Martin D.S. Braine

Quite good, I thought. First, because it gives me a more appealing pair of terms to distinguish the development of language in the individual and the (pre/)historic development of language in general--I've been using "originary" and "acquisitional" in my thesis (and by "been using" I mean 'been thinking about using", because who's started their thesis? Not this guy! Ha ha ... huh), but now I will be changing that to "ontogenetic" and "phylogenetic", which Google tells me is originally a biology convention used prominently by Stephen Jay Gould.


Anyway, the second reason it's quite good is that it presents an appealingly simple, functional and complete grammar of the first phase of child word-combination--two-word phrases. Syntacticians have often gravitated toward confustication in their pursuit of totalizing explanations (certainly in 1978, when this was published, that was so), but in a funny way the simpler your analysis is the further it goes toward convincing people that it could be total, because it deals with a large part of the learnability problem. Here, for instance, Braine takes data from three children to show that

S(entence)-->{PX}, {XP}

(are those curly brackets the right convention? I can't even remember anymore), where P is what he calls a "pivot"--a subset of the child's total vocabulary that cannot be produced in isolation, but that can be followed by any word in X, whixh stands for the child's total vocabulary minus some pivots. So you could have, say "all____" (all clean, all done, all gone) or "mama _____" (mama chair, mama dirty, mama house" as examples of PX, or "see dada, see bird" or "other one, other chair" where P comes before and modifies X--P, the pivot, being any one of a limited set of words functioning not as their adult parts of speech but as general modifiers, and X being any word except certain pivots (*"mama other",). In P can also come second in a limited set of words seemingly corresponding to adult nouns and pronouns: "go downthere", "book downthere", etc. (where "downthere" is treated as one word because the child did not have either "down" or "there" separately). X stays X, although one kid may have PX1 and X2P, with X divided into noun/adjective and verb subclasses.


Period. It's beautifully simple, it covers all the data, it is a powerful argument not only for Occam's Razor but also for a nativist interpretation of language acquisition (the Chomskyan "language is not learned, it grows") because the kids combine words in totally novel ways that do not exist in adult English and which, since they are unlikely to have heard them, are evidence of a creative faculty. (Eventually, of course, they lose them once they realize they are odd.) It gives me hope that I will be able to get through TAing the fearsome syntax session of this language acquisition course.

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