The multilingual potential in emerging grammars

Abstract

Our contribution deals with the nature of children's earliest word combinations. Based on data from monolingual (German) and bilingual (German/English) children we argue that there is no pregrammatical stage once children move beyond single-word utterances. As soon as words combine, basic organizational principles, such as the binary distinction between head and non-head, are activated and enter into coalitions with other (semantic, pragmatic) levels of representation. In addition we claim that monolinguals behave very much like bilinguals in that initially all children create coexisting grammars. Various types of evidence in favor of this proposal are considered. Convergence comes about when children (assisted by universal grammar) reconstruct derivational relationships linking hitherto independent systems. The overall process is slow, making it possible for us to detect transitional problems. Bilingual language mixing yields important insights into children's early awareness of cross-linguistic equivalence and contrasts and can be related to specific properties of a child's grammars at different developmental stages.