First published in 1973, this important work was the first systematic attempt to apply theoretical and methodological tools developed in America to the acquisition of a language other than English. Dr Bowerman presents and analyses data from a longitudinal investigation of the early syntactic development of two Finnish children, and compares their speech at two stages of development with that of American, Samoan and Luo children. The four language families (Finno-Ugric, Indo-European,...
1. Introduction; 2. Data collection; 3. The pivot grammar approach; 4. Early stage 1 speech; 5. Late stage 1 speech; 6. problems with the transformational grammar approach; 7. The case grammar approach; 8. Summary and conclusions; Appendices.