Language in Use 99-100
This unit considers what we mean by a rule in the internal organisation of
language. It examines what happens when a child uses the rules it knows,
and yet produces what an adult would call a 'mistake'.
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[1] For this session the class needs a collection of examples from children's
language. Discussion should try to identify the nature of the 'mistake' as the
class sees it. The class can collect the examples from the speech of younger
brothers and sisters, or other small children with whom they come into contact.
These may be supplemented by examples Such as the following:
(a) these shoes hurt my foots
(b) can I louden the TV?
(c) she's taked my things
(d) I'm jumper than you
(e) I saw three womans there
(f) Daddy fews some out for me
(g) it rained all the way, but shined when we got there
(h) 'goggie' applied to anything on four legs
[2] The aim of this session is to work out how the child arrived at
the form of language identified in [1] as a 'mistake'. This should be done in
stages:
(a) first, the class should be asked how they recognise that the sentence being
discussed is English-answers might
include the words themselves, their characteristic endings,
and the order in which they come;
(b) next, the class should be asked which of these features contains the 'mistake'-for
example, in (a) it is in
the word 'foots' and its ending;
(c) finally, the class should be asked to say how they think the child arrived
at this form-in particular, what other
parts of the utterance were involved, parts which the
child had got 'right'.
[3] In this session the class approach the idea that a linguistic rule
is properly a function of the way in which language actually works. This may
be done:
(a) by extending the work of [2] (c) to show that when the child arrived a;
a form like 'foots' he did so by applying, to the
unfamiliar, rules he had already found to work successfully elsewhere
(b) by examining what other 'rules' had bc~n applied correctly in each of the
sentences, and
(c) by working out the rules for, say, personal pronouns, present tense. or
word order in questions, from' a few
sample sentences.