The investigator and the theory: a question in the field of language acquisition

Abstract

This paper intends to put into question the role of theory – specifically the linguistic theory – in the investigation of language acquisition. The proposal is that the application of linguistic theory to children’s utterances, i.e., the attempt to ascribe these utterances to categories and rules arising from theoretical knowledge on the part of the investigator, would exclude the singularity of the child’s speech. However, we intend to indicate that such a singularity derives from the investigator’s listening to the resistance that the child’s speech opposes to the inclusion in the referring categories and rules.