two-word utterances to accomplish a great deal of communication. This pattern
of development is universal across all known languages. Some typical two-
word utterances are:
- Go bye-bye.
- All gone.
- Baby fall.
- Me sleep.
- Doggie run.
These two-word utterances have a basic grammatical structure. In the case
of “go bye-bye,” they contain an action with an understood agent, whereas in
utterances like “me sleep,” the agent and the action are present. These agent-ac-
tion utterances are very similar to the simplest grammatical sentences, such as
“dogs bark.” Between 18 months and age 2, children’s language develops at a
rapid pace; they acquire two or more new words per day, and within 6 months to
a year they are producing complete sentences that are grammatically correct.
That is, a 3-year-old child will produce sentences like 6a, but they will never
produce sentences like 6b:
6a. I got a boo-boo.
6b. Got boo-boo a I.What should strike us immediately is that this behavior allows us to under-
stand why most of the errors students make in their writing are not related to
grammar.As native speakers of English, their language is necessarily gram-
matical.There is no other option. Language is partially, but significantly, de-
fined by grammar; that is, grammar is inherent in language and language
cannot be acquired or produced without grammar. Newport, Gleitman, and
Gleitman (1977) estimated that 99.93% of the speech produced by anyone
older than age 6 is grammatically correct. If people produced ungrammatical
sentences like 6b, they would not be using English.^13 This does not mean, of
course, that native speakers of a language never produce ungrammatical sen-
tences—they do—but such sentences represent a tiny fraction of all the sen-
tences they generate. The majority of ungrammatical sentences we find in
38 CHAPTER 2
(^13) Linguists have developed a theory of universal grammar that proposes that languages do not vary
arbitrarily or without limitations. This means that all languages share numerous properties, probably as a
result of the way the mind is structured and operates. Example 6b violates the word order properties of
universal grammar; no languages exist or can exist with this particular structure. Therefore, we would
have to conclude that anyone who spontaneously produced 6b (as opposed to its deliberate construction
as an example in this text) probably is not human. See Chomsky (1981, 1995, 2000), Culicover (1999),
Jackendoff (2002), Newmeyer (1998), and Prince and Smolensky (1993) for more on universal grammar.