Some New Perspectives on Lexical and Functional Categories:
Revisiting Brown’s ‘Fourteen Grammatical Morphemes’
in GLOSSA
http://bibliotecavirtualut.suagm.edu/Glossa2/index.html
He has some interesting ideas on child language. I
kept a journal of my youngest daughter’s speech from first babblings to her
second birthday.
Being highly intelligent, she picked up on pronouns,
noun plurals, and the correct usage of do, be, and go—right from the
beginning. She had three areas of misuse that took her to age two to getb them
worked out: because irregular plurals of some nouns are so common—or they
would have been regularized—she carried iove some irregular plurald of
nouns to similar sounding new nouns and did the same with making some weak
verbs strong. Her thirtd area ogf error was the smallest: lexical. She would
determine what the name was for something and was very loath to change her usage;
e.g., ‘birthday’ belonged to a cake with candles. She liked such
cakes and always wanted her mother to bake a ‘birthday’ for her.
She was two before she finally accepted ‘birthday’ as being the
anniversary of one’s birth and not a baked good.
It was most fascinating to take phonetic
transcriptions of her early babbling: I had read somewhere that children are
born with a full phonetic store
and learn which sounds to use by parental reaction. When
I heard voiced uvular trills, voiceless velar spirants, ich-lauts, ach-lauts,
and pharyngeals from a 4 month old, I was impressed. I did not start teaching
them foreign languages until they were 5, 3, and 1½. I spoke French on MWF and
Spanish on TThF. Sunday was English and their mother spoke only English to
them. I had taught a few phrases to my daughter before she was 2.
My folks took her on a long trip to visit her uncle,
aunt, and cousin. My Daddy stopped in a store on the way and asked my daughter,
“¿Quisera chocolate? She replied, “Si, grandpapa.” “That
child speaks Spanish,” asked the astonished owner. The Daddy had to show
her off by asking., “Et la glace, vous en voulez”? She answered, “Bien
sur, grand-pere.”
N. Scott Catledge, PhD/STD
Professor Emeritus
history & languages