[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Four Theories of Language Development
Some linguistic research has suggested that language is biologically rooted in a language faculty or organ that grows as we experience the world. An increasing number of studies purport to reveal that young children or infants have early "knowledge" of--or at least some sort of sensitivity to--many linguistic properties. This would mean that language is not simply a set of symbols in the world that we learn to manipulate. This sort of evidence, among other factors, has motivated investigators of language to study both the structure of mind and its outputs.
In their investigation, Maria Babyonyshev (Babyonyshev et al., 2001) and her team seek to support the theory of an innate language faculty and acknowledge that the common approach is to show childrens' knowledge in the absence of the intensity of environmental stimuli that would have engendered language learning. Babyonyshev et al., however, look at the opposite situation--gaps in children's linguistic abilities, generally young children's inability to use passive constructions and unaccusative case verbs the way adults use them. For these researchers, cases of late knowledge bolster the hypothesis that the biology that supports the relevant knowledge is not available until a comparatively late stage in child development.
Using linguistics' technical methods and terminologies, Babyonyshev et al. (2001) note that clauses produced by adults containing unaccusative verbs, like passives, "require an A-chain with a tail in direct object position and a head in subject position.'" Thus:
(a) The [door] opened.
(b) The [mail] arrived.
The authors explain that it might be expected that children lacking A-chains would not use unaccusative verbs at all, but inform us that this prediction is clearly incorrect. In fact, as the authors conversely note, children successfully use unaccusative verbs. There are ways that children lacking A-chains may be able to use unaccusatives..................
