My daughter's language
My daughter is very clever at two and one-third years of age. Not a day goes by when she doesn't surprise and delight me with something new she's learned. She just returned from a weekend with her grandparents, and proceeded to strut her newly-acquired linguistic stuff.
That a very very big butterfly!
Mummy [com]puter is tiny tiny one!
A missing verb here, an elided article there, sure, but I was amazed at the assured use of repetition for the purpose of intensificatory reduplication. I was stumped as to what to call this, as I started out thinking about reduplication, but wikipedia's article on it gave me little clue as to whether I was right. Google eventually sent me to the Language Log for the above-linked blog post. Reading the very very good post also let me know why I had such trouble finding a description of the process:
When I realized in 1999 that intensificatory reduplication (of both adjective modifiers in the noun phrase and adverb premodifiers in adjective phrases and adverb phrases) needed to be described in the Adjectives and Adverbs chapter of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, I rummaged around in all the earlier reference grammars I could find to see what they had said about it, and the answer was that the exact facts had apparently never been recorded. What Rodney Huddleston and I wrote for Chapter 6 of The Cambridge Grammar (pages 561-562) was apparently the first description that dealt with both adjectives and adverbs.
It's strange. The Language Log only came onto my personal radar when it covered LOLCODE, but it now requires an honoured place on my blogroll. My weekend has been filled with it, since I've become obsessed with the recent controversy over the Pirahã, as described in the New Yorker. The Language Log's coverage of Dan Everett's work has been a great introduction to the topic.
Comments
Very nice. It's common in other languages, and in a sense, it's interesting that it doesn't happen more in English. Glad to see other people catching the lanugage-lovin' bug.
Laura
@ 29.06.2007 00:17 London/GMTOh, it just gets better and better as they get older. They come up with all kinds of cool stuff. Mine are 10 and 12 now, and my favorite of theirs is 'versing.' They verbed 'vs' - as in, 'I've versing the computer' to describe playing a video game against the computer.
adam
@ 29.06.2007 12:34 London/GMT(I've had the language-lovin' bug for a long while.)
My daughter's long-running favourite is "do-it" as a noun. Like, everything that she wants to do herself is "MY do-it." Recently, sometimes, when she wants help, she'll give a "Daddy, your do-it."