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Substitution: 'drink water' > 'drink milk'.
Expansion: 'lock-it' > 'lock that Lulu'.
Addition: 'hit tennis' > 'Danny hit tennis';
Coordination: 'Maria hit. Hit me.' > 'Maria hit me'.
Based on data from his daughter for the period 18 to 20 months, Tomasello (1992:
236-7) reports that 92% of the first 271 three-or-more-word combinations of the child
involved only a single simple change from previous sentences with the same verb.
Reordering of elements in a sentence is a rare operation.
3. Data from Chinese-speaking children
3.1 Productivity of early word combinations in Cantonese-speaking children (Lee
2004)
Table 5. Multi-word combinations of two Cantonese-speaking children before 2;0
Child Age frozen phrases intermediate
utterances
constructed
utterances
MHZ 1;7-2;0 55 (23%) 109 (45%) 77 (32%) 241
CKT 1;5-2;0 77 (21%) 69 (19%) 218 (60%) 364
total number
of
multi-word
utterances
Lieven's methodology is too restrictive in excluding first time occurrences as
indicative of productive patterns.
For example, if a child says Daddy drink and drink milk, and later says Daddy drink
milk, the latter utterance will not be classified as constructed. But the child may be
generalizing from its knowledge of subject-predicate and verb-object structures (cf.
McNeill 1966).
3.2 Verb as a category (shown by its being an argument of a higher predicate)
(Xiao, Cai and Lee 2006)
Table 6. Longitudinal data for verb argument analysis and distributional analysis
Subject Age range covered Number
of
sessions
Age range
covered
AJR 01;02;22-02;00;26 20 01;06;03-02;00;10 13
LSY 01;03;14-02;00;19 20 01;06;28-01;11;29 11
Number
of
sessions
8