(Comments on Activities)
"teddy sock": - teddy is wearing a sock
- this sock belongs to teddy
- teddy is taking his sock off
"mummy car": - mummy has a car
- that's mummy's car
- mummy is getting into the car
- mummy is getting out of the car
- mummy just crashed the car
"Kimmy kick": this is an actual utterance, which we are told in the context actually meant "kick Kimmy". However, there was no way of knowing this!
"Kendall spider": again an attested utterance which we are told meant "Kendall is looking at a spider". But it could have meant a lot of other things!
"play bed": - could be a statement, "I'm playing on the bed"
- or a permission question, "can I play in bed?"
- or a request, "play with me on the bed!"
Here the intonation, as well as the context, would help to disambiguate it.
These are by no means the only interpretations. The point is that there is at least more than one for each utterance.
The question versions are:
Is Jane eating her lunch?
Did Sam like chocolate?
Couldn't Emma catch the ball?
Might Sean have been ill?
The rules for forming yes/no questions in English are something like:
1. If there is an auxiliary verb, swap the first auxiliary verb with the subject of the sentence.
2. If there is no auxiliary verb, supply "do" as an auxiliary just before the main verb. Move any inflections for tense, number or person onto the "do" and remove them from the main verb. Then swap it with the subject.
3. Use rising intonation at the end of the question.
Children usually get the intonation before anything else: it is only the intonation that marks an early utterance as a question. Later on they learn to invert the subject and auxiliary. It is some time yet before they remove the tense marking from the main verb, so you often find examples of double past tense marking: "Did he caught it?" etc.
There are a whole number of possible WH-questions, including:
Where is Jane eating her lunch?
What did Sam like?
Who couldn't catch the ball?
Why might Sean have been ill?
The rules for forming WH-questions are something like:
This involves one additional step to the yes/no questions, so it is not surprising that children's development in WH-questions is slower. They get the position of the WH-word right straight away, but the range of WH-words available to them expands slowly. When a given child is capable of inverting the subject and auxiliary in yes/no questions, he/she may well be unable to do this for WH-questions. And removing inflections from the main verb comes last of all.
"unsqueezed" involves two errors: an inability to remove the past tense from the main verb (see notes on Activities 2 and 3), and a generalisation of the use of "un" to a verb which doesn't allow it. Quite sensible really!
"unflatted" again involves an overgeneralisation of "un" to a verb "flat", presumably derived from the adjective. After all, "untidy" seems to work like this ...
"beed" sticks a regular "-ed" past tense ending onto the irregular verb "to be".
"tooked" is similar, but the past tense ending is added onto something that is already a past tense, producing a double past: took + ed.
The same applies to "putted". Note that "take" and "put" are not the verbs an adult would use in any case: maybe the child does not know that "make" is the appropriate verb for these situations.
"unhate" is simply "un" added to a verb, just like un+tie, un+do, etc.
