Syntactic development By William O' Grady (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS171 Syntactic development. By William O' Grady. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1997. Pp. ix, 409. Reviewed by Stanley Dubinsky, University of South Carolina O'Grady's volume on the syntactic aspects of first language acquisition is a welcome addition to the field. It provides a thorough empirical and theoretical overview of research on the acquisition of syntax that is useful to anyone who desires to understand how Ll acquisition has informed syntactic theory and how syntactic theories have primed research in Ll acquisition. The text does not oversimplify any of the experimental research and theoretical concepts brought up for discussion, but it is still clear enough to be accessible to anyone with a basic background in linguistics. For this reason, among others, the volume is useful both as a source book for the various issues it covers as well as a good text for a course in Ll acquisition. Having used it as a text for a directed reading course on Ll acquisition of syntax, I am convinced that it works quite well as a course book. Following a short introductory chapter, the book is divided into two parts, with the first (twothirds ) consisting often chapters on 'The developmental facts' and the second (one-third) dealing with "Theories of learnability and development'. The issues discussed in Part 1 are introduced topically and, for the most part, in the temporal order oftheir relevance to the acquisition process. They include one-word utterances, early multiword utterances, word order and case, subject drop, embedded clauses, w/t-questions, inversion, relative clauses and clefts, passives, and constraints on coreference. Each of the chapters in Part 1 surveys the important (and often conflicting) claims made by psycholinguistic researchers regarding acquisition of the phenomena in question and reviews the experiments that have been brought to bear in these debates. For instance, the chapter on early multiword utterances (Ch. 3) examines four important approaches to the distribution of these—thematic analysis (Bowerman 1973 and many others), pivot analysis (Braine 1963), limited scope analysis (Braine 1976, Maratsos 1983), and syntactic analysis (including Brown & Fraser 1963 and Pinker 1984). In discussing each approach, O provides a brief description ofLl data and experimental evidence used to support it. In this particular chapter, the section on 'syntactic analysis' is quite a bit longer than the others and reveals the author's preference for this approach. In the chapter on subject drop (Ch. 5), O discusses three types of theories explaining this stage of acquisition: processing theories (which attribute subject drop to processing considerations), grammar-based theories (which associate it with 'confusion over a language's typological status'), and tensed-based theories (which ascribe subject drop to 'a temporary morphological deficit'). The third theoretical position, O's own, is one that he argues for in this chapter. I found the 'facts first' approach to the subject, as laid out in Part 1, to be quite appealing. In the first place, it provides a valuable overview of the range and depth of research in nearly every comer of the field. O's inclusive discussion allows the reader to get a sense of the variety of viewpoints on all of the topics covered. Further, the review of empirical studies helps to make the theoretical discussion in Part 2 much more accessible to the reader. Of course one cannot have things both ways as regards breadth and depth of discussion, and the empirical section of the book sometimes errs on the side of breadth. Although O includes a very helpful summary box for each experiment of special interest, some of the discussions were too abbreviated to be of much use to this reader. For instance, the chapter on embedded clauses (Ch. 6) races through fifteen experimental studies (covering a period from C. Chomsky 1969 to Eisenberg & Cairns 1994) in just 27 pages, with some articles summarized in less than a single page. In discussions such as this, the reader gains an overview of the literature (on embedding in this case) and an understanding of each study's place in this literature but is left without significant insights into the details of the individual articles themselves. In this respect, the volume is quite a good sourcebook...