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We take a radical approach to the organizing principles of emergent grammars in bilingual children: (1) We adopt the framework of Radical Construction Grammar (Croft, 2001) and (2) we undertake an extensive analysis of a wide range of utterances, covering the first six months of word combinations in two children. We address two questions: (1) Do predicates fail to match the language context more often than arguments? (2) What is the nature of the mixed child predicates, and does it change over time? We find that (1) for both children predicates do fail to match the language context more often and (2) both children move from the use of non-verbs as predicates in the first months to adult-like use of verb predicates later. A third question arises from our findings: Why should bilingual children treat predicates differently from arguments in early word combination? We attribute this to the learning process itself and to a difference in accessibility established in adult studies for concrete or imageable as compared with abstract words. The arguments used in the first word combinations, derived directly from experience with objects and persons, are readily imageable, while early predicates have to be learned through a process of abstraction.
