Abstract
Language is a system whose elements are related both to the world and among themselves. The function of syntactic morphemes is to relate words to words. The first appearance of these elements would seem to occur in the form of placeholders, single-syllable, unfixed, unaccented entities carrying no readily available meaning or function, existing only as potential syntactic morphemes. They are forms that will not become fixed and functional until later in the learning process, and full acquistion will take even longer. A longitudinal study had been carried out on a bilingual French/English child from age 2–3, and the following is based on the transcript of that study.
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Dolitsky, M. The birth of grammatical morphemes. J Psycholinguist Res 12, 353–360 (1983). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067618
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01067618