The Acquisition of Syntactic Categories in Jakarta Indonesian

This paper presents evidence for two distinct stages in the acquisition of syntactic categories in Malay and Indonesian, drawing from an ongoing longitudinal study of 8 children in Jakarta, documented in a naturalistic corpus of close to one million utterances. Jakarta Indonesian is characterized by an extremely impoverished inventory of syntactic categories. Almost all expressions, including those whose translational equivalents into English are nouns, adjectives, verbs, and their phrasal projections, belong to a single open syntactic category, S(entence); all members of S exhibit the same syntactic behaviour, including shared distributional privileges. In addition to S, there is a single closed syntactic category S/S, consisting of a few dozen semantically heterogeneous items whose distributional privileges are more restricted: as suggested by the categorial-grammar notation, members of S/S combine with members of S to form other members of S. In Gil (2000), a universal theory of syntactic categories is proposed, which makes certain empirical predictions with respect to typology (cross-linguistic variation), phylogeny (language evolution) and ontogeny (language acquisition). With regard t