"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).

Even in an article about ngrams, NYT fails to care enough about language to factcheck

Anyone who knows me knows how much I love google ngrams. So I was interested to see David Brooks wrote a column based on it.

The beauty of google ngrams is that it makes it easy even for journalists to check facts about language. But that doesn't mean they bother to do the work. Alas, the column, which promised to string a series of ngrams observations together, in fact had its facts wrong.

For example, Brooks claims that:

That is to say, over those 48 years [between 1960 and 2008], words and phrases like “personalized,” “self,” “standout,” “unique,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself” were used more frequently. Communal words and phrases like “community,” “collective,” “tribe,” “share,” “united,” “band together” and “common good” receded.

For the time being, let's ignore the likelihood that the use of the word "tribe" in published books represents communal feeling and check some facts. I began with, "common good" and "band together," and saw that they do not both "recede" as he says. "common good" did drop over the middle of the 20th century, but has been rising over the last twenty years; "band together" has risen steadily over the last two centuries.

Next I tried the phrase, "I come first." It seemed only fair to put it in context by searching a family of such phrases, so I included phrases such as "family comes first", "faith comes first," and so on.

It turns out that "I come first" and "God comes first" track each other nearly perfectly, both rising and falling over the last one hundred years without any clear overall trend as he describes. The only clear trend that emerges from the set is a steady rise in the phrase "family comes first."

I decided to test his general theory that we've seen a rise in individualism and a decline in collective thinking with the most basic words and searched "myself" and "together." Alas, the chart holds nothing to confirm Mr. Brooks' argument.

To be clear, even if the trends he describes were true, they wouldn't necessarily tell us much. Rare in these word lists are phrases that seem equivalent -- comparing trends around "economic justice" and "prudence" (two words that do actually move in the ways he describes) doesn't tell you much since a speaker would virtually never be in a context in which they would be likely to use either word.

But even if his analysis was valid, his data are not.

It's hard to believe the NYT would be this lazy fact-checking anything else. Can you imagine they'd allow a column on sports in which the win-loss records were all made up on the spot? Or a column on politics that got the number of republicans in the senate wrong? With language, you might argue, it is harder to check facts, but in this case the article actually describes the tool needed to do the fact checking, a tool free to the public and a mouse click away.

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).

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).

Stupid commas (if lisp ran the world...)

Does it give me away as a programmer that I think commas would be much easier to teach if we used parentheses instead?

And am I peculiar in my absolute conviction that commas basically are parentheses, where any nested parentheses (commas inside commas or commas at a sentence edge) get collapsed and disappear?

Here's a student sentence I'm giving feedback on:

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

In my mind, there are two acceptable revisions of the basic comma error in this sentence:

Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

or

Although Desdemona has no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello, he mistakes her kindness, which she naturally bestows on everyone, as a particular fondness for another man, Cassio.

But what I'm really seeing in my head is that this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

should become this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness (which she naturally bestowed on everyone) as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

or this:

((Although Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello) he mistakes the kindness she naturally bestowed on everyone as a particular fondness for another man (Cassio))

Of course, as with lisp, this would be much clearer with a little indentation

(
 (Although  Desdemona had no thoughts for anyone but her beloved Othello)
he  mistakes the kindness
 (which she naturally bestowed on everyone)
as a  particular fondness for another man
 (Cassio)
)

Is it just experience with lisp that makes me think this way, or does this go on in everyone's head?

me gusta a...

Today I was working with a native speaking student (not literate in Spanish, but basically fluent) who had always thought that you said:

"me gusta + a + NP"

It seemed very strange to me that she would have internalized this grammar, but there's no reason it should seem that strange. The "a" is un-hear-able, so it's just as logical for her to think that we say "*me gusta a hablar" (incorrect) as it is for her to think we say "va a hablar" (correct).

I asked her if she would say "me gustan a los perros" or "me gustan los perros" and this was a no-brainer for her -- obviously just "me gustan los perros", so she really does speak the language correctly.

I'm sure this is no more strange than the fact that native-speaking English speakers mix up "they're" and "their", but I don't usually get to see these kinds of errors in Spanish so it struck me as interesting.

Part-of-speech algorithms...

Just finished grading a student's essay that repeatedly confused "este" (that, demonstrative) with "que" (that, complementizer). Whenever I see a repeated part-of-speech error like this, I try to put together a simple algorithm to help the student. In this case, it goes like this:

If replacing "that" with "this" yields a valid English sentence, then you mean "este/esto/esta." Otherwise, you mean "que"

Example: "That man is stupid." --> "this man is stupid" --> use "este"

"He said that I should." --> "*He said this I should" --> use "que"

This one is actually quite straightforward. Other times, it's trickier, like when I try to teach the difference between the past tense and the past participle by making use of the fact that English makes this distinction for irregular verbs only:

Replace the verb in question with a form of "write." If you say "wrote", you need to conjugate a past tense verb. If you say "written", you need the past participle.

Example:

"I played baseball" --> "I wrote baseball" --> past tense

"Baseball is played all over Cuba" --> "Baseball is written all over Cuba" --> past participle

Here, the trouble is that semantically, "write" (or whatever irregular you choose to use) may or may not make any sense in the sentence in question, thus confusing the student.

Nonetheless, it is my belief and experience that transformations of these kinds of easy for students, whereas recognizing and labeling parts of speech is difficult (probably because the parts of speech are usually taught using incorrect and confusing generalizations). That said, the question remains: how useful is it to have labels for the categories? Is it better to teach "if you can replace that with this, it's a demonstrative" or to teach "if you can replace that with this, use 'este'"?

More provokingly, is there a way to teach such that students will never make the este/que error in the first place. The parts of speech are so far apart that it seems very difficult to imagine they should ever be linked in a student's mind, except through English... it is intriguing to imagine an immersion approach that might eliminate the step through English on the way to learning these structures and thus eliminate the error altogether. Nonetheless, it seems quite possible to me that even if the teacher never said to students that "que" means "that", they would still figure this out and thus be vulnerable to this sort of error...

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.

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.

Pesky taboos

Quote of the day: "Está jodido", said by an earnest Spanish 2 student describing a character in a movie about to be carted off by fascists...

Meaning and usage learned correctly from an Orishas song he studied earlier in the semester. The description of the character was also correct. He just missed the pesky detail of register... It's always interesting to see the kind of Spanish students speak (and the kind of errors they make) when you give them authentic sources.

This is one of many words that students would typically never encounter in a textbook but which they would likely hear within a few days of arrival in a Spanish-speaking country (presuming they make contact with other youth, that is). Not all these kinds of words are swear words, they also include simple phrases like "mande", "vale", "venga" or "anda."