The "Guts" of Language

The "Guts" of Language • In Mysak's Model we discussed the Governor. It is the seat of consciousness, where an idea, we might wish to communicate, becomes the focus of our attention. • We call this idea Deep Structure. • The process of transforming this Deep Structure into its final symbolic form which is suitable for communication is called Surface Structure. • This is basically what language is all about. • All of the other processes, such as transduction, perception and the comparator are necessary for the development and use of language, but they are ancillary processes. • To get from Deep Structure to Surface Structure, a child must first learn and then be able to apply simultaneously five levels of linguistic rules. • These are abstracted by the child from his/her language environment. There are Five Levels of Linguistic Rules to be learned and applied to go from Deep Structure to Surface Structure. • The five levels of rules are: o Phonologic Rules o Morphologic Rules o Syntactic Rules o Semantic Rules o Pragmatic Rules • The first three sets of rules are typically discussed in the literature as the FORM of language. • The fourth, Semantics, is referred to as the rules of CONTENT. • And the fifth, Pragmatics, is described as the USE of language. • This module will address the first three, or Language Form. • Because language is discursive, I must list and discuss them in order, but they are learned by the child simultaneously. • Ironically, the first I have chosen to discuss, Phonology, is often the last to be completely mastered by the child. The Phoneme is the smallest unit of a language that can change meaning. • Phonology is the study of sounds (phons) that humans can make for oral communication. Humans are capable of a great many of these sounds. • The hurdle that the baby has in learning language is that each language has its own personal selection of sounds to serve as individual units. • We call them collectively phonemes. The child must learn what those units are for his/her language. • The phoneme is the smallest unit of a language that can change meaning. • Hence, when I go to the doctor after a fight with my wife, I may report that she either bit me or beat me. • In English, the "i" (as in "bit" ) and "ee" (as in "beat") sounds make a difference in meaning, so they are phonemes. • In Russian, those two sounds are not distinguished as seperate, so that my Russian friend may say his wife beat him when there are clearly teeth marks in his arm. A Phoneme is really a bundle of sounds called Allophones • There are approximately 41 to 48 phonemes in English depending upon the dialect etc. Spanish has less, and Hawaiian has only about 13. • Does that mean that Hawaiian is a more primitive language which is too unsophisticated to serve in todays complex society. • Definitely not! The number of phonemes in a language has no bearing on the complexity or effectiveness of the language to communicate. • Few languages if any have more than 50. However, I have unconfirmed reports of some Russian dialects in the Caucasus Mountains that have 76. • Regardless, the problem for the child is that a phoneme is not typically a single sound (phon). It may be somewhat arbitrarily made up of a bundle of sounds. One example in English is the /t/ phoneme. Babies must separate the phonemes from the allophones. • The /t/ phoneme in English is actually four different phons. They are as follows: o The aspirated /t/ as in "take." o The unaspirated /t/ as in "steak." o The unreleased /t/ as in "cat." o The nasaly released /t/ as in "cotton." • You could use them interchangeably in the word "cotton" and it would still mean a piece of fluff. • Sounds that are different, but are accepted as the same phoneme in a language are called allophones. In English those different /t/ phons are allophones. • In some other languages, the degree of aspiration changes the meaning and hence the ÑtÅs would be considered phonemic. • Babies certainly have their work cut out for them, to separate the phonemes from the allophones! It truly is a job that separates the men from the babies. Babies do not hear the phonemes of a language, but they do hear the building blocks of the phonemes of all languages. • When a man hears speech, he hears discrete sequences of phonemes. This is because he has learned the phonemes of his language, and now has an internalized perceptual overlay of those phonemes to place over and interpret the speech stream. • Babies, however, have no knowledge of phonemes and no overlay. They hear only a continuous stream of sound including a host of discriminating features, like noises and tones, that rapidly change. • Ironically, for learning a new language, the baby has the advantage over the man. • Babies are born with the neural connections to hear all of the discriminating features in the stream of sound. • These are the building blocks of the phonemic system of every language. The "perceptual overlay" that the man uses to understand speech, masks out many of these discriminating features. • Hence, the man will hear only the sounds he expects to hear and miss what is really being said. Babies should be stimulated in more than one language to keep neural connections alive. • Babies are born, as we said, with the neural connections in place to hear all of the building blocks of phonemes for all languages. • But if these connections are not stimulated they will die out. • Hence, it is important that families with multi-language backgrounds should make these resources available to the babies. • Family members speaking different languages should talk to the babies as much as possible. • Some folks play language tapes to the baby, but I am skeptical of this approach, since it is not accompanied by the sense of vision or touch, and may be tuned out. • We shall have to wait for some research in this area. • I don't recommend a multi-language approach for children who are at risk for a language delay, such as premature babies, blue babies or babies with a history of language delay in the family, etc. The Morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that can carry meaning. • Morphology is the study of words. The morpheme is the smallest unit of a language that can carry meaning. • Hence, every uncompounded word in English is a morpheme. The word "me" is one morpheme. The word "Mississippi" is also one morpheme. • Morphemes are certainly a major part of our lexicon (vocabulary) and we want to facilitate their acquisition as much as possible. We will discuss how later. • "Me" and "Missisippi" are called free morphemes because when you hear them by themselves, they have symbolic significance. • There is another smaller class of morphemes for which that isn't the case. • If you hear me say "ssssss," you would probably classify it as an English phoneme. • But any meaning you derived from this would be from the non linguistic channel--as a sign in an emotional graded communication. A Bound Morpheme has meaning only when it is attached to a Free Morpheme. • But if I put the "sss" sound on the end of the word "cat," as in "cats," the sound has meaning--more than one. • In this instance, the sound "sss" is a morpheme, or more specifically, it is a bound morpheme. It only has meaning when attached to a free morpheme. • Those who remember a time before television, will also remember bound morphemes as the old prefix/suffix game. • But that belies its true importance. A child must learn the bound morpheme structure and rules to communicate linguistically. • Let's look at six important communication functions that depend upon the use of bound morphemes. • 1. Singular/Plural: Obviously, there are times when we want to talk about more than one. The bound morpheme that accomplishes this, as we discussed, is /s/, as in "cats". Allomorphs are a group of Bound Morphemes that all do the same thing, like signifying two or more objects. • But what about the plural of "dog"É. It is spelled "s" but is pronounced /z/. And the plural of "hose" adds an "s" in the spelling, but is pronounced /ziz/. • Since we donÅt talk as we spell, the young child must deal with the pronunciation rules. But it gets worse! The plural of "goose" is not "gooses," but "geese". And the plural of "moose" is not "mooses" nor "meese" but simply "moose." • The bound morpheme in that case is nothing, and is designated as /0/, or nothing. • All these bound morphemes which are pronounced differently but do the same thing (e.g, signify plural) are called allomorphs. • The child must not only learn all the allomorphs to express plurals, but also the correct time to use them. Bound Morphemes are used to express the Past Tense in English. • 2. Present/Past: There is no doubt that folks in our Society are particularly concerned with time. We live by the clock. • In my office which is 8Åx8Å, I have three clocks on the wall, and if that werenÅt enough, I wear a watch and my computer keeps the time at the top of the screen. • So how many bound morphemes do we devote to expressing time--that is, how many tenses do we have in English? Take a guess...2, 4, 6, 8 or more? • I you answered 8 or more, you are in for a surprise. The answer is 2! They are the Present and Past Tenses. • We do have other mechanisms for expressing nuances of time, but they do not involve bound morphemes. We will discuss those later. • So today I jump. Yesterday I jumped. The bound morpheme expressing past tense is pronounced /t/ (although it is spelled "ed.") The Past Tense has many Allomorphs in English. • But suppose I jog today. Yesterday I jogged. Here the bound morpheme is pronounced /d/, although it is spelled "ed." So now we have two allomorphs again for past tense--/t/ and /d/. • And what if I land softly today. Yesterday I landed softly. Note that it is spelled "ed," but pronounced /did/. And then there is "rise" and "risen," and "run" and "ran," and more. • Learning this is not a task for babies, or is it? • 3. Male/Female: In some languages, bound morphemes are used extensively to indicate Gender. Was I shocked, for example, in my Russian 100 class to find out that all Russian nouns have Gender. • And its not just a choice of two but three: masculine, feminine and neuter. There is a bound morpheme for each. • There are some gender endings in English, although its a paltry number when compared to Russian. Bound Morphemes are used to signify Possession and include many Allomorphs. • What gender is my Waitress? What is the bound morpheme that tells us that? And what about the Prince and Princess--Which one is wearing the glass slippers? • 4. Possession: What makes the slippers special anyway? Nothing unless you are Cinderella because they were Cinderella's slippers. Notice, the bound morpheme that expresses possession is spelled "s," but pronouned /z/. • But when she became the princess, we would have to say they (the slippers) were the Princesses. Here the allomorph is spelled "ses" but is pronounced /siz/. • If they belonged to Benz, they would have been Benzes /ziz/ and if they belonged to Pat, they would have been Pat's /s/. • There is certainly an impressive array of allomorphs for the child to learn to express possession. Bound Morphemes are used to change the function of some words and to identify the function of some others. • 5. Word Functions: The Prince, it turns out was a "kind" man. The word "kind" is an adjective which describes someone. • If we wish to talk about that quality, however, we canÅt use an adjective. We need a noun. • Here again, bound morphemes play an important role. By adding the bound morpheme "ness" to the adjective we can change it into a noun! • It can go the other way too. Cinderella was a "beauty." "Beauty" is a noun. If we want to use it to describe someone, we must change it into an adjective. • To do this we add the bound morpheme "-iful." Think how many of these the child will learn. • 6. Markers: Bound morphemes are also used to identify the function of other words. We will discuss this, however, at little later. Morphemes are used to analyze the development of language via the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU). • Language Analysis: Another use of Morphemes, not by the child this time but by professionals, is to evaluate the development of a childÅs language. • Most people use a gross rule of thumb based on words. If my child is one year old, he should be speaking, on the average, in one word sentences. • If he is two years old, he should average two word sentences. The three year old should average at least 3 word sentences. • For example, he might say, "Doggy's toys busted," which is a 3 word sentence. • Professionals, however, consider words to be too broad a unit to be very discriminative. Hence, they count the mean length of utterances in terms of both Bound and Free morphemes (MLU). • Hence the sentence, "Doggy's toys busted," would be considered to be 6 morphemes long. Roger Brown described Five Stages of Language Development based on the Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) • Roger W. Brown, as a result of his extensive research on children's language in 1973, described five stages of development based on the mean length of the their utterances (MLU). • He found that the linguistic complexity of language unfolded fairly predictably as each stage was attained. In fact the MLU was a better predictor of language development than age. • This is covered very well in the course text (and in most major books on Language Development) but we will review them briefly here. • While Brown did not assign ages to the five Stages, others have noted the most typical age range for each. • In Stage 1, the MLU ranges between 1.0 and 2.0 morphemes. Children's ages range from one to just over two years (26 mos.) Free morphemes are used exclusively. Semantic Roles provide a framework in Stage 1; and Phrase Structure, Inflections and Prepositions appear in Stage 2. • Semantic relations (roles) are clearly in evidence. For example, agent + action (Doggie run) or action + object (Throw ball), would be a typical expression. Intonation on a word is used to communicate questions. • In Stage 2 the MLU ranges between 2 and 2.5 morphemes. Children's ages range from about 2 and 1/4 years (27 mos) to 2 and 1/2 years (30 mos.) Mainly, phrases are the units of expression. • Noun and Verb Phrases are recognizable now. Some "wh" pronouns (like "where") are added to the beginning of a noun phrase. • And some verbs like "do," "go", and "read" etc. are appended to the beginning or the end of the phrases. • Some bound morphemes (inflections) are used, particularly plurals and the "ing" endings on verbs. Prepositions like "in" and "on" are also popular. Sentences with Simple Transformations are in Stage 3; while Embedded Sentences and Relative Clauses appear in Stage 4. • In Stage 3 the MLU ranges between 2.5 and 3.0 morphemes. Children's ages range from 2 1/2 years to not quite 3 years (34 mos.) • Simple sentences with both noun and verb phrases are the unit now. Some basic transformations are also evident, like the "Yes/No" Question Transformation, and Negations. • Towards the end, some auxiliary forms appear in questions. • These may include words like "be," "can," "will," and "do." • In Stage 4 the MLU ranges between 3.0 and 3.75 morphemes. Children's ages range from almost 3 years (35 mos.) to not quite 3 1/2 years (40 mos.) A major transformation here involves embedding one sentence in another, and the use of relative clauses. For example, "There is the boy who hit me." Stage 5 brings Coordinated Conjoined Sentences and Propositional Relations. • In Stage 5 the MLU ranges between 3.75 and 4.50 morphemes. Children's ages range from almost 3 1/2 years (40 mos.) to not quite 4 years (46 mos.) Complex sentence transformations include coordinated conjoined sentences and propositional relations. For example, "He ran away because he hit me." It couldn't be, "He hit me because he ran away." • More Modals, more consistency in auxiliary inversions, and some adult level tag questions are just a few of the complexities added to the language system. • Whereas the rules of morphology deal with additions, subtractions and transformations to or within words, Syntax deals with these manipulations at the sentence level. Syntax is a human convention not found in the Symbolic Communication of the Apes. • Syntax: For those of us who have suffered through a Grammar class or worse yet a course in Linguistics, its hard to imagine anything being exciting about syntax. • And yet there are four rather interesting things about it that arouse my curiosity. • First of all, syntax is peculiarly human. We used to say that symbolic behavior was exclusively human. • Now it appears that some Gorillas and Chimpanzees have learned symbols and have used them to communicate. Indeed Koko, the gorilla, has a vocabulary of 2000 words! • True, it takes some vigorous training on the part of the care-takers to a develop this skill in primates. • This is in stark contrast to human children for whom it would take vigorous steps just to suppress any kind of symbolic communication. The fact that all known Languages employ syntax is used to support the genetic origins of Language Development. • What appears to be missing, however, from the symbolic communication of primates is true syntax. • When answering a question (please note that their symbolic communication is all through the visual modality), the gorilla will mimic the syntax of the questioner. • But when they generate a spontaneous sentence, there appears to be no structure to their word order. • Syntax, then is what separates the men from the gorillas. • A second interesting fact is that there is no culture known in the world, present or past, that has a language without syntax! Nor has there ever been found a language with a primitive syntax. • Even the language of the aborigines in Australia has a syntax that is no less complex than any other language. • This encourages natavists like Chomsky to predict a genetic link to language development. We use Syntactic Rules without being able to articulate what those rules are. • A third interesting fact about syntax is that we all employ syntactic rules very effectively, if not even effortlessly (How many morphemes in that word?). • But when asked to describe what those rules are, we are nearly speechless. • We must enroll in convoluted English Grammar courses to even have a notion of what the rules are that we are following. • How, the natavists ask, can we learn something without knowing what it is we learned? I'll pass on answering that question. • The fourth interesting feature about syntax is the amount of linguistic information that can be packed into a short simple sentence. Take, for instance, a short three word question like, "Can't I play?" A three word sentence can demonstrate a wealth of linguistic competence. • When this sentence is spontaneously generated by a child, as opposed to being merely an imitation of another childÅs speech, it demonstrates a wealth of linguistic knowledge. • In addition to including a precise word order, it demonstrates the childÅs competency with about 4 transformational rules (we will discuss these later). • We would not be aware of this if it were not for the discipline of Linguistics. • Hence, I recommend to all teachers of young children or children with language delay to include linguistic and grammar courses in their professional continuing education plan. • The following discussion of Syntax, therefore, is not intended to be in anyway a course in Grammar or Linguistics. • Our purpose here is only to underscore the complexity of the task facing the child who is involved in acquiring his/her first language. Grammar includes Syntax (rules of sentence structure) and Transformations (the rules to change that structure). • When I think of Grammar, I think of two things--Syntax, the rules of Structure; and Transformations, the rules to change that structure. • Structure Rules: In the real world, we are often wanting to communicate about someone who is doing something to someone else or something, somewhere at sometime. • There are two structural systems that languages may use to communicate these relationships. • These are Inflectional and/or Analytic systems. • Inflectional Languages: One method is by using bound morphemes to create different word endings (inflections) to reflect these relationships. Languages that rely heavily on this are called Inflectional Languages. • Russian is a fine example of a language that is highly inflectional. For example the word cat (kashka) has the inflection "a" on the end. This means the cat is the actor. The Structure of Analytic Languages, like English, puts emphasis on Word Order, an Auxiliary System and Prepositional Phrases • If the sound "oo" were there (kashkoo), then something happened to the cat. The bottom line is that the words can appear anywhere in the sentence and be understood. For example, "Kashkoo bites mouse," would clearly indicate that the mouse bit the cat. • Analytic Languages: English, on the other hand, is a fine example of a language that is highly Analytic. • Instead of depending greatly on word endings, English employs a triad of grammatical conventions to communicate relationships. • These include: o Word order o An Auxiliary system o Prepositional Phrases • Word orde in English is very important in differentiating the agent (subject) from the object. Take for example,"The cat bites the mouse." Deep Structure in English divides the thought into Two Constituents: the Noun Phrase the the Verb Phrase. • The first noun "cat" in the sentence is the agent, and the first noun after the verb "mouse" is the object. • Change the order of the words and, unlike Russian, the meaning is significantly changed. "The mouse bites the cat." • This structure of English comes down right from the top (Deep Structure) and can be traced through levels of constituents (intermediate units). Take for example the first level of constituents after the deep structure which, we will call "S." This includes a Noun Phrase (NP) and the Verb Phrase (VP). This order is preserved right to the surface structure and is intuitively perceived by young children. • • The Noun Phrase and the Verb Phrase also break down into their Constituents, which provide a template for word order. • The Noun Phrase in turn breaks down into a Noun (mandatory), preceded by an Adjective (optional), and a Determiner (sometimes). The Verb Phrase includes an Auxiliary (mandatory but not always evident), a Verb (mandatory), and another Noun or Noun Phrase (optional). Surface structure, the final sentence, reflects the word order dictated through the hierarchy of constituents. • Some texts do not show the Auxiliary as we have done here. This is not an exact science so you should expect to find many variations in these descriptions in the literature. • The final breakdown includes the actual words. This is, at last, the level of the surface structure--what is actually said, or written or signed. There are many and varied routes from Deep Structure to Surface Structure. • These diagrams which trace in detail the structure of an English sentence (or any language), of course, can get very esoteric and very very numerous. • Some scholars spend their lives studying and describing them. Children intuitively learn them in four years without really trying! • Maybe there is something in Chomsky's Language Acquisition Device (LAD). • An English teacher once remarked that you can reduce all the stories in the world into about five themes. I believe there is an element of truth to this. • My favorite movie hero was John Wayne, but I noticed that all his movies followed just about one of those themes. • Whether he was a Mongol Warrior, an Indian Rebel or a World War II Hero, the story always seemed (to me) to be the same. All English Sentences can be reduced to five Kernel Sentences. • He would meet a girl; they would be separated through a misunderstanding; and then they would be reunited after a period of time, but not before he had engaged in a lusty fist fight with his rival in view of the girl. • That same English Instructor also suggested that all English sentences could be reduced to five Kernel Sentences which hold the basic word order of the language. • The rudiments of these Kernel sentences can be heard during Brown's first three Stages of language development. • These five Kernel Sentences bring out some interesting aspects of English so lets examine them briefly. They are as follows: o 1. N + Vi (e.g., "I cry.") • The verb here is intransitive, so the action simply ends after the verb. The Verb "To BE," is in itself, a Special Class of Verbs in English called the COPULA. o 2. N + Vt + N (e.g., "He hit me.") • Here the verb is transitive so the action continues on (unfortunately in this case) to another Noun, the object. • The last three Kernel Sentences use a special verb in English. Some grammarians list it by itself as an alternate category of verbs; and they give it a special name--the Copula. • The Copula (C) is conjugated differently than any other verb in English. o 3. N + C + N (e.g., "I am Napoleon.") o 4. N + C + Adjective (e.g., "I am crazy.") o 5. N + C + Adverb [of location] (e.g., "I am here.") • With these five sentence structures, we can discuss the universe--albeit very pedantically and laboriously. Transformational Rules change the basic structure of the Kernel Sentences in English • Transformational Rules: There are many ways to change the basic structure of these Kernel sentences-- to streamline them and make them fit the intent of the communication more efficiently and effectively. • The rules for changing them are called Transformations. There are many of them and they can be quite complex. The Yes/No Question Transformation is a good example. • Take the rather simple sentence: "I go." • How would you change that sentence into a question without adding to the meaning? • If you said, "Can I go?" you are pragmatically correct, but semantically incorrect, because you have changed the meaning by adding the notion of "capability." • I was thinking of the sentence, "Do I go?" The Yes/No Question Transformation Adds an Auxiliary to the sentence and Moves it to the front. • The word "do" in "Do I go," incidentally, comes from the category of words we call Auxiliaries. In this case it's name is the Dummy Auxiliary because it does not add any meaning to the sentence. So why use it at all, you ask. • Because in the rule we call the Yes/No Question Transformation (in other words to ask a question that requires a yes or no response) we must move the auxiliary to the front of the sentence. • Since the statement, "I go," contains no visible auxiliary, it is necessary to insert one first, as in "I do go." (transformation #1). • We then move it to the front of the sentence, as in "Do I go?" (transformation #2). • Now suppose I want to change that same statement to a negative sentence. We add two auxiliaries -- the dummy "do" and the negative "not" (transformation #3,) as in "I do not go." A simple three word question like, "Do I go," demonstrates Four Transformational rules. • Notice that there is a required order to these modals. You can't say, "I not do go." • And now, to change "I do not go," into a question, we must move both modals to the front, as in "Do not I go?" But its rare in conversational speech to say it that way. We usually contract the modals "do" and "not" (transformation #4) and say, "Don't I..." • The point here is that if a child spontaneously (i.e, is not simply mimicking someone else) generates the three word sentence, "Don't I go," look at the wealth of linguistic knowledge that has been demonstrated here! • In addition to the lexicon, there has been demonstrated four transformational rules and the observance of the proper word order in the sentence, and within the modals. These rules would be lacking the sentences made by Koko, the Gorilla. The Auxiliary System in English is a major player in some important Transformations. • The complex auxiliary system plays a large role in many transformations, as you can see. So far, we have talked about two: the Dummy and the Negative Auxiliaries. • A third important group is the Aspect Auxiliary. When I say, "I go," I am declaring that to be something I do. • But suppose I want to convey the idea that I am in the process of doing it right now? • I say, "I am going." English structure does not allow for two consecutive verbs in a sentence. But here we apparently have the Copula "am" and the verb "going" back to back! • Shakespeare, of course, was not referring to grammar, but he might well have been, when he wrote, "...to be or NOT to be½that is the question!" • In this case, is "am" really the Copula or not? The Bound Morpheme "ing" is a Marker that identifies "to be" as an Progressive Aspect Auxiliary and NOT a Verb. • In the sentence "I am going," the word "am" is NOT the copula but an Auxiliary, specifically called the Progressive Aspect. • How do we know when it is or is not the copula? If you look at the Verb "go," you note it has an "ing" ending. This bound morpheme is a Marker, which identifies "am" as as the Progressive Aspect auxiliary. • Remember we talked about Markers on slide 14 entitled: "Bound Morphemes are used to change the function of some words and to identify the function of some others." • So here is a short quiz for you. Which of the following sentences contains the auxiliary? o "I am sick of you." o "I am sicking my dog on you." • • (Answer--The second sentence) There is also a Perfect Aspect--the auxiliary word "to have." In the example, "I have jumped," the "ed" is the marker that identifies "have" as the Perfect Aspect Auxiliary and not a verb. The Modal word "will" is used to express future events and must be in the proper sequence if other auxiliaries are used. • Another important Auxiliary are the Modals. They do a hodge-podge of things including express future events. For example, "I will go." The word "will" is a modal. • You can combine Auxiliaries to express nuances of time. For example, "I will have gone." (Notice that "...one" in the word "gone" is an allomorph of "...ed," (as in jumped) and many children struggling with this concept might use the word "goed,' instead of "gone.") • You can even add the Negative Auxiliary and the Progressive Aspect to say, "I will not have been gone very long." Notice how delicate the word order is here. Which of the following is acceptable: o "I not will been have gone..." o "I been will not have gone..." o "I will have not been gone..." o "I been have will not gone..." o "I have not will been gone..." (Answer--The third sentence) • • How does anybody learn this! Try explaining the proper word order to a deaf child. There are many kinds of Modals, and very many more important Transformations to be learned. • Modals express other notions too. For example: o I may go (permissibility) o I might go (possibility) o I should go (responsibility) o I could go (opportunity) o I would go (opportunity) o I can go (capability) • It's no wonder that English as a second language is very illusive and frustrating, but as a first, for children, it seems simple and natural. • The list of transformations to be learned are very long. • When sentences are conjoined ("I went to the store and bought a cookie"); or embedded ("I, jumping headlong into my car, rushed off the store.") or turned into relative clauses ("I, who just bought my car, drove recklessly to the store.") they are instances of transformations. Another important one is the Passive Transformation. For example, "I paid the clerk." is transformed into "The clerk was paid by me." The Indirect Object Transformation is complicated because it contradicts the Proximal Rule in English. • The Indirect Object Transformation will be our final example to underscore the complexity of this grammatical system that the children are trying to learn. • Take for example the simple Kernel sentence (Type II), "Mary brought Billy." In English, we know it was Mary who did it (the Subject), because she is the noun before the verb. • Billy, we know, is the recipient of the action (the Object) because he is the noun after the verb. • But what about the sentence, "Mary brought Billy to George." Now there are two nouns after the verb. • The Proximal Rule, however, tells us that the closest noun to the verb ("Billy") is still the object in the sentence. Children understand the Indirect Object Transformation as early as five years. • "George," on the other hand, is the object of the preposition "to" in the adverbial prepositional phrase in the sentence, "Mary brought Billy to George." • For verbs in English which describe a reasonably rapid transference (e.g., "brought"), of something ("Billy") away from the subject ( "Mary"), we can do and often do a grammatically contorted thing. • We remove the preposition ("to") and reposition the object of the preposition ("George") between the object and the verb, and say, "Mary brought George Billy." • Notice how the word "George" violates the proximal rule. Under normal circumstances "George" should be the object, but in this transformation, he is the adverbial indirect object. Children, by age 5 years can understand this transformation.