This monograph presents a descriptive analysis of the syntactic patterns in 16 corpora of word combinations from 11 infants learning either English (six children), Samoan, Finnish, Hebrew, or Swedish. The mean utterance lengths range up to about 1.7 morpehmes. There are both reanalyses of corpora in the literature and new corpora. The data indicate that each child has learned a number of positional formulae that map components of meaning into positions in the surface structure. In addition, two kinds of phenomena involving free word order are noted. In general, the evidence indicates less grammatical competence at this stage of development than children are being credited with in much current work. (Author/JMB)