Young Children Learn a Native English Anat Ninio The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 2010 Conference of Human Development, Fordham University, New York Background: We do not yet understand fully how children learn syntax. To get new information, we used the methods of "corpus-based linguistics” to investigate the earliest syntactic combinations of English ‑ speaking children. We built a large corpus of child sentences based on English ‑ speaking children whose speech is transcribed and stored in the public CHILDES archive (MacWhinney & Snow, 1985). Children from all English ‑ speaking countries and dialects were included, hence the corpus reflects the shared English spoken by native speakers of English. 1 Method -- Syntax: We focused on child sentences in which the syntactic Subject-Verb Verb-Object Verb-Indirect Object relations were expressed. These grammatical relations are considered to be the building blocks of the clausal core. 2 Method -- Sample: A total of 421 children contributed multiword sentences with these core grammatical relations to the pool. Individual children contributed no more than a couple of hundred utterances from the start of their production of multiword combinations. The mean age of the children was a little over two years and 3 months. The child sample belongs to children at Roger Brown's Stage I grammar (Brown, 1973). 3 The corpus : Utterances were hand ‑ parsed for grammatical relations, and the verbs lemmatized. The corpus consisted of over 25,796 tokens, produced with 292 different verbs. 4 9 Conclusions: Early syntax is Anglo- Saxon It is well known that monosyllabic verbs from any origin join the native verbs in their special grammatical behaviour (e.g., Zwicky and Pullum, 1986). We may summarize that almost without exception, all of children's early basic grammatical combinations reflect the native, Anglo-Saxon type of syntax. 10 Conclusions: No need for homogenous semantics for early syntax Paradoxically, polysemy and polyvalency do not appear to hurt syntactic learning in the early stages. Nor does lack of semantic content – children use many auxiliaries and copulas in Stage I. 11 Conclusions: Syntactic development without semantic linking We should reconsider what we believe children learn when they develop syntactic knowledge. In all probability, it is not semantically homogenous “Argument Structure Constructions”. Further details and all references will be found in: Ninio, A. (in press). Syntactic development: its input and output. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 12 Why is this important? Being of native origin makes a difference to the syntax of verbs in English. Many native verbs have auxiliary or semi ‑ auxiliary versions besides the full version. There are constructions open only for this stream of verb vocabulary: dative direct object (Green, 1974); verb - particle (Makkai, 1972); light verb constructions (Algeo, 1995) and so on. Native verbs are mostly polyvalent, their semantics is polysemous (Dixon, 1991). Results – Length : It appeared that 258 verbs, 88% of verb types, were mono-syllabic. These verbs were responsible for 98% of all tokens of the core grammatical relations in the corpus. 6 Results -- Origin: 78%, or 3/4 of all verbs were of vernacular or native Anglo-Saxon origin, generating 95% of all tokens of the core grammatical relations of verbs. Some of the most frequent native verbs were be, do, go, want, give and get. 8 Coding for Origin: Next, we classified all verbs according to their historical origin, based on the Online Etymological Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Three categories were used: (1) Native or Anglo ‑ Saxon (words whose origin is Old Germanic, Old Norwegian and other Scandinavian languages), (2) Latinate (including words of Norman French origin and words borrowed from Latin), and (3) other or unknown (mostly of onomatopoeic origin). 7 5 Coding for Length : We classified all verbs appearing in the Subject ‑ Verb, Verb-Object and Verb- Indirect Object patterns according to number of syllables of the verb-stem, into one-syllable versus multiple-syllable verbs. As the basis of the analysis were verb stems, inflections for person or tense did not add to length.