ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the theoretical approach to child language acquisition. It has at least four elements that are surprising from the point of view of nativist theorizing about language development, especially with regard to the syntactic dimensions of the process. Most approaches to the study of first language acquisition use adult-like grammatical categories and rules to describe children's language. This is especially true of the dominant approach to the study of children's syntactic development. The central issue of current concern is whether children are operating from the outset of development with adult-like linguistic categories and schemas or, alternatively, whether children begin the acquisition process with only highly specific and concrete linguistic items and structures. In the context of a focus on syntax, the over generalisations of most interest are those involving sentence-level constructions, in which the child uses verbs in syntactic constructions in an 'incorrect' way.
