Complement or adjunct? The syntactic principle English-speaking children learn when producing determiner–noun combinations in their early speech

Abstract

In children acquiring various languages, the early mastery of determiners strongly predicts syntactic development. What makes determiners important is not yet clear as there is a linguistic controversy regarding their syntactic behaviour. Some consider determiners to be similar to adjectives and to modify common nouns, while others consider the common nouns their complements. This article aims to find out which of the two basic syntactic operations, complementation or adjunct attribution, children learn when they master determiner–noun combinations in their early speech. Pearson correlations of determiner–nominal combinations with verb–noun combinations and attributive adjective–noun combinations were computed in early two-word-long sentences of a large sample of young English-speaking children. Determiner–nominal combinations were very highly correlated with verb–noun sentences, whereas the correlation with adjective–noun combinations was much lower. It appears that determiner–noun combinations are a type of complementation. When children learn them early, they apparently learn the syntactic principle underlying such combinations which then can be transferred to other syntactic constructions.