The Empirical Acquisition of Grammatical Relations

We propose an account for the acquisition of grammatical relations using the concepts of connectionist learning and a construction-based theory of grammar. The proposal is based on the observation that early production of childhood speech is formulaic and the assumption that the purpose of language is communication. If one assumes that children’s comprehension of multiword speech is not globally systematic, but based initially on semi-rote knowledge (socalled “pivot grammars”), a pathway through small-scale systematicity to grammatical relations appropriate to the child’s target language can be seen. We propose such a system and demonstrate a portion of the emergence of grammatical relations using a connectionist network.