Semantic value of the morphosyntactic structures in 3-year-old children

Abstract

Langacker (in Cifuentes 1996:23) states that “[…] grammar is just the structuration and symbolization of the semantic content”. According to this postulate, morphosyntactic markers would be structured by lexical-semantic relations. To test this hypothesis, we investigated whether 3-year-old children were able to identify verbs and countable and uncountable nouns presented as pseudowords from morphosyntactic markers of the sentence. For that purpose, a descriptive exploratory study was carried out in twelve 3-year-old children by replicating one of Brown tests (1981:39). When the findings were analysed, it was observed that all children recognized the addressed grammatical categories. It can be said that the morphosyntatic structures from the sentences would allow children to identify each category of the pseudowords. It was concluded that the grammatical elements would structure the cognitive representation evoked by them allowing the access to the presumptuous meaning of a pseudoword from its form and function in the structure of a sentence. This means that the morphosyntatic markers would provide the necessary information to locate the grammatical category of words and, in this way, the non-words would acquire a reference status as they would be a “first semantic approximation in a pragmatic context” (Sentis et al. 2009:148). These results would confirm the thesis that "[...] lexicon, morphology and syntax are conceived as a continuum of interrelated aspects [...]" (Cuenca y Hilferty 2007:24).