Even More Contamination

I told Doug the joke that ends with the punchline, “There’s gotta be a pony in here somewhere!” He loved it, and told it to his mom that night. He started out:

Some psychiatrists did an experiment on two kids. One was an optimist, and the other was a pestimist….

Doug’s Multiple-Level Coordination

What was going to be a Christmas present for Doug and Adam turned into a Valentine’s Day present. Then it turned into an (early) Easter present. But today, after months of delay, the game that Doug and Adam had been anticipating for months finally came out, and we went and picked up our copy of Hyper Crush Bros. Knockdown-Dragout. Doug and Adam started playing it as soon as we got home from our errands, and managed to get in a couple of rounds before it was time to wash up for supper. As we sat down, I asked them how they were liking it. Doug said:

We haven’t tried training mode, versing mode, or looked at all the items yet.

Jump-Roping

There was an eye-catching action shot on the front page of a community newspaper this week. It was taken in an elementary school gym, and showed a first-grade girl jumping rope. (It seems all the local elementary schools do a unit on jumping rope around this time of year.) The photographer had caught her in mid-air, legs bent, arms out, red hair flying out horizontally, and a grin on her face (the usual place for grins to appear, I believe). It was such a neat shot that I showed it to Doug and Adam.

“What’s she doing?” asked Doug as he took the paper. “Oh, she’s jump-roping.”

“Jump-roping, huh?” I said. “Is that how you say it?” I handed the paper to Adam. “What would you say she’s doing, Adam? Jumping rope, or jump-roping?”

Adam thought for a second, then said, “Jumping rope.”

“Well, jump-roping is what all my friends say,” Doug told us.

I get 418K Google hits for “jumping rope”, and 127K for “jumproping”, “jump roping”, and “jump ropeing” combined. There were enough hits for jump-roping compared to jumping rope that my suspicion is that jump-roping has been around for quite a while. I don’t have any data correlating these forms with age, so I can’t say if jump-roping is something that’s only recently caught on. However, if Doug’s friends are representative of the general population of American English-speaking kids, I’m getting a feeling of deja vu.

If He and She Is Right, Why Does It Sound So Weird?

When Doug’s teacher returns a graded paper to him, he rolls it up into a tight cylinder. He does this so that he can poke it into his almost-but-not-quite zipped up backpack without having to take the backpack off its hook. After lunch he unzips the backpack enough to stuff his lunchbox into it. He leaves the backpack half unzipped after this, which allows him to shove in any later-arriving papers without having to roll them up. I have assembled this picture from regularly emptying his backpack of one or two randomly wrinkled papers, then his lunchbox, and finally, one by one, any rolled-then-flattened papers hiding underneath it. Once I’ve thown the lunchbox back on top of the fridge, it’s time to unfurl the papers and look at them. The last one I looked at yesterday was a language arts paper. Doug had had to identify a few sentences as declarative, interrogative, etc., label nouns as singular or plural, and correct some sentences. One of the sentences to be corrected was:

him and her take ice skating lessons on wednesday

Doug’s answer:

On or By Accident

In my last post, I mentioned an episode of Grammar Girl’s podcast that I had found particularly interesting, about by accident and on accident. In case you haven’t listened to that episode or read the transcript, here it is again. (Also interesting: this post at Mother Tongue Annoyances on the same topic.) In this episode, Grammar Girl summarizes the findings of Leslie Barratt of Indiana State University, which can be found here (watch out, one of the tables is messed up, and doesn’t match the graph it goes with). In short, Barratt finds that:

1. speakers born before about 1970 hardly use on accident at all;
2. speakers born between 1970 and 1995 use on accident and by accident (sometimes even an individual speaker will use both);
3. speakers born after 1995 use on accident to the near exclusion of by accident.

This is not just speakers in one region; she surveyed speakers in Indiana, Michigan, California, and Georgia, from different socioeconomic classes.

What could have caused such a sudden shift to the almost complete displacement of by accident in speakers born after 1995? Barratt doesn’t know, but she does know one thing:

Congestion Question

Saturday morning: As I scrubbed the dried-up remains of last night’s cat food out of the bowls, Doug entered the kitchen. He sniffed. “Blueberry muffins!” he exclaimed. His favorite. He looked around to see where they were. None were in sight. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot. I always smell blueberry muffins when my nose is stoffed up.”

How unusual, I thought. This calls for some investigation.

But Although…

Adam’s acquisition of English took an incremental step this week. It happened sometime between bedtime Wednesday night and when he got home from school Thursday afternoon. Maybe it came to him in a dream, or maybe he made the connection while he was sitting in the cafeteria or on the school bus, but by the time he’d thrown his coat and backpack on the floor, it had happened. Adam realized that but and although both convey the semantic relation of concession: the idea that if proposition A is true, you would expect proposition B to be false.

The problem now is in rediscovering the differences between but and although now that he’s discovered their semantic commonality. When he wants to express a concession, which word should he use? Right now he’s hedging his bets, and using both. Not in the way my ESL students tended to do, in sentences like:

Although much has been done, but many problems still remain>

Adam uses them right next to each other, like this:

This globe doesn’t show Santo Domingo, but although it’s in the Dominican Republic.

That one was a situation where either but or although would have worked. Unfortunately for Adam, there are also situations where only but will work, when you want to show some contrast, but not necessarily concession. When I asked him on Friday afternoon about the pizza they’d served at school, he was telling me about the “California vegetables”, which turned out to be broccoli and carrots. I knew there was no way he would have eaten the broccoli, but there was a chance he might have gone for the carrots, so I asked him how they were. It turns out the nasty smell of the broccoli had so thoroughly contaminated the whole vegetable mix, he didn’t eat any of it. To minimize the cause for concern, he added:

I didn’t eat any of it, but although it wasn’t the main food. I just ate the pizza.

Just because something is a side dish does not mean I’d be surprised if someone ate it, so this is not a case of concession. But although Adam now seems to be using but and although less correctly than before, his grammar is still one step closer to an adult’s. Overgeneralization is the best evidence of kids’ having learned a rule of their language, instead of just relying on forms they’d memorized: irregular plurals get regularized, as do irregular verbs. I’d never heard of this particular overgeneralization, but it fit right in. I’ll know Adam has constructed version 2.0 of the rules about but and although when once again he can produce one without the other.

Yateraw Gwiding

The December 2007 issue of Language arrived while we were packing for our trip to visit Mom and Dad. I glanced at the contents and some abstracts, figuring I’d read more when we got back. The first article: “Positional neutralization: A case study from child language,” by Sharon Inkelas and Yvan Rose. When I looked at the abstract, I realized this article couldn’t wait for us to get back from our trip; it would have to go in my carryon bag for the plane. It was about a child they referred to as E, who from the ages of about one and a half to three years exhibited … lateral gliding.

Lateral gliding, you say?

Yes, lateral gliding! Lateral is the phonetic term for /l/ sounds, and glide is a term referring to vowel-like consonants such as [y] and [w]. (They’re also known as approximants.) Lateral gliding, then, is the pronunciation of /l/s as [w]s and [y]s. Sound familiar?

Maybe you remember a few years ago, when I wrote about how Doug pronounced his /l/s until he was about six years old. Sometimes he’d say them as [y], sometimes as [w]. (BTW, I should mention that I’m using a corrupt version of the International Phonetic Alphabet here. Technically, the consonant y sound is written as [j]. The j sound, meanwhile, is written [ʤ]. But for consistency with the posts I’m linking to here, and to lessen confusion for my nonlinguist readers, I’m representing the y sound as [y].) I was dissatisfied with my own analysis of the rule describing when Doug would produce a [y] and when he’d produce a [w]; another linguist had a better one, but I was naturally curious about what a paper in a scholarly journal would have to say on the subject. This wasn’t academic; it was personal.

The Put-Down From Which There’s No Pick-Up

Today was a sad day for us. After two years of steady weight loss (and one month of precipitous weight loss), and having more or less constant kidney problems, our 18-year-old cat Barney finally reached the point where his prognosis was a matter of days. We decided earlier in the week that we would kill him today. Or to be more accurate, have the vet kill him.

Ugh. All I’m doing is avoiding the euphemisms for this kind of thing — put him down/to sleep/out of his misery, euthanize him — and all of a sudden it sounds so heartless. It was a tough decision, since Barney hadn’t reached the point yet where we could say, “He’s obviously in constant pain, and we need to end it”; but he had clearly declined enough that we didn’t want to wait for him to die during a frightening, painful crisis, the way his brother did a few years ago. And in the midst of questioning ourselves about our decision, we had to explain it confidently to Doug and Adam. They cried about it off and on for the past three days as they got in their last Barney-petting, and Doug continually pointed out how he thought Barney had gained a little bit of weight (his spine didn’t stick out quite as much as before), that he seemed like he was feeling OK today, and if we somehow got up to, say, eight pounds, would they put him to sleep then?

During one of these discussions, Doug told me about the time a couple of years back when he learned what it meant to put someone to sleep. His neighborhood friend’s dog had had to be euthanized, and his friend tearfully told him, “They had to put Rocky to sleep.”

Trying to cheer up his friend, Doug offered, “It’s OK, I’m sure he’ll wake up soon.” It didn’t work, and Doug said it a few more times, figuring his friend just hadn’t heard him clearly. Finally another friend who was there couldn’t stand it anymore, and clued Doug in.

Ah, Doug, you have so many euphemisms yet to learn!

Condiment Coordination

As I was setting Doug’s and Adam’s drinks on the table, Doug knew he had to act fast. If I was already sitting down when he asked if he could have some ketchup, he knew from experience that I’d say, “Sure. It’s in the door of the fridge.” If he wanted me to get the ketchup for him, he would have to ask me specifically, and do so before I sat down. Furthermore, if all he requested was for me to bring the ketchup, and then, upon receiving it, he tried to expand the scope of my mission to include actually squeezing some onto his plate, I’d most likely say, “You can do that,” and head to my seat. If he wanted to take his ease while having both of these simple tasks done for him, he’d have to make both requests at the same time, and right now. So he quickly mustered his wits and said,

Hey, Dad, can you bring over and squirt some ketchup onto my plate?

“OK,” I said, but as I walked to the fridge, that familiar feeling came over me, that nagging post-processing sensation that something wasn’t quite right. I mentally reviewed Doug’s utterance as I returned with the ketchup, and realized that — hot dog! — he had just created another “Friends in Low Places” coordination (aka right-node wrapping, or RNW) to add to my list.

A review of the anatomy of an RNW coordination: It has form A and B C D, but is semantically equivalent to [A C] and [B C D], instead of [A C D] and [B C D], as it would if it were parsed as an ordinary, parallel coordination. In this example:

A = bring over
B = squirt
C = some ketchup
D = on my plate

His intended meaning was equivalent to [A C] and [B C D], i.e. “bring over some ketchup and squirt it (the ketchup) on my plate”; it was not “bring over some ketchup on my plate and squirt it on my plate.”

Do I dare say that I relish moments like this?