"Us-guys:" how Lila recreated the birth of "nosotros," only in 2-year-old English

Yesterday at whole foods, all three girls were on the verge of melting down and we had a long drive ahead of us. I grabbed a box of truffles for the road. As I did so, I noticed that Katharine had already gotten one, leading to this exchange:

Me: Oh, you already grabbed chocolates?
K: Yeah, I got some for work.
Lila (excitedly): Some chocolates for work and some for us-guys!  [əm wawI fə wək æn əm wawI fə əsgaiz]
Grace (archly): Lila, it's "us," not "us-guys." Dad, she said Us-guys.

This led, of course, to me giving an impromptu lecture on the evolution of "nosotros" in Spanish, which, though unappreciated by Grace, I will nonetheless repeat here.

 At about the time Spain was busy conquering the world, it was in more or less the same place we are now with its evolution of second person pronouns. Spanish, like English, started out with singular and plural second-person pronouns:

	English		Spanish
	Sing.	Plural	Sing.	Plural
1st person:	I	We	Yo	Nos
2nd person:	Thou	You	Tú	Vos

In both languages, the plural form was used as a term of respect for people of rank, both in the second person and the first (the royal "we"), etc. In what seems like an odd move, both languages at one point or another generalized the plural/respectful form to a universal "you" form:

	English		Spanish
	Sing.	Plural	Sing.	Plural
1st person:	I	We	Yo	Nos
2nd person:	You	You	Vos	Vos

Obviously, that leads to confusion in the 2nd person, and a great deal of innovation has occurred in both languages to fill in the gap.

	Various innovative forms
	English		Spanish
	Sing.	Plural	Sing.	Plural
2nd person:	You, Thouh	You, Y'all, You guys, Yous, Yous guys	Vos, Tú, Vuestra merced, Usted	Vos, Vos-todos, vosotros, vuestras mercedes, ustedes

Eventually, Spain evolved four different 2nd person forms to address formal and informal, singular and plural, and "vosotros" became the standard 2nd person informal plural form. It was only after the evolution of "vosotros" that "nosotros" came into being instead of "nos" as the full (non-clitic) form of the first-person-plural pronoun, presumably as an attempt to regularize the forms by rhyming them (of course "nos" and "vos" had originally rhymed, but by this time "vos" was no longer a plural pronoun).

So, what does all of this have to do with "us-guys"? Of course, "us-guys" was formed by precisely the same pattern that formed "nosotros" in Spanish. Just as "otros" was taken to be a plural marker, "guys" is understood by Lila as the plural-marker in my Northeastern dialect. It strikes me that it is quite possible that Lila learned the grammatical meaning of "guys" (turn a pronoun plural) before she learned its literal meaning.

To understand what happened in the Spanish in terms of modern-day English, you would have to imagine the following events taking place in order for English to arrive where Spanish presently is:

1. All speakers adopt Lila's habit of adding "-guys" to "us" and "we" in addition to adding it to "you" (you-guys, us-guys, we-guys). This new us-guys form becomes so common it is used universally by speakers everywhere, no matter what their feeling are on 2nd person pronouns.

2. "Thou" becomes trendy again and becomes the normal informal 2nd person pronoun, leaving "you" on its own to sound old-fashioned and oddly formal, except in a few countries colonized by England, where "you" continues to be the normal pronoun or where it exists in alternation with "thou."

3. "Your honor" and "your honors" becomes a standard form of formal address in all kinds of situations, except in particularly left-leaning English-speaking enclaves, and becomes contracted first to "yonor" and then finally to "onna" The abbreviation is written either "On./Ons." or "Yn./Yns." depending on where you see it.

4. Many people stop saying "you-guys" all the time, so that "you-guys" sounds like a particularly New-England thing. Most of the world uses "onnas" for the 2nd person plural, regardless of formality.

Texting Speak + Cross-Language Pollination + Morphology = New Words

So the other day in a dopey article I grabbed from a Spanish teen magazine for students to look at, I discovered the Spanish word "BeFa" (also spelled "befa"). From context, I had a gut feeling it meant "best friend," which a Puertorican student confirmed for me.

This word is awesome: it derives from "BF" (English internet/texting speak for best friend). I assume (dangerous, I know) that this happened in the following way:

BF - borrowed form from English
be efe - borrowing as pronounced in Spanish
befe - new word form from fusing the two letters. Spanish phonetic rules don't distinguish between double vowels between words and single ones (this is how "ten te en pie" becomes tentempié, for example)
befes - new plural word form based on Spanish morphological rules for creating a plural
befa - new playful Spanish feminine form, based on Spanish morphological rules for creating a feminine form. This is highly unusual, however, because usually words ending in "e" do not change form for gender.
befas - new plural feminine form.

Quick google searches seem to confirm that ="befe" (m), "befes" (m), "befa" (f) and "befas" (f) all exist as forms in Spanish. Google also confirms that my proposed intermediate forms "BF"and "be efe" also exist, as well as "mi be efe efe" and "mi be efe efe efe" which suggests that some speakers think the extra "f" in "bff" serves as an intensifier rather than standing for "forever." Some other hybrids that exist but are rarer are "BFa" and "BFas." I was able to find only a handful of hits for "mis be efes" and none for "mis bes efes," suggesting that the whole "BF" is taken as a word and not as two words.

Google ngrams, alas, has yet to capture the phenomenon in print -- I'd love to have an up-to-date Google ngrams like tool for internet text as well as print.
Question: what other texting words are likely to have crossed over into Spanish?

A regional accent emerging: friends trump family

Overheard from my eldest daughter at the end of a skype with cousins...

Grace: /Wəts 'ðæt pɪkʃʌɹ/ (What's that picture. )
Katharine: /ðæts ə pɪkʃʌɹ əv ænt 'ɛli/ (That's a picture of aunt Ellie. )
Grace: (annoyed) /'ɒnt ɛli/ (*Aunt* Ellie. ) 

 So Grace is beginning to assert accent independence from her loving parents. I'm pretty sure neither Katharine nor I routinely say ɒnt, so this must be coming from school (it is, I believe, the standard pronunciation here in New England).

Three Word Sentences

Lila's language has been exploding for a month or two now, which means she is now in one of my favorite phases linguistically. I have to try to pay attention this time: somehow with both Grace and Clara, I went from counting words to expecting them to use basically the full grammar system of English without really noticing what happened in the interim. And I mean that pretty completely. Clara, at 3, already commands the English equivalent of what my Spanish students still struggle with as Seniors. The other day a friend commented after hearing her use the pluperfect progressive and I realized I wasn't even noticing new structures any more, and hadn't been for ages -- I expect the grammatical structure to be pretty much complete already, with only the predictable lapses in irregular forms left for cuteness.

Anyway, Lila is very much in the early sentence phase, and what's fun is that a huge number of her utterances fall into 3 word sentences that basically look like the top of the tree diagrams my middle school English teacher had me learning. Do you remember those diagrams? If you never did them, here's a guide.

SUBJECT | VERB | OBJECT

This was the basic structure of all sentences. Understanding that diagram meant you could write complete sentences, meant you would always be able to identify a fragment or a run-on, meant you could pretty much parse anything you wanted to. Here's what's kind of neat about Lila's speech right now: she has near total respect for the basic SVO word order in English, but complete flexibility about what kinds of words can fill the verb slot. So her diagrams look more like this:

SUBJECT | WHATEVER-I-FEEL-LIKE | OBJECT

Here's a list of some typical sentences:

Sentence	Standard English	Comments
Mamma hep me	Help me, mommy.	The present tense can work as commands like this in Spanish, but not usually in English.
Dadda up me, no mamma up me	Daddy should carry me, not mommy	Prepositions can be verbs. Also, she can string these puppies together!
Dadda oh no book	Dadda knocked over the book	Exclamations can be verbs
Mama book me	Read me a book, mommy	Nouns can be verbs
Dada mma* me	Daddy kissed me	Physical actions can be verbs too!
Dada may-meh me	Daddy carried me to the basement!	Places can be verbs!
Baby doll oh no mih	Baby doll spilled the milk	There can be subjects other than mom and dad

*actual kissing sound, not a word.

She of course also has some sentences without objects, like these ones:

Sentence	Standard English	Comments
Dadda book oh no!	Daddy's book fell over	Note a proto-genitive here
Mamma memeh	Mommy basement	Note a proto-locative here

Well, there's a list of sentences so far. I'll do my best to listen out for other emerging structures as she rounds the corner towards her 2nd birthday this summer. I believe she is sometimes varying the SVO structure I presented here -- I think I've heard her use VOS appropriately to put emphasis on the subject, suggesting she may already understand the underlying Theme/Rheme structure, but I'm not certain enough of any examples to write them down. I'll keep my ears out!

Grace, Clara and æ/eɪ/ɛ allophone v. phone distinctions

I noted some time ago that Grace complained about my pronunciation of "lego" (which I pronounce as if it were spelled leggo, I suppose). Clara's now about the age Grace was then, and predictably enough, we had the familiar exchange recently:

Me: Clara, do you want to play legos (lɛgos).
Clara: Not lɛgos, daddy! Leɪgos!!!

Obviously, Katharine says Leɪgos, and that sticks with them as the correct pronunciation, even though I'm the one that plays legos more often, I think...

Yesterday, Grace and I had the following exchange (forgive my crappy phonetic transcription):

Grace: Daddy, can I have some? ( dædi, kɛn ai hæv səm)
Me: Yes you can. (yɛs, yu kæn).
Grace: Daddy! You said can (kæn) like a soda can. You meant to say kɛn.

This one's kind of cool because Grace is taking what I see as a set of allophones (kɛn/kæn) and hearing a distinction. Of course, she's right that /ɛ/ and /æ/ are distinct in lots of English words -- witness minimal pairs like fen/fan, send/sand, etc.

I've now been spending a lot more time paying attention to the word "can" as I say it. Of course, the funny thing is that saying kɛn in a stressed position is incorrect. I'm pretty sure, though, that we never say kæn in an unstressed position, saying something like kɛn or perhaps even kən or kɪn instead.

I wonder how much of this, and in how much detail, they cover in teaching foreigners English.

Transitive copula

Holding a lego in her hand, Clara, 2, says:

"I want to be this a car."

I've heard lots of words transitivized before, but never this one.

Prepositions: About, Por, and Gracese

After I read Grace (for what turned out to be the 3rd total time) the chapter about Malaria from Little House on the Prarie, she was all aflutter about the different theories presented in the chapter. Mrs. Scott thought the fever was about the watermelons she said, and Ma thought it was about the night air, she added, but they didn't know that it was because of the mosquitos.

The reason Grace found the chapter so interesting was that it ends with a little coda that says "they didn't know that..." and then explains how mosquito bites carry malaria. That simple phrase -- "they didn't know" -- was quite captivating and led to another homily from Grace about the limits of human knowledge (sometimes little boys and girls don't know... and sometimes mommies don't know... and sometimes daddies don't know... and sometimes teenagers don't know...).

What I found interesting was her use of about. Particularly, it struck me because in teaching Spanish to English speakers, the pronouns "because" and "about" (both of which often translate as the same word, "por") stick out.

Grace's use of "about" seems in line with Spanish "por" which can mean anything from "by way of" to "by cause of" to "by means of." What's odd, though, is that none of these uses of "por" translate to "about." In fact, the only clear case where "about" translates to "por" is the spatiotemporal sense ("it's about five" or the somewhat antequated "somewhere about").

The most common use of "about" I can think of is the meaning that "it has to do with" or "its topic is." I suppose this makes sense... "Mrs. Scott thought the fever had to do with watermelon but it was because of mosquitos."

Still, it all gets me thinking about our friends the prepositions, all of which have multiple meanings applying across multiple domains (causality, space, time). It seems totally natural even at a much younger age to expand meanings (Clara's language constantly demonstrates this). What is trickier is how the meanings get cut off, so that we learn to say "she thought the movie was about pandas" but "she thought the fever was from watermelons."

Semantic Innovation Starts Early

Clara's language has been exploding since I last blogged, more in how much and how persistently she uses it than in how many words, but really in all ways.

This morning, Clara wanted me to read to her but needed a diaper change. I asked if I could read to her after she got a new diaper and she said "mo mo" and pointed at her book a couple of times, then happily went off to get a new diaper.

It's hard to convey in text why these things are so clear, but what was crystal clear from the way she uttered the word and the way she subsequently behaved was that Clara was using "more" to mean "in a little bit," and then emphatically repeating it to make sure I would do it.

The concepts aren't actually that different. You could use both "a little bit" and "more" to mean "I want more cereal", so why not use both to mean "in a little more time."

Of course, these kinds of innovation are incredibly common (and useful), especially when you're dealing with a tiny vocabulary like Clara's at present, but I still think they're neat. One of the most common questions I get from students as a language teacher is why words have multiple meanings. This usually comes up when some common word is revealed to have a new meaning they didn't know or when a word in Spanish has two meanings they need to learn (every new turn in a foreign language is perceived as a personal affront). Watching kids learn language I always think is the sort of linguistic version of "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny," the point being, if you want to know why words have multiple meanings, just watch kids talk. They're constantly mapping new meanings onto words, expanding the territory they cover. Of course, we only tend to notice the mappings that aren't (yet?) part of standard English, like Clara's use of "more" this morning -- the mappings that are in keeping with our language tend to go unnoticed entirely.

Clara's first protosentence

Clara has a favorite sentence, but alas it doesn't involve anything you would recognize as a word.

It goes like this:

1. She hides her hands in her shirt.
2. She makes the sound of a car moving (her version of this sound is identical to her dinosaur roar).
3. She moves her hands (hidden in her shirt) back and forth in the motion of a steering wheel.

The meaning of this sentence, which only makes sense in the context of our family, is: "Oh no! Clara left her hands in the car!"

I can confirm this is the intended meaning because Clara gets more and more frustrated and insistent until we say this sentence outloud in confirmation.

Other emerging words in Clara-ese include:

bəbəbə: basketball (Clara's favorite sport, which is particularly interesting since we never watch basketball on television -- she's picked up on this mostly through the big screens at beerworks).
hæt: "that"? A generic deictic word used frequently and enthusiastically while pointing at things.

əməm: yum (used for food and eating).

We are particularly interested to see that Clara has a word for basketball well before she reliably has words for "mom", "dad" and "Grace." Her most common word by far -- far more common than any of her family members -- is her word for car (really just a roar and steering wheel motion). Second most common is "up" (pəpəpə).

The joys of transivitizing (more notes from Gracese)

Just now, Grace and Katharine are looking at a map of the world.

Grace says:
"Let's wander our fingers."

This is the latest in the pattern of Grace over-transivitizing Every time she brings out a new one of these, it wonders me if these follow an underlying conceptual pattern I haven't spotted yet or if transitivization or no is just one more element that must get lodged in the mental dictionary.

It would be fun to try to design an experiment where I tried transivitizing lots of words and waited for Grace to correct me (I realize waiting for her to correct me seems like a bad experimental design, but given that Grace has started conversations about language on at least two other occasions, it might just work).

Grace's e/ɛ distinction

From Grace, today:

Me: Do you want to play legos ('lɛ-goz)
Grace: No, I call them legos ('leɪ-goz). Why do you call them 'lɛ-goz but I call them 'leɪ-goz.
Me: I don't know. I call them 'lɛ-goz.
Grace: I call them 'leɪ-goz.
Me: Ok.
Grace. Logos, 'lɛ-goz, 'leɪ-goz (laughs)

And so Grace shows off the perfection of her e/ɛ distinction (my poor Spanish-speaking friends of course mostly can't do this). The question is how did she come to learn the word legos as leɪgos and not lɛgos... I'll have to follow up and ask Katharine how she pronounces the word. Do any of you pronounce this word like Grace?

Pronunciation note: lɛ is the vowel sound in "leg." leɪ is the vowel sound in "lay"

Early Claraese

At long last, Claraese is starting to emerge. I'm guessing that over the next two months so many words will emerge that I'll quickly forget this stage entirely, so before that happens I'd like to record what we have so far.

1st clear meaningful words: Three words all have been intermingled for some time -- "mom", "milk" and "more." Needless to say these are usually uttered at moments of desperation. Over time, these are starting to distinguish themselves, with "mom" often articulated as "mə mə" or "mə maaaa", milk articulated with a mid vowel ("mɪ" or "mɛ") or "more" articulated more like a single long "mə"

1st clear, common animal sound: "roar", first made in response to dinosaurs, then to other roaring animals as well. Hard to describe this sound, except to say it's kind of throaty and that there's nothing cuter than a tiny person trying to roar.

2nd clear animal sound: "moo." This one is more interesting because you can hear her articulating the "moo" as she goes -- she starts the sound at "ma" and then moves to "oo", resulting on something that sounds like "mao" or, occasionally, makes it all the way to "maouuu"

Several new words are emerging this week with more frequency, including:
- dad (də də)
- up (pəpəpə) - this sounds more like a play sound than a word, with the vowel almost unperceived and the main focus on repeating a "p" sound
- yes (ya ya) - this was produced after extensive coaching by big sister Grace.
- bye (bə bə) - this was learned as part of a fabulous game involving repeatedly hiding behind the shower curtain. She mostly still prefers to wave for this though.

Clara still prefers to communicate mostly with simple signs -- yes and no nods and pointing. It can take a fair amount of work to elicit a word from her, since asking her questions about me, say, will get her to point to me or to pictures of me or to the door (if I'm at work) but rarely to simply say my name.

As far as recognition, her vocabulary is big enough that it's impossible to enumerate what she knows and hard to estimate how many words. An example of words she certainly knows: names of all family members & friends, names of common foods, diapering and bathroom related words, guitar, music, book, radio, baby, doll, couch, table, and on...

I still find the notion of a "first word" baffling: I have no idea what her first word was.

Capturing some features of Gracese before the New Year

It's been a while since I posted on the evolution of Gracese. Thinking back to a year ago, I realize that this blog is all the record I really have of changes in her language -- my own memory proves far from a reliable tool. That reflection makes me realize I should be blogging her language much more frequently if I want to remember anything at all.

In that spirit, here are some unique features of Gracese as of 12/28/2010.

1st. The incredible, flexible why question

At first I thought this was something common to all 2/3 year olds, but I now believe that my darling Grace asks more why questions per hour than any other creature on the planet. Among my favorite are the questions where she asks about her own motives "Why did I do that." Here's a brief taxonomy of Grace's why questions:

• Know what's going on with everyone at all times: Why did Grampa go to the basement.
• Understand full context of all actions at all times: Why did Grampa go to the basement to get a hammer?
• Confirm what she has just learned from asking a "why" question: Why did Grampa go down to the basement because he needed to get a hammer to help Uncle Dave?
• Make a Veiled request: Why did you go to the kitchen? (when she suspects I just went to get a cookie and would like one herself)
• Point out humorous situation: Why did Clara think I wanted the doll! (when Clara brings her a doll over and over)
• Process her own bad behavior: Why did I want to eat in that room? (when she's just been eating in grandparent's living room where eating is forbidden)
• Process own good behavior: Why did I want to share with Clara!
• Learn about the world: Why did grandpa say there's a deer in the back yard?
• Process own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier?
• Clarify parent's explanation of own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier because it's christmastime?
• Process parent's explanation of own mistaken perception of the world: Why did I say there were reindeer in the backyard earlier because we talk a lot about reindeer at christmastime?

2nd. Total Refusal to Make a Direct Request

This fits more into social learning and pragmatics than grammar, but it's astonished me this year to see that before the age of three Grace has learned that making a direct request is risky business, to be avoided at nearly all costs. Of course, this prohibition is codified in the way we ask questions and make requests -- "Would you mind...", "Could I bother you to...", etc. -- but I would have thought that child would learn these questions as mere forms and that the basic logic that accompanies them (e.g. that in most circumstances there is no polite way to make a request of another person) would come much later. Not so.

Here is a typical conversation with Grace:

Parent: Grace, what would you like to eat?

Grace: I don't know.

P: Would you like some cottage cheese?

G: No.

P: Would you like a cracker?

G: No.

P: What would you like?

G: You can just give me something.

P: serves something

G: Why did you give me something?

P: I thought you'd like it. Do you want it?

G: Can you tell me?

P: Would you like something else?

G: Can you tell me what I would want?

P: No, I don't know what you want. What would you like?

G: I was thinking you could tell me what I would like.

P: Were you hoping to have a cookie.

G: (eyes light-up) Yes!

I'm pretty sure that throughout this interaction, Grace believes that parent knows that she wants a cookie and that she has to do the dance of indirection correctly in order to get one. This is actually rarely the case -- usually we're simply frustrated that she refuses to say what she wants. Now, at 3 years and 2 months old, Grace almost never says what she wants. And I dare say we almost never say "no" to her, so it's not like this is coming from a long history of failed direct requests...

3rd. Grace's delightful Christmas semantic innovation: "make ideas"

This one is short and charming. About half-way into present opening, Grace caught onto and thoroughly enjoyed the part where before opening the present we guess what might be in it (we were making up particularly absurd and silly guesses for her amusement). Before opening a present, Grace began to request we start guessing by saying: "Let's make ideas about it."

Later in the day, she switched to "let's make up ideas" which became much less charming. How quickly they learn!

4th: Grace uses the past tense instead of the infinitive with "did" questions

Grace has used "do" correctly to ask questions for quite a long time. I've often wondered, however, if she understands the somewhat complicated "DO + INFINTIVE" construction the same way we do (where we first form "DO + INF" then split it apart to form a question) or if she thinks that "DO" is simply a question particle (like "ma" in Mandarin or "ne" in Latin).

I suppose she can't think "do" is merely a particle -- she conjugates "do" correctly as a verb (using do/does/did appropriately). However, interestingly, she frequently also puts the verb that should be in the infinitive in the past tense when making "did" questions, such as:

"Did you went to the store"

or

"Why did I wanted that?"

I haven't really adequately researched what's going on here. I wonder if there are any other constructions that allow two tensed verbs in this way, without a subordinating structure and without any coordination going on. I also need to focus more on just what Grace is doing. After Grace's nap today I'll have to try to get her to say a third-person present-tense question (the only kind where the tensed verb would look different from the infintive) so that I can see if she says something like "Does Clara likes to eat?" I should also tease out whether she in fact uses the tensed past-tense verb with both "Wh-" questions and yes/no questions as my examples above suggest (I can't attest she uttered those actual sentences, just ones like that).

Grace the (prescriptive!) sociolinguist

Last night, I had the following excahnge with Grace:

Grace: One two three four five six seven, eight nine tell and then eleven. Twelve thirteen fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.
Me: (singing along)... eighteen nineteen twenty...
Grace: No, daddy. You say twen-ty.
Me: Yes, twenty (twenny)
Grace: No. Boys say twen-ty. Girls say twenny.
Me: Grace, everyone says "twenny" most of the time, and "twenty" when they're speaking slowly, or something when you're singing.
Grace: No. Mommy and I say "twenny." You say "twenty." Boys say "twenty"
Me: But Grace, I say "twenny."
Grace: No, daddy. You say "twen-ty". Mommy and I say "twenny."
K (to me): Do we say these words differently?
Grace (insistent): Boys say twen-ty. Girl say twenny.

Where the raw material for this observation came from, I'm not sure. I have sung in many-a-chorus, which training does make me tend to overpronounce my "T"s when singing (I had to unlearn this behavior when singing folky/poppy music where it sounds rather silly to be so hyper-articulated). It's possible that's the root of Grace's observation, though I'm not at all confident that if I could play back recordings of us singing this would be the case.

One of the interesting moments for me in this conversation was when I realized Grace was not being descriptive but prescriptive here. Her initial comment, I'm pretty sure, was motivated by the fact that I had said it like she does (i.e. wrong for a boy), not by the fact that I said it differently from her.

This seems like an interesting window into language change for me. There are a great many variations in language and the human mind is a pattern-hungry and meaning-hungry thing. Obviously the great majority of patterns new speakers pick up (be they sociolinguistic or purely linguistic) are "real" (i.e. observed or obeyed by the vast majority of speakers). But a pattern like this new gender distinction from Grace is the equivalent of a ghost-sighting: she sees cultural significance where there is none. Language change happens the same way mass-ghost-sightings do -- we all have similar minds, see similar patterns, etc. Except that in language there is no "real" outside the minds of the beholders, so if we get enough Graces together, we could produce a generation of women who refuse to pronounce "t"s after "n" for fear they'll sound too masculine (or of women who will start enunciating "t"s to project male power in given scenarios etc etc etc).

First Words

I'm always amazed that other parents can report the first words their children spoke. How on earth can you be sure?

At any rate, I can report that Clara's first words that I'm positive were words -- used and understood, with clear meaning, etc. -- were an emphatic "AAAH DAAAAA" (all done) at the end of dinner the other night. Clara also did the appropriate gestures for "All Done" (a sort of clapping that K must have picked up from daycare babysign and then a wild waving that Clara has added to make it sure we know she's done). The "Ahh Daa" was spoken first, clearly -- the gestures were only really added when I paused to marvel at the clarity of the words rather than getting her out of her high chair -- ah, the frustration!

This is assuming that the first word must be spoken. If not, then I have a clear first word from this past weekend (earlier still): "clap." I asked Clara to clap, for once not clapping myself or gesturing but merely saying the word, and she immediately began clapping. I tried out some other words and quickly found that she seemed to also know "wave" and "dance."

I realize that it can be hard to know for sure whether she knows these words since, understandably, her patience with being told what to do and doing it does wear thin rather quickly.

Other contenders for first-word (i.e. other things we think we've heard her say) include: "Clara" and "Hello."

How I know what counts as first, I know not, but I can definitely say that Clara is using language now -- let the fun begin!

More Gracese: overtransivitizing

Here are a few more sentences I wanted to blog about before I forgot them, mostly for their charm, but also for their grammatical interest:

Grace, asking me to toss her in the air: Daddy, will you jump me

and

Grace, hearing me drop something: What did you just fall down

In both of these cases, Grace has transivitized a verb according to the standard English pattern, except that Standard English doesn't transivitize either of these verbs in just this way.

Here's the standard pattern Grace is working from:

Verb	Intransitive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Open	The box opens	She opens the box
Stop	He stops at the sign.	She stops traffic.
Sit	She sits down	She sits the doll down
Trip	He trips over the rug.	She trips him.
Move over	I'll move over for you	I'll move this over for you

For any students of Spanish following, the same pattern applies in Spanish, with a "se" marking the intransitive forms.

Verb	Intransitpattern.pattern.ive Form	Transitive Form
X	To X	To cause (Y) to X
Abrir	La caja se abre	Ella abre la caja.
Parar	Se para al señal	Ella para el tráfico.
Sentar	Se sienta.	Sienta la muñeca.

Not too long ago I read a nice description of which verbs accept the transitivizing pattern and which do not in a popular linguistics book. Alas, I can't recall which book at the moment, nor can I really recall just how strongly predictive the explanation given is.

Grace extended this pattern to two cases where it doesn't belong. In the case of "fall down", there simply is no transitive form of "fall." I suspect that this is part of a relatively clear pattern.

In the case of "jump", there are a couple of transitive uses, but neither of them mean "to cause to jump." Instead, they mean "to jump (at)" or (in checkers) "to jump (over)", with the transitive form basically eliding a preposition. If I think of other verbs similar to "jump" in meaning, I can see some similar transitive uses: skip (vt = to skip over), hop (vt = hop on, as in a train), or in other cases no transitive form available (prance, leap).

Thinking of verbs of motion, there are some neat patterns -- flip, turn, and spin all follow the transivitizing pattern, for example, whereas skip, hop and jump do not -- but it's still a bit hard for me to see what the proper pattern is.

Here's a rough chart of some verbs in the family...

Follow pattern	Has idiomatic transitive	Has no transitive form
flip, turn, spin, twist	hop, skip, jump	leap, prance,
Move (over)	run	go
land, fly		take off, soar
crash, trip		fall, stumble
break, hurt, heal		get better, get worse

Laying it out this way, it's hard to believe there is a pattern underlying it (though I imagine there is, at least of a sort). At any rate, I don't envy Grace the job of sorting it all out.

Adjectives and more unexpected ambiguity

Tonight Grace and I had the following interaction while reading a story about a girl saving pennies in a penny jar:

Me (reading): "She put all the shiny coins in the jar."

Grace (responding): But not the dark ones.

It took me a second to figure out what she meant, but it did occur to me that given the structure "all the ADJ NOUN", her assumption that ADJ was restrictive was not a bad one. Only given the (false) assumption that all coins are shiny and the knowledge that shininess is not a good criterion for sorting coins when saving money is the correct reading, in which "shiny" serves as descriptive embellishment, obvious.

All of this reminds me a bit of teaching adjective order in Spanish. One common example given is "La blanca nieve." The explanation of this word-order is that adjectives providing an extra flourish of description can be preposed, whereas adjectives playing the more typical function of restricting the set of nouns being described are postposed.

When you try to explain this in terms of emphasis, it gets quite confusing, because whether "La blanca nieve" calls more or less attention to the word "blanca" depends on your frame of reference ("blanca" is extraneous information, but the fact it's being mentioned at all given its obviousness serves to emphasize it).

Of course, in both the case of the "shiny coin" and "la blanca nieve", it seems that contextual knowledge -- about the importance of shininess in coins and whiteness in snow -- plays a much more important role than grammatical patterns.

poop, the past tense, and phonological features

So last night Grace said, "I pooped," a pretty typical sentence (we're mid potty training here). Here's how she said it:

ai pʰupʰɪt

This struck me as a pretty interesting utterance.

Background
Here's the relevant background information. First, the Standard English past tense here is formed by two simple rules.

1. Gramatical rule: Add "d" to create the past tense (unless the word already ends in "d/t" in which case you add "ɪd" in order to make the "d" audible).
2. Phonological rule: In a consonant cluster, the voicing spreads from the first consonant rightward in English (the opposite can happen at other times -- as it does in Spanish, for example, where voicing spreads leftward to affect the pronunciation of the "s" in "mismo" or "beisbol").

poop --> (grammar) poopd --> (phonology) poopt

One more piece of background information that is important is to understand Grace's rules for syllabification. Grace has for a long time not permitted consonant clusters. This is pretty typical of children's speech in English, and is typical of many languages throughout the world so it's also true of many accents. Her basic rule is that a syllable consists of C + V + C, where C is one consonant, V is one or more vowels and C is one consonant. When a word contains more than one consonant, Grace has two options: she can ignore a consonant or add a vowel. In practice, she does both, as in the following pronunciations:

Grace's syllabification at work
James: "dʒeimɪz" (standard pronunciation: dʒeimz)
Books: "bʊtʰɪz" (standard prononciation: bʊks)
Star: "tʰɑɹ" (standard pronunciation: stɑɹ)

These have been standard Gracese for a while. Obviously under the pressure of the Standard English she hears every day, all of these formations will eventually give way to the standard ones, and we have started to hear the occasional consonant cluster out of Grace already.

Analysis of Poop-it
Given Grace's rules for syllables, and Grace's frequent formation of past tense words in English with the "d" suffix, I would have expected her to form one of the following two forms:

1. Gracese: pʰupʰɪd (poop-id)
2. Standard: pʰupɾ (poopt)

What she did, however, is she formed a hybrid. This raises the possibility that she has learned neither the grammar nor the phonological rule described above, but has instead simply heard the word form "poopt" and interpreted it based on her own rules for syllabification.

This shouldn't seem that surprising, but to me it is. Listening to her talk, it seems so clear that she is using our grammatical endings "z" (plural, third person) and "d" (past tense) in a variety of contexts. But of course, it's entirely possible that instead of hearing Grace alternate between uninflected forms ("I poop") and inflected forms ("I poopit"), what I have in fact been hearing is simply her alternating between two pronunciations/interpretations of the to-her unpronouncable ("I poopt): "I poop" and "I poopit").

Of course the real proof that she is inflected verbs at all will only come when she begins to create novel (i.e. erroneous) forms like "goed" and "throwed." I can't say for sure whether I've heard these yet -- given how common they are in kid-speak and how interested I am, it's likely we haven't hit this phase yet.

Except that my second example of Grace's syllabification above is in fact a novel form: bʊkɪz. If Grace were in fact simply hearing and mimicking the word form, we would predict "bʊk" or "bʊkɪs". So are these novel forms? Has Grace learned to inflect for number but learned tense simply as "vocabulary"?

Hard to know for sure, but for the next few days I'll be paying close attention to those verbs and nouns that end in unvoiced consonants.

Grace's first linguistic question...

Following up on the topic of taboos, Katharine reports that today Grace asked her her first question:

G: Mama, what's doo doo?
K: poop.

How do you say "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" in linguisticsese?

Today, Grace wanted to go to sleep "camped out" on her bedroom floor. She then decided the whole family should come, and she moved over for me. This was a remarkable event -- usually when Grace comes to our bed she takes over my side and insists that I sleep on the bottom of the bed (I don't actually give in to this demand, for what it's worth). Thus, Grace thought that her moving over tonight was worth repeated comment, which made it pretty easy to tell what she was saying:

"Mine moved over daddy" (standardized spelling).

Which means: "I moved over for daddy"

Which she pronounced, roughly: "mine mov-uhduh ovuh daddy"

This would be the first regular past tense I've definitely observed in Gracese!

What's particularly cool is that her pronunciation of "-ed" looks a heck of a lot like her pronunciation of "did", which is one of the (albeit disputed) theories of the origin of the suffix in English (see Paraphrastic Theory of Origin here). Regardless of the similarity to "did", her pronunciation does look more like Old English weak verb endings (-ede and -ode) than like modern English.

You might think "uhduh" was a word for something like "for", which we would expect in her sentence ("I moved over ____ Daddy"), but as far as I can tell, Grace only has a subset of the prepositions (up, on, down, over etc.) which she tends to use on their own as verbs or as so-called "prepositional verbs". She omits the prepositions "for", "to" and "with" everywhere we would expect them. So, you can analyze this sentence (and countless others like it) either with "Daddy" being in something like a dative case or with "move/move over" having a slightly different semantics in her language (with similar usage to a phrase like "give into"). Other verbs with interesting semantics in Gracese are "play", which is used transitively in the play-with-toys sense, whereas in standard English the transitive play is only used for the play-an-instrument sense. This is a particularly charming one since it comes up hundreds of times a day ("Mine play it", "Mine play those", "Mine play it more right now", "Daddy play it too right now", etc.).

The other reason I'm thinking this new "uhduh" is a past tense suffix is that I've been watching her engage more with the past tense (as a concept) over the past month or so. On other nights, for example, I've noticed her self-correcting to get irregular past tense verbs right. For example, the other night when Katharine worked late and then made a much-celebrated return home at bedtime, we kept retelling the story of "mommy come home." On the thirtieth retelling or so, Grace switched over to "mommy came home" (pronounced something like "Mommy tame home", since she still doesn't really have a "k" sound). The point being she definitely understands the concept of past tense verbs.

Of course, the proof will be when she first produces the sentence "Mommy come-uhduh home" (with the newly mastered ending overriding the correct irregular form) which I am eagerly looking forward to!