Chapter 22 - Syntactic Categories in Child Language Acquisition: Innate, Induced, or Illusory?

Abstract

Traditionally, it has generally been assumed that adult speakers are in possession of syntactic categories such as NOUN (e.g., boy, girl) and VERB (e.g., see, dance). This chapter evaluates three possibilities for how children acquire these categories. The first is that syntactic categories are innate (i.e., present from—or even before—birth) and that acquisition consists of using incoming words’ semantic or distributional properties to assign them to the relevant category. The second possibility is that syntactic categories are induced from the input, via some kind of distributional clustering procedure (e.g., words that frequently appear after both the and a are often NOUNs). According to this view, acquisition consists of gradually building classes that are, ultimately, largely the same as those posited under nativist approaches. The third possibility is that syntactic categories are illusory, and that acquisition consists of storing individual words, phrases, and sentences, along with their meanings. Speakers produce and comprehend novel utterances by generalizing across these stored exemplars, but at no point form a free-standing abstraction that corresponds to a category such as NOUN or VERB. It will be argued that, although implausible on the surface, the third approach is ultimately the one most likely to yield a successful explanation.