Adults, target-words, and the child's syntactical development
Language cannot be learned without linguistic input. Hence, the
environment plays an important role in childrens’ language
development. In this paper it is examined how important the
environment’s role is. Two views are described: Universal
Grammar and Emergentism. They are in this paper considered to
represent two basic stances; the innate stance and the “non-
innate” stance. The overall aim is to present evidence in favour
of either Emergentism or Universal Grammar. It is achieved by a
theoretical discussion and the findings from an observation. In
the observational study the aim is to see if and, if so, how
adults provide clues for children to develop their syntax. This
is achieved by looking at target-words and how the adults use
context and prosody to supply children with them. The findings
show that the adults extensively use context when talking to
children. The theoretical discussion together with the findings,
are here found to support Emer