Children’s syntax: a parametric approach

Abstract

Here I present some reasons to take a “parametric” approach to children’s acquisition of syntax. I briefly review findings from three case studies which, in my view, offer important insights into what happens when a child’s syntax undergoes a change. Each of the case studies is based on longitudinal corpora of spontaneous-speech samples from children acquiring English or Spanish, and each one examines the initial emergence of syntactic structures that are subject to cross-linguistic variation. My principal claims are that changes in a child’s syntax are decisive, additive, and interconnected.