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Transitivity in child language

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

David Ingram
David Ingram*
Affiliation:
Institute for Childhood Aphasia Stanford University
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Abstract

The holophrastic nature of children's one-word utterances has long been recognized by linguists. The child will use gesture, intonation, and a single word to convey a variety of messages. Syntactic models of grammar, however, are not equipped to capture adequately this early stage of language development. Fillmore's case grammar comes closer, but is still based on the syntactic category of verb in the deep structure. It is suggested that Fillmore's model can be adapted to account for this early stage if verb is replaced by a semantic category. This category is semantic transitivity, which designates a proposition as communicating either an act or a state. With this adaptation made, it is also suggested how gestures and intonation can be formally included in the semantic model for representing one-word utterances. An analysis is then presented of the one-word utterances recorded by Leopold. The results show that children's early one-word utterances convey states, while later ones refer to actions.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , December 1971 , pp. 888 - 910
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 by Linguistic Society of America

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