1018: Reproducing Interrogatives Sep 22, 2017

Though somewhat controversial, it can be said with reasonable certainty that children acquire language from studying and reproducing what they hear around them. Partly this is a matter of memorization; being able to associate a collection of sounds with an idea is how words are used, but also children will follow patterns that they feel they understand, sometimes too much as seen by adults. The sentence "I holded it" rather than "I held it" is ungrammatical but is arguably more sensible than the alternative. It would perhaps appear reasonable to assume that it is common for children to follow every pattern they observe, such as placing a verb before the subject nominal phrase makes a question, like "the man is painting" versus "is the man painting?". Nevertheless, it has been shown that children do not make errors in following this blindly, as would happen with "the man who is painting is happy" becoming something like "is the man who painting is happy?". This idea was proposed by Chomsky as one of many explanations as to why grammar must be innate, but the issue with his point is that children are not producing sentences like that because, among other reasons, children would not be exposed to a ungrammatical interrogative such as that one. Unlike 'holded' which is one of a few exceptions to a very basic pattern, "is the man who painting is happy?" is not a lexical issue, but a systematic issue that is more complex, and would never be presented to children to mimic anyway.