As one happy result of our online discussion, I have been alerted to a
very interesting, very current article on these issues.
    “Building Language Competence in First Language Acquisition”.European
Review, Vol 16, No. 4, 445-456.  2008.
   Elena Lieven, the author, is, according to the author note, Director of
the Max Planck Child Study Centre in the School of Psychological
Sciences at the University of Manchester and was editor of The Journal
of Child Language from 1996-2005.

   The abstract is as follows:

     “Most accounts of child language acquisition use as analytic tools
adult-like syntactic categories and grammars with little concern for
whether they are psychologically real for young children. However,
when approached from a cognitive and functional theoretical
perspective, recent research has demonstrated that children do not
operate initially with such abstract linguistic entities, but instead
on the basis of distributional learning and item-based, form-meaning
constructions. Children construct more abstract, linguistic
representations only on the basis of the language they hear and use
and they constrain these constructions to their appropriate ranges of
use only gradually as well—again on the basis of linguistic
experience in which frequency plays a key role. Results from
empirical analyses of children’s early multi-word utterances, the
development of the transitive construction and certain types of
errors are presented to illustrate this approach.”

    Some of you may find the article useful for the careful and thoughtful
way she presents the dual perspectives of Universal Grammar and the
alternative (constructive, emergent, usage-based) approach. In all
three of the empirical studies summarized, the constructivist model
seems the most in play.

Here’s from the conclusion:  “The structure of language emerges from
language use historically and ontogenetically. Children use what they hear
in order to communicate and thus come to share in a language community in
terms of the network of form-meaning mappings that comprises their
grammar.” She points out that much work needs to be done, including a
focus on the role of “saliency, communicative relevance to the child and
relationships between items in the network of connections…” “My aim here
has been to illustrate ways in which a constructivist accounts would
approach these issues and to argue that because these accounts are more
psychologically realistic, they are likely to provide a much sounder
theoretical and empirical basis for further research.”

   I think there are major implications. One, certainly, is that the
grammar of the language doesn't seem to be already pre-wired into the
brain. Acquisition depends a great deal on input, on the kinds of
interactions involved. The other implication is that gramamr is not
best thought of as a set of abstract, formal "rules". It is, by its
very nature, functional in orientation, connected to a shared language
community.

   I know I get people angry when I say this, but a more functional,
emergent understanding of grammar also gives us a better chance of
arguing for a much larger place for attention to it in the English
curriculum.
   For a formal or structural grammar, you need to theorize ways in which
knowledge of the underlying forms can be put to work. In a functional
model, those connections are already there. As Bill put it in a recent
post, there is no performance/competence split.

Craig

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