linguistic structures - Professor Binkert's Webpage - Oakland ...

(18) a. Question: Why did they come?
b. Answer: *Too clean the room./*So clean the room.
Children also know that too has a variety of uses like to, so that (19) is ambiguous meaning either
‘They are overly clean’ or ‘They are definitely/emphatically clean.’
(19) They are too clean.
Lastly, children know that clean in (20a) is an adjective whereas clean in (20b) is a verb.
(20) a. They were clean.
b. They did clean.
We know they know this because they will utter only the grammatical sentences in examples like
the following:
(21) a. They were very clean.
b. *They did very clean.
c. They were cleaner.
d. *They did cleaner.
e. *They were clean it.
f. They did clean it.
g. *They were so clean better than us.
h. They did so clean better than us.
In short, when children acquire their native language, they acquire unconscious knowledge of the
parts of speech (nouns and verbs) and of word usage (two, to, and too) long before they go to school
and learn to talk consciously about what they already unconsciously know. They unconsciously
know what a noun is and what a verb is; they just don’t consciously know that a noun is called a
“noun” and a verb is called a “verb.” They will correctly use all three words that are pronounced
[tu] long before they learn to spell them. In fact, although they know the difference between the
three words (two, to, and too) and do not misuse them in speech, many children often misspell them
into adulthood writing sentences like He is to tall. We can tell what children unconsciously know
by listening to what they say and observing whether or not they understand what is being said to
them. It is the task of linguistics to discover the exact nature of that unconscious knowledge and to
formulate a theory that explains how children acquire that knowledge. As this discussion indicates,
both tasks are formidable.
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