writing grammars of child language. ln this
endeavor they apparently emulate the linguist who writes a grammar of
adult language. But, in fact, the task of the investigator of child language
should be conceived of differently from that of the linguist, as will be
made clear below.
Sorne writers on child language have stated explicitly that their only
concern is with what the child learns, admitting that they do not know how
he learns it. 1 They proceed to construct "grammars" for children ofvarious
stages of linguistic development, and they do not attempt to answer the
question of how the child acquires these grammars and how the grammar
at a given stage develops out of that of the preceding one. It seems to be
taken for granted here that these questions can be studied independently,
and perhaps even that the question of what is learned must be answered
• This article was written as part of a study on child language supported by the
Human Development Center of Hebrew University.
I See L. M. Bloom, Language Development: Form and Function in Emerging Grammars
(Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. 233, and Paula Menyuk, Sentences Children
Use (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1969), pp. 1-5.
187
188 1. M. SCHLESINGER

prior to the question of how it is learned. The latter daim has been made
by sorne writers.2 At first blush it seems to have logic on its side: to study
how the child learns the rules of grammar, one must first know the nature
of the rules that he learns.3 However, as 1 have pointed out elsewhere, 4
scientists rarely, if ever, settle logically prior questions once and for ali
before proceeding to those based on the former. Instead, there is a continu-
ous feedback between areas of study. Thus, insights gained about processes
of acquisition may reflect on our conceptions of the nature of what is
learned (i.e., of the child's grammar). While this has not occurred to any
appreciable degree so far (Iargely because of the high status of linguistic
theory), such cross-fertilizing of fields of study seems bound to happen
sooner or later. There are already sorne auspicious signs of a growing
awareness of this possibility.s Nothing argues, therefore, at this stage of
our knowledge, against focussing on acquisition processes in the study of
child language. In fact, as 1 shall argue in the following pages, postponing
investigation of this problem and an exclusive concern with children's
grammars at various stages is bound to lead us into a cul-de-sac.
The typical procedure of researchers who limit themselves to studying
the nature of the child's grammar has been to analyse the corpora of child
language in the way in which one would analyse corpora of adult speakers.
While such an endeavor may have been a useful exercise and may have
served a good purpose for a while, its fruitfulness seems to have been ex-
hausted by now. It can not take us far. The best that can be achieved
thereby is a condensed description of the corpus of a particular child at
a particular time, without any more general theoretical import. 6 The
reflections that follow should serve to substantiate this daim.
As data on child language are accumulating, it is becoming increasingly
clear that children speaking a given language differ widely among them-
selves in the "grammars" exhibited in their speech. Bloom, for instance,
had to write a different grammar for each of the children that she studied.7
Likewise, sorne writers did and sorne did not find pivot grammars at the
2 See, for example, W. Weksel, rev. of The Acquisition of Language, ed. Ursula Bellugi
and Roger Brown, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 29,
Language, XLI (1965), 625-709.
3 Cf. Paul M. Postal, "Underlying and Superficial Linguistic Structures," Harvard
Educational Review, XXXIV (1964), 246-266.
4 1. M. Schlesinger, "A Note on the Relationship between Psychological and Linguistic
Theories," Foundations of Language, III (1967), 397-402.
s See esp. the trenchant analysis by W. C. Watt, "Competing Economy Criteria,"
Working Paper 5, School of Social Sciences, Univ. of California, Irvine, 1972.
6 See also Robert Lees, forma! discussion in The Acquisition of Language, ed. Ursula
Bellugi and Roger Brown, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Develop-
ment, XXIX, No. 1 (1964), 96-98.
7 Bloom, pp. 34-134.
 ACQUISITION OF GRAMMAR: WHAT AND HOW TO INVESTIGATE? 189
beginning stages of learning to speak. s (Further examples are discussed
below). The investigator is therefore left with the task ofwriting grammars
each of which is valid for only one individual child. Such a grammar is of
little scientific merit, for two reasons.
Firstly, for one and the same corpus different grammars may be appro-
priate.9 There is no way of evaluating these different grammars. The occur-
rence in the corpus of utterances not predicted by the grammar may be
ascribed to imperfect learning of the grammatical rules. This is always a
most likely possibility, and only in the most extreme cases will there be
sufficient cause to reject the grammar as too restrictive. Likewise, it will be
difficult to reject the grammar as over-inclusive (i.e., as predicting types of
utterances not found in the corpus), because the latter is only a smail
sample of the child's potential verbal output. Any corpus of an individual
child is too slender a basis for the construction of a refutable (and hence
scientificaily meaningful) grammar. Attempting to construct such a gram-
mar is almost like attempting to construct a theory of, say, aerodynamics
designed to explain only the manner in which three raindrops feil to the
ground on a particular occasion.
It might be argued that simplicity criteria may determine which of the
various possible grammars describing a given corpus is to be preferred.
Not only are such criteria insufficiently defined and not too weil under-
stood, however,lo but whatever intuitive notion of simplicity might be
applied is almost certain to clash with the requirement that grammars for
different children be as similar as possible. The latter requirement is based
on the recognition that a different grammar for each different child will be
of very doubtful value for theory.ll
8 See Melissa F. Bowerman, Early Syntactic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 27-70, and Bloom, pp. 223-225.
9 For a detailed discussion of this problem, see Roger Brown and C. Fraser, "The
Acquisition of Syntax," in Verbal Behavior and Learning: Problems and Processes, ed.
D. N. Cofer and B. S. Musgrave (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), pp. 158-197.
10 Cf. Noam Chomsky, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (The Hague:
Mouton, 1972), pp. 13-15 and 125.
11 It might be objected that in writing child grammars the criterion for evaluation
ought to be the extent to which this grammar is compatible with the adult grammar.
This notion of compatibility, though, is not at ali clear. What would constitute an "in-
compatible" grammar? Bloom (pp. 70-74), for instance, has postulated a reduction trans-
formation to account for agent-object constructions appearing in most English-speaking
children, and such a transformation is nonexistent in adult grammar. If a child grammar
which contains a rule not found in adult grammar is not considered incompatible with
the latter, what kind of grammar would conceivably be? Compatibility can, of course,
be defined so as to exclude ali rules not found in adult grammar, but even this solution
would not constrain the range of possible grammars sufficiently.
190 I. M. SCHLFSINGER

Secondly, there is the problem of generality. Ali that the above approach
can be expected to yield is a haphazard assembly of grammars, a naturalist's
collection of schematic descriptions of what various children have uttered
at various stages of their development. Unlike a grammar of an adult
language which can be viewed-very roughly-as a theory of what kinds
of utterances speakers of the language will find acceptable, such a collec-
tion is a theory of nothing at ali. Ali that one might learn from it is that
children's utterances follow rules, a generalization which has been taken
for granted for a long time and which surely does notjustify the enormous
investment of work required for the analysis of even a single corpus.
Because of the above-mentioned lack of evaluative criteria, it will even be
doubtful what exactly these rules are.
Suppose now that an attempt were made to transcend these individual
grammars and to write a grammar for children at a given stage of develop-
ment. Here we face essentially the same problem discussed above. Two
strategies seem to be possible: (1) one includes in the grammar every rule
found in any one of the individual grammars of that stage or (2) one
includes in it only those rules found in each of the individual grammars.
Even without discussing the complicated question of what does and what
does not constitute a "rule" for the corpus of a single child, it may be
stated that these strategies will render little that is of value. Given the great
diversity of the speech of various children, a grammar arrived at by either
strategy will obviously be a far cry from a description of what individual
children know. If the investigator employs a combination of strategies 1
and 2 (i.e., decides for each rule whether to include it or not), the results
will hardly be any better because of the lack of an adequate principle
guiding his decisions. Mere nose-counting so as to ascertain for each rule
whether it applies for most children can only result in a hybrid grammar
with no more theoretical interest than the overinclusive grammar attained
by strategy 1 or the overrestrictive grammar resulting from strategy 2.
What would be needed here is a unifying principle showing how the gram-
mar of each developmental stage evolves from that of the preceding stage.
But this presupposes a theory of acquisition, as discussed below.
Now it is of course true that the same problems beset ali attempts at
writing grammars, including those of adult speech. Yet in writing an adult
grammar one has much more to go on, namely, the speech behavior (and
linguistic intuitions) of a whole community with very little variation be-
tween individuals (and with what variation there is being disregarded).
By contrast, there is a great variation between individual children. Matters
are further complicated by the fact that, unlike adults, children acquiring
a language must be assumed to be continually at a transi tory stage between
 ACQillSITION OF GRAMMAR: WHAT AND HOW TO INVESTIGATE? 191
one "grammar" and the other. They are always acquiring new rules and
following them only imperfectly, making many lapses. The situation here is
similar to the "ongoing process of linked changes" described by Bickerton
for the change of a community's dialect (e.g., from Black to Standard
English). 12 This in itself is sufficient to show the futility of the attempt to
write a grammar of an individual child or else a "generalized" grammar
of the kind discussed above. A presuppositionless analysis of a child's
corpus will not have any theoretical import.
There is a basic difference between the corpus of an adult native speaker,
which may be regarded as a representative segment of the speech of a wh ole
community, and that of a two-year-old, which is not representative of any
static system. Instead, the value of the latter lies in that it may give us a
glimpse of acquisition processes at work in the particular child at a par-
ticular stage. The underlying grammar may be inferred from the corpus of
the adult, whereas the corpora obtained from a child at different points of
time may lead to hypotheses as to the process of change. There the field is
wide open to research. What are the mechanisms of learning grammatical
rules? Does the child learn rules of the kind appearing in generative gram-
mar, or are his utterances "merely imperfect imitations with occasional
substitutions", as proposed by von Raftler-En gel ?13 These and related
questions still need to be researched and often, indeed, need to be ade-
quately formulated. Sorne hypotheses have already been advanced. Cor-
roboration of these requires, of course, extensive corpora of child language
-in fact, as is argued below, more extensive ones than are usually available.
This corroboration, however, is not dependent on there being a uniform
grammar for ali children. The theory of acquisition may provide for differ-
ent and devious ways by which various individual children ultimately
attain adult grammar.
Sorne initial attempts have already been made toward the development
of acquisition theories, ranging from partial theories dealing only with
limited aspects of learning grammar to more global ones.t4 Whatever one
12 Derek Bickerton, "Inherent Variability and Variable Rules," Foundations of Lan-
guage, VII (1971), 457-492.
13 Walburga von Raffier-Engel, "Suprasentential and Substitution Tests in First
Language Acquisition," Bolletino di Psico/ogia App/icata, LXXXVIII-XC (1968), 34-41.
14 See, for example, G. R. Kiss, "Grammatical Word Classes: A Learning Process and
Its Simulation," mimeographed (Medical Research Council, 1972), pp. 1-74; David
McNeill, "The Capacity for the Ontogenesis of Grammar," in The Ontogenesis of
Grammar, ed. Dan 1. Slobin (New York: Academie Press, 1971), pp. 17-40; 1. M.
Schlesinger, "Production of Utterances and Language Acquisition," in The Onto-
genesis of Grammar, pp. 63-101, and A. Staats, "Linguistic-Mentalistic Theory versus
an Explanatory S-R Leaming Theory of Language Development," in The Ontogenesis of
Grammar, pp. 103-150.
192 1. M. SCHLESINGER

may think of the validity ofthese attempts, they at !east have the merit that
they can be invalidated by the data. By contrast, a grammar written for an
individual child can hardly ever be proven wrong, as shown above; bence,
it is practically useless.
In spite of the reservations noted earlier, it is conceivable that, once a
theory of acquisition has been developed on the basis of available data, an
ordered series of grammars can be presented. The daim will then be made
that the child moves from one grammar to the next until he ultimately
reaches the adult's grammar. The choice of one grammar out of ali possible
ones will now be determined by the theory: writing the series of grammars
will in fact be equivalent to spelling out the theory in full. It would not be
necessary to assume that each individual child has internalized any of
these grammars completely at a given stage of development. Rather, a
large degree of deviation from the grammar may be tolerated, because the
latter is not constructed merely in order to account for individual corpora
in the most economical way but is part of the theory specifying the acquisi-
tion process.
We may summarize by stating that the study of what is learned at a given
stage cannot be separated from the study of how it is learned, without de-
generating into data gathering devoid of theoretical interest.
Interestingly, the approach to the study of child language advocated
here is essentially the one first adopted when the new upsurge of interest in
language development began, a decade orso ago. Only subsequently has it
been abandoned, unadvisedly, for a description of static child "grammars".
Braine's proposai concerning pivot constructions is, as 1 read him, not so
much a theory of child grammar as a theory of how certain rules are
learned.1 5 It went band in band with an experimental demonstration that
relative position can indeed be learned by children. 16 Braine's critics may
be right in questioning the universality of pivot constructions, 17 but they
do not provide alternative explanations of how learning takes place.
The methodological quandary attendant on the construction of a child's
grammar has been explored brilliantly in one of the first studies attempting
to construct such a grammar,ts but the moral of this study has been little
heeded later on.
The above contention concerning the proper objective of child-language
15 Martin D. S. Braine, "The Ontogeny of English Phrase Structure: The First
Phase," Language, XXXIX (1963), 1-13.
16 Martin D. S. Braine, "On Learning the Grammatical Order of Words," Psycho-
logical Review, LXX (1963), 323-348.
17 See Bloom (pp. 3-7) and Bowerman (pp. 27-70).
1s See n. 9 above.
 ACQUISITION OF GRAMMAR: WHAT AND HOW TO INVESTIGATE? 193

research has consequences for the methodology of data collection. Rather

than record corpora at widely spaced points of time, 19 a continuous record-
ing should be aimed at, with as little time difference as possible, even at
the expense of obtaining more sparse data for each time interval. The
former procedure would be appropriate for constructing grammars for
various periods. The latter will probably be required for tracing the
emergence of constructions and rules.
A comment is in arder here concerning universals of grammatical
development. Unlike the endeavor to write grammars of child language
without the framework of an acquisition theory, the study of linguistic
universals as proposed by Slobin2o is potentially fruitful. Examining data
on acquisition of grammar collected by various investigators of various
languages, he finds many similarities across languages. Such constancies
are obviously important for a theory of language learning. They suggest
certain "cognitive prerequisites", as he calls them, for acquiring grammar.
Thus links are formed between linguistic development and general cogni-
tive development.
It should be pointed out, however, that findings asto what is not common
to children learning different languages may prove to be no less important
for acquisition theory. The irregularities found in the data appear to me
no less intriguing than the regularities. To illustrate, let me quote just two
examples: fixed ward arder and the subject-object construction.
When work on child language was in its infancy (a bare decade ago), it
was found that one of the first things which the child learns about grammar
is ward arder and that already at the two- and three-word stage he tends to
follow the adult madel. Especially interesting was the observation that a
fixed ward arder was followed even by a child learning Russian, a language
in which adult ward arder varies rather freely. 21 This observation seemed to
suggest a universal strategy of language acquisition. Subsequently, fixed
ward orders were reported for sorne children learning Finnish,22 and
Korean,23 bath inflected languages. As more data became available,
however, exceptions were noted. Not only where ward arder is relatively
19 See, for instance, Bloom (p. 235), wh ose recordings are separated by severa) weeks.
20Dan 1. Slobin, "Cognitive Prerequisites for the Development of Grammar," in
Studies D/ Child Language Development, ed. Charles A. Ferguson and Dan 1. Slobin
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 175-208
21 See Dan 1. Slobin, "The Acquisition of Russian as a Native Language," in The
Genesis of Language: A Psycholinguistic Approach, ed. Frank Smith and George A.
Miller (Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press, 1966), pp. 129-148.
22 See Bowerman (pp. 167-171).
23 See Tschang-Zin Park, "Language Acquisition in a Korean Child" (Ms., Univ. of
Münster, 1970).
194 1. M. SCHLESINGER

free in adult speech (as in inflected languages), but even in children learning
to speak English, free word order occurred.2 4 What accounts for the fact
that sorne children follow adult word order right from the beginning,
whereas others indulge freely in variations? Are the latter just late devel-
opers in this respect (and why in this and not in others ?), or do they use
different strategies for learning the same rules? One may even wonder
whether it is the same kind of rules or whether a different rule system is
learned which ultimately produces identical results. These questions can
only be vague!y formulated now, because we are nowhere near to answering
them.
Another tantalizing problem is the subject-object (or agent-patient)
construction, like "Mommy cake", on reporting that the mother is eating
cake or has given the child sorne. This construction does not appear in
adult speech-and, in fact, it does not fit the generative grammar mode!
as currently conceived. It has been found in children speaking as diverse
languages as English,2s Russian,26 Finnish,27 and Hebrew.2s Severa!
explanations for the occurrence of such utterances have been offered.29
How can one explain, though, the fact that they appear in sorne children
while being totally absent in others?
These, and other, irregularities are bound to stymie attempts at cons truc-
ting a theoretically significant grammar of child language. In the long run,
it will be impossible to write them off as residual variations which can be
left unexplained. Rather, these language-specifie phenomena ought to be
utilized for developing and testing theories of grammar acquisition. The
same probably holds too for differences between children learning a single
language: a complete theory will have to account for different roads to
learning a language and learning language.
Hebrew University and
Israel Institute of App/ied Social Research
Jerusalem
Israel

24 See Slobin, "Cognitive Prerequisites," p. 198, for references.

25 See Bloom, pp. 223-224.
26 See Slobin, "The Acquisition of Russian," pp. 133-135.
27 See Bowerman, pp. 140-147.
28 See 1. M. Schlesinger, "Leaming Grammar: From Pivot to Realization Rule," in
Language Acquisition: Models and Methods, ed. R. Huxley and E. Ingram (London:
Academie Press, 1971), pp. 85-89.
29See Bloom, pp. 141-148; Roger Brown, A First Language (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard Univ. Press, 1973); and Schlesinger, "Learning Grammar," pp. 85-89.