Learning to in complement constructions

The acquisition of to in infinitive complement structure was examined in the spontaneous speech data from four children who were observed longitudinally from two to three years of age. The children learned to as a complementizer connective in the context of a small group of verbs and other matrix forms that take a verb phrase complement. They did not learn to in the context of the complement verbs to mark the infinitive. Secondly, the children learned to with the meaning ‘direction towards’ and not as a meaningless syntactic marker. These results contribute to understanding the relation between the acquisition of complex syntax and the verb system in child language, and to evaluating traditional and contemporary linguistic theories of infinitive complement structure in English. The transition from simple to complex syntax ordinarily begins between 2 and 3 years of age, and the structure of infinitive complements is one of the first complex structures to appear (Brown, 1973; Limber, 1973). Certain other linguistic structures that children begin to acquire in this period have been highly constrained by the kinds of verbs that they know and use, in particular, the acquisition of verb inflections (Bloom, Lifter, & Hafitz, 1980) and wh-questions (Bloom, Merkin, & Wootten, 1982). Because sentences with infinitive complements include two verbs, how children acquire infinitive complements is relevant to extending our understanding of the relationship between the acquisition of complex syntax and the development of the verb system in child language. One purpose of this study, then, was to determine whether regularities among the higher verb forms (hereafter referred to as matrix forms) or the complement infinitive verbs governed acquisition of to as a syntactic marker. In addition, among the reasons for studying child language is the continuing concern for understanding the nature of language more generally. How children acquire language is relevant to how we attempt to explain language. The study of one or another aspect of language development, then, can be helpful in evaluating alternative theories of language. In the case of the acquisition of infinitive complements, we have several theories but no consensus about their structure in adult language. A second purpose of this study, then, was to evaluate the extent to which child data are consistent with traditional and contemporary theories of infinitive complement structure. In many linguistic accounts, the connective to is presented as part of the larger system of complementation in English and, in particular, to complements are contrasted with participial -ing complements (e.g., Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, & Svartvik, 1972; Rosenbaum, 1967). However, to complementation was the subject of the separate study reported here because (1) the children in this longitudinal study did not acquire participial -ing complements in the same period (from 2 to 3 years of age), so that to complements were not learned contrastively, 1The research reported here was supported by Fellowship F1-MH-30,001, 1965-1968, from the National Institute of Mental Health; Research Grant HD 03828, 1971-1974, from the National Institute of Child Health and Development; and Research Grants from the National Science Foundation, 1975-1987, to Lois Bloom. The study was published originally in the Journal of Child Language, 11, 1984, 397-406; reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three, New York: Cambridge University, pp. 292-309; and reformatted for this digital version with slight changes in organization and minor text editing.