In this chapter I summarize and discuss T's verbs from the point of view of her syntax and grammatical organization. In the first section I focus on sentences – particularly on the processes of symbolic integration that T used to combine her symbols into sentences and the syntactic devices she used to mark the different conceptual roles played by these symbols in various sentences types. In the second section I focus on T's grammatical organization, that is, on the Verb Island hypothesis. The question here is how generally T applied her syntactic devices across verbs – to what extent her early language shows evidence of lexically general syntagmatic and paradigmatic categories. In a third and final section I attempt to sketch out a more general perspective on processes of early grammatical development.

Before proceeding to specific analyses, Table 8.1 provides a very global overview of T's early sentences containing a relational word or verb, organized by sentence type and age in months. This is essentially a highly distilled composite of the tables depicting T's syntactic development in chapters 4 and 5. To accommodate an overall perspective in a small space, much important information is not included in this table, for example, precisely how syntactic marking is nonconventional in some cases. The specific analyses in the sections that follow provide much of this missing information.

Two terminological notes. In the analyses that follow I use the general argument categories actor (or agent), object (or theme or patient), location, instrument, and so forth for all verbs; these will be called argument types.