Child Language : A Language Which Does Not Exist?

Contents Preface Introduction I. Container and contents II. Relative temporal adverbs III. Intensification IV. Degrees of comparison V. International correspondences VI. The use of some interrogatives VII. Antonymous use of words VIII. Self-reference 1. There is no linguistic form expressing self-reference 2. Self-reference in the full sense of the word a. Using the proper name b. Using a personal pronoun IK subject IK not subject Using personal pronouns other than IK c. Using a possessive pronoun IX. Some concluding remarks References Index of proper names Index of subjects, words and expressions ## Preface In 1959 there appeared under the title Kindersprachforschung mit Hilfe des Kindes 'Child language research with the help of the child' the commercial edition of my thesis Einige Erscheinungen der kindlichen Spracherwerbung erläutert im Lichte des vom Kinde gezeigten Interesses für Sprachliches 'Some phenomena of language acquisition in children elucidated with the help of the linguistic interest shown by the child'. This book was based on a very small part of my material on child language collected from the spontaneous speech of my two sons. I discussed principally those utterances in which the children showed a kind of reflection on language. The work met with approval, and repeatedly I was asked to publish the remaining material. Pressure of other work and unforeseen circumstances prevented me from complying with these requests. Also, the revolution in linguistics since 1957 made me reluctant, because my approach to language is essentially different. Notwithstanding all that, I was encouraged to publish my material by remarks such as "Still, we can never get too much firsthand material on child language" (Leopold 1964:272), and "What we need just as urgently are extensive transcripts of utterances made available to workers in the field, against which theories can be tested" (Schlesinger 1968:10), and by demands for much more data on children's acquisition of various native languages, especially on later stages than the earliest ones (Slobin 1970:184; for Dutch see Schaerlaekens 1977:VII). As German was the foreign language with which I was most familiar (I was then a teacher of this language), I wrote my thesis in German. However, in order to make my work accessible to a larger reading public, I now prefer to present my observations in English. The point is that many American researchers don't read German. What Nickel (1981:2) remarks with reference to a paper on the contrastive analysis hypothesis holds for publications on child language as well: "Typically enough, the list of references includes, like those of the majority of articles written in the USA and also sometimes in the UK, only Anglo-American publications. No reference is made to research in Europe or other parts of the world." I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. W.J.M. Levelt for his encouragement and advice concerning the publication of this book. With sadness I remember my late friend Prof. Dr. F.C. Maatje, whose stimulating letters helped me to continue my study in unfavourable circumstances. But most of all, I thank my son Hans, who not only allowed me to publish the awkward sentences he produced in his childhood, but who has also displayed all along a keen interest in my linguistic work. When E in the third year of his life uses the word opete(n) 'eat' for taking a liquid medicine or for drinking tea (examples 1 and 2), where opdrinkefnp would be more adequate, the deviation from adult language is the same as in a eat juice (example 74 in Bloom 1970:122). However, the meaning of the component op-does not differ from standard Dutch: strictly speaking, although not necessarily, it expresses that by means of eating or drinking, the food or the beverage will be finished. In (3) and ( 4), however, op expresses absence: the child only wants to say that there is no (not: no more!) water in the kettle, and that there are no candles in the box, respectively. In (5) the meaning is again different: here op does not referto the contents of the box of bricks (the absent bricks), but to the box (more generally, the 'container') itself, as in the examples from otherchildren (6), ( 7), ( 9), (10),and (11). Example( 8) is ambiguous: does the child Y mean that the pretended drink is finished, or that the container is empty? By asking this question, we lay open the cause of the children's deviant use of op: when the food (or the drink) is eaten (or drunk), the plate (or the cup) is empty; how can the child know that the mother by saying op! refers to the disappeared food and not to the empty plate? As a matter of fact, it is more plausible to suppose that the child's attention is held by the plate before him than by the food, because the latter is no longer present. On the other hand, there is no doubt that in (3) and (4) op refers to the absent water and the absent candles, respectively. Therefore in my opinion the best explanation is that in the child's mind the reference is rather vague, in other words, that even at the age of about 2;6 the "semantic fog" (cf. Leopold 1949a:132-133, and Barrett 1978:212) has not yet cleared away. The child's thought is still "a dim, amorphous whole" (Vygotsky 1962:126). A striking individual difference is that the discussed utterances with op were spoken by my sons in the third year of their lives, but by the girl Y in the second. Conversely, it is interesting to observe that E and H use the word leeg 'empty' in the sense of op in standard Dutch (12 and 13), expressing that the contents of a container are finished. In (14) a periphrasis takes the place of the inflected form of leeg\ an adult would say lege flesjes 'empty bottles'. The opposite of leeg is vol 'full', which in normal linguistic usage refers to the container, not to its contents. In that sense it is used by Ein (15)-volmaken 'make full' is a colloquial variant of vullen'W-1. In the Western Netherlands the final -n of the Infinitive is mostly not pronounced, although according to the orthographic rules it must be written.

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