Grammar starts being acquired after utterances are segmented into words (at three years of age). This is so for logical reasons: rules of grammar apply to words, therefore words must first be available.
topic-comment structure
. | car broken |
. | all-gone cookie |
construction [subject predicate]
construction [adjective noun]
. | bad girl |
simple sentences
morphological forms
. | Daddy said no |
grammatical marking: articles, auxiliaries, prepositions, conjunctions ...
overgeneralization: maked
rarer morphological forms:
. | subtler |
complex syntactic constructions:
. | The more stuff you write that nobody reads, the more frustrated you get. |