It has been widely noted in the literature on language acquisition that at an early stage of development children tend to omit personal pronouns and prepositions. This finding is often explained in terms of the lexical-functional distinction. It is claimed that there is a pre-syntactic stage of child language which is characterized by the lack of all functional morphemes (among them pronouns and certain prepositions). I would like to show in my talk that a closer examination of the data reveals regularities in children's use of these elements which are independent of the development of other functional morphemes. I will argue that young speakers rely heavily on the conceptual structure of predicates (in Jackendoff's sense) and gradually build up argument structure as evidenced in the adult grammar.
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