Abstract
Not too long ago the consensus in the field was that during the early stages of language development young children did not have grammatical categories or relations of any sort. but rather that their grammars had a semantic basis (cf. Bowerman, 1973; Schlesinger, 1971, for example). A notable problem for such analyses was to account for the transition to an adult-like, syntactically-based system. Current theories which propose that functional categories are lacking or underspecified in early grammars, face a similar challenge. The latter hypothesis, which I will henceforth refer to as the small clause hypothesis, following Radford (1986, 1990), may in fact have a harder task in that the kinds of semantic bootstrapping mechanisms which have been posited for the acquisition of lexical categories, such as Noun and Verb (cf. Wexler and Culicover, 1980; Grimshaw, 1981), do not readily extend to functional categories, such as INFL or COMP, which have no clear referential function.
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Hyams, N. (1992). The Genesis of Clausal Structure. In: Meisel, J.M. (eds) The Acquisition of Verb Placement. Studies in Theoretical Psycholinguistics, vol 16. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-2803-2_12
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