Emergence of Child Grammar and Grammaticalization Theory

Emergence of grammar in first language acquisition is studied from the point of view of recent approaches to grammaticalization in general linguistics where the emergence of grammar in the languages of the world is taken to proceed from discourse to syntax, from more concrete lexical to more abstract gram­matical meanings. In this perspective, the language acquisi­tion problem consisting in the child's task of constructing the grammar of his native language on the basis of linguistic input becomes less formidable and it seems less paradoxical to consider the child as using a language in order to learn it rather than vice versa. Insofar as grammaticalization theory will finally succeed in explaining the course of grammatical development in the languages of the world and in language ac­quisition, the role played by “universal grammar” considered as man’s specifically linguistic biological endowment will be reduced. - The paper presents arguments for considering the child's acquisition of grammar as a process of grammaticalization. Data are mainly from Greek child speech