Babies’ non-said words: a review of the “wordhood” issue in the light of language acquisition

Abstract

The proper characterization of wordhood has been an important topic in morphological theories, and the lack of consistent criteria for defining it has led certain frameworks (the constructionist ones) to give up on the special status of “word” and to characterize it as an output of syntactic operations – the ones employed to generate phrases and sentences. That been said, this paper aims at reviewing this problem in the light of another perspective, namely, language acquisition. Specifically, the present work, built on a corpus analysis of children acquiring Brazilian Portuguese, reviews the main issues emerging from the wordhood targeting both linguistic theory and language acquisition methodology, and also discusses the status of the minimal unities of infant utterances. In short, this case study shows that words are not the minimal linguistic unities at any level at all and as well as target-grammar (i.e. adult-grammar), children lean on smaller unities. Therefore, the intuition behind wordhood must come from somewhere else.