This paper is a report of two studies of the relationship between intonation and syntax. An analysis of intonation was used to decide whether the pivot-like two-morpheme constructions of a one- and one-half-year-old girl were single lexical items or two separate lexical items. Further, the intonation contours connected with her linguistically diverse open-open constructions were highly similar, suggesting the inadequacy of semantic relations and syntactic constructs in explaining the developmental stage. Finally, a comparative study of the intonation of the same child at two years of age and an abnormal speaker, a fifteen-year-old boy, pointed to differences in their syntactic capabilities that were not obvious from a syntactic analysis. (Author)