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of the range of application of the passive (Ingram, 1989, p. 471). According to Pinker
(1984), children use their knowledge of oblique prepositional phrases such as The cat was
sitting by the fence to generate what they first perceive as a parallel structure, e.g. The cat
was bitten by the dog (Ingram, 1989, p. 472):
This will eventually lead to a new phrase-structure rule which generates
passives as well as oblique prepositional phrases. The difference between
the two rules will be in the grammatical roles of the NPs. A last step will
be the child’s acquiring a second lexical entry for the passive form of the
verb. For example, the child’s lexicon will have ‘bite’ for active sentences
and ‘bitten’ for passive ones, [compare LEXICAL-FUNCTIONAL
GRAMMAR].
Children under five years of age use few relative clauses, preferring to string clauses
together with and (Ingram, 1989, p. 476). Yule (1985, p. 144) provides a typicalexample
from a two-year-old who repeated an adult’s utterance The owl who eats candy runs fast
as Owl eat candy and he run fast. As in the case of passives, it appears that four-year-old
children have begun to acquire relative clauses, though they use them far less than adults
do (Ingram, 1989, p. 483).
C.Chomsky (1969) provides evidence of 5- to 10-year-old children’s abilities to
process three types of constructions with pronominalization: (1) blocked backward
pronominalization, as in He found out that Mickey won the race; (2) backwards
pronominalization, as in Before he went out, Pluto took a nap; (3) forward
pronominalization, as in Pluto thinks he knows everything. Each of the forty children in
Chomsky’s study was tested for their comprehension of five sentences of each type. The
children were first introduced to two dolls called Mickey and Pluto. Then the test
sentence and a question about it were presented to the child, e.g. Pluto thinks that he
knows everything. Pluto thinks that who knows everything? Because the children had two
dolls in their universe of discourse, the pronoun in sentences of types 2 and 3 could refer
to either the doll named in the sentence or to the other doll, so Chomsky only took
account of the children’s performance with type 1 sentences. She took blocked backward
pronominalization to be acquired by a child only if the child answered all five questions
for this type of sentence correctly. Thirty-one of the children met this criterion, but all of
them except three showed evidence of beginning acquisition. Chomsky concludes that the
acquisition of pronominalization is maturationally determined, that is, independent of
environmental factors and of intelligence and general cognitive development (Ingram,
1989, p. 489).
Later studies, for instance Ingram and Shaw (1981), in which a 100 children between
three and eight years of age were studied, have shown four stages in the acquisition of
pronominal reference, which show children to be moving from the exclusive use of linear
order to a system which takes account of structural properties of sentences. The stages are
(Ingram, 1989, p. 491):
stage
1:
stage
2:
The linguistics encyclopedia 334
Use of coreference: a pronoun may refer to an NP in a clause which may either precede or
follow it;
Use of linear order, a pronoun may only refer to a preceding NP;