ABSTRACT
In 1997 Liz Bates and Judith Goodman published an important paper entitled “On the inseparability of grammar and the lexicon” This paper, which pulls together decades of work on normal and abnormal development, argues eloquently and persuasively for an “emergentist” view of language. Bates and Goodman argue against the autonomy of grammar, and, more generally, against the view that language learning depends on innate abilities that are specific to language. Instead, they put forward a unified lexicalist approach, whereby language is acquired through processes and learning mechanisms which are not grammar-or language-specific, and where lexical and grammatical development are so strongly interdependent that a modular approach to the acquisition of grammar is simply untenable.
