Early morphosyntax is very rich and uniform in young French-speaking
children. The present study aims to give a thorough analysis of the
morphosyntax produced at the outset of multi-word speech, with a
classification of free language produced at 2;0 by 27 French-speaking
children. The corpus was fully tagged by an automatic part-of-speech
tagger. A classification performed with words taken in isolation shows a
clear difference between the categories used in single-word utterances
and those used in multi-word utterances. A classification performed
with word sequences reveals surprisingly adult-like sequences of syntactic
categories and words; the non-adult combinations are few in a
French child's language. The very successful use of the tagger demonstrates
the morphosyntactic coherence of the child's speech. When
compared with adult language, the quantitative results, and more
precisely the data concerning regularity and error types, contribute to
the documentation of all the specificities of the emerging morphosyntax
in normally developing French children.