CHAPTER VII

GRAMMAR

§ 1. Introductory. § 2. Substantives and Adjectives. § 3. Verbs. § 4. Degrees of Consciousness. § 5. Word-formation. § 6. Word-division. § 7. Sentences. § 8. Negation and Question. § 9. Prepositions and Idioms.

VII.--§ 1. Introductory.

To learn a language it is not enough to know so many words. They must be connected according to the particular laws of the particular language. No one tells the child that the plural of ‘hand’ is _hands_, of ‘foot’ _feet_, of ‘man’ _men_, or that the past of ‘am’ is _was_, of ‘love’ _loved_; it is not informed when to say _he_ and when _him_, or in what order words must stand. How can the little fellow learn all this, which when set forth in a grammar fills many pages and can only be explained by help of many learned words?

Many people will say it comes by ‘instinct,’ as if ‘instinct’ were not one of those fine words which are chiefly used to cover over what is not understood, because it says so precious little and seems to say so precious much. But when other people, using a more everyday expression, say that it all ‘comes quite of itself,’ I must strongly demur: so far is it from ‘coming of itself’ that it demands extraordinary labour on the child’s part. The countless grammatical mistakes made by a child in its early years are a tell-tale proof of the difficulty which this side of language presents to him--especially, of course, on account of the unsystematic character of our flexions and the irregularity of its so-called ‘rules’ of syntax.

At first each word has only one form for the child, but he soon discovers that grown-up people use many forms which resemble one another in different connexions, and he gets a sense of the purport of these forms, so as to be able to imitate them himself or even develop similar forms of his own. These latter forms are what linguists call analogy-formations: by analogy with ‘Jack’s hat’ and ‘father’s hat’ the child invents such as ‘uncle’s hat’ and ‘Charlie’s hat’--and inasmuch as these forms are ‘correct,’ no one can say on hearing them whether the child has really invented them or has first heard them used by others. It is just on account of the fact that the forms developed on the spur of the moment by each individual are in the vast majority of instances perfectly identical with those used already by other people, that the principle of analogy comes to have such paramount importance in the life of language, for we are all thereby driven to apply it unhesitatingly to all those instances in which we have no ready-made form handy: without being conscious of it, each of us thus now and then really creates something never heard before by us or anybody else.

VII.--§ 2. Substantives and Adjectives.

The _-s_ of the possessive is so regular in English that it is not difficult for the child to attach it to all words as soon as the character of the termination has dawned upon him. But at first there is a time with many children in which words are put together without change, so that ‘Mother hat’ stands for ‘Mother’s hat’; cf. also sentences like “Baby want baby milk.”

After the _s_-form has been learnt, it is occasionally attached to pronouns, as _you’s_ for ‘your,’ or more rarely _I’s_ or _me’s_ for ‘my.’

The _-s_ is now in English added freely to whole groups of words, as in _the King of England’s power_, where the old construction was _the King’s power of England_, and in _Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays_ (see on the historical development of this group genitive my ChE iii.). In Danish we have exactly the same construction, and Danish children will very frequently extend it, placing the _-s_ at the end of a whole interrogative sentence, e.g., ‘Hvem er det da’s?’ (as if in English, ‘Who is it then’s,’ instead of ‘Whose is it then?’). Dr. H. Bradley once wrote to me: “One of your samples of children’s Danish is an exact parallel to a bit of child’s English that I noted long ago. My son, when a little boy, used to say ‘Who is that-’s’ (with a pause before the _s_) for ‘Whom does that belong to?’”

Irregular plurals are often regularized, _gooses_ for ‘geese,’ _tooths_, _knifes_, etc. O’Shea mentions one child who inversely formed the plural _chieves_ for _chiefs_ on the analogy of _thieves_.

Sometimes the child becomes acquainted with the plural form first, and from it forms a singular. I have noticed this several times with Danish children, who had heard the irregular plural _køer_, ‘cows,’ and then would say _en kø_ instead of _en ko_ (while others from the singular _ko_ form a regular plural _koer_). French children will say _un chevau_ instead of _un cheval_.

In the comparison of adjectives analogy-formations are frequent with all children, e.g. _the littlest_, _littler_, _goodest_, _baddest_, _splendider_, etc. One child is reported as saying _quicklier_, another as saying _quickerly_, instead of the received _more quickly_. A curious formation is “P’raps it was John, but _p’rapser_ it was Mary.”

O’Shea (p. 108) notices a period of transition when the child may use the analogical form at one moment and the traditional one the next. Thus S. (4.0) will say _better_ perhaps five times where he says _gooder_ once, but in times of excitement he will revert to the latter form.

VII.--§ 3. Verbs.

The child at first tends to treat all verbs on the analogy of _love_, _loved_, _loved_, or _kiss_, _kissed_, _kissed_, thus _catched_, _buyed_, _frowed_ for ‘caught, bought, threw or thrown,’ etc., but gradually it learns the irregular forms, though in the beginning with a good deal of hesitation and confusion, as _done_ for ‘did,’ _hunged_ for ‘hung,’ etc. O’Shea gives among other sentences (p. 94): “I _drunked_ my milk.” “Budd _swunged_ on the rings.” “Grandpa _boughted_ me a ring.” “I _caughted_ him.” “Aunt Net _camed_ to-day.” “He _gaved_ it to me”--in all of which the irregular form has been supplemented with the regular ending.

A little Danish incident may be thus rendered in English. The child (4.6): “I have seed a chestnut.” “Where have you seen it?” He: “I seen it in the garden.” This shows the influence of the form last heard.

I once heard a French child say “Il a pleuvy” for ‘plu’ from ‘pleuvoir.’ Other analogical forms are _prendu_ for ‘pris’; _assire_ for ‘asseoir’ (from the participle _assis_), _se taiser_ for ‘se taire’ (from the frequent injunction _taisez-vous_). Similar formations are frequent in all countries.

VII.--§ 4. Degrees of Consciousness.

Do the little brains _think_ about these different forms and their uses? Or is the learning of language performed as unconsciously as the circulation of the blood or the process of digestion? Clearly they do not think about grammatical forms in the way pursued in grammar-lessons, with all the forms of the same word arranged side by side of one another, with rules and exceptions. Still there is much to lead us to believe that the thing does not go of itself without some thinking over. The fact that in later years we speak our language without knowing how we do it, the right words and phrases coming to us no one knows how or whence, is no proof that it was always so. We ride a bicycle without giving a thought to the machine, look around us, talk with a friend, etc., and yet there was a time when every movement had to be mastered by slow and painful efforts. There would be nothing strange in supposing that it is the same with the acquisition of language.

Of course, it would be idle to ask children straight out if they think about these things, and what they think. But now and then one notices something which shows that at an early age they think about points of grammar a good deal. When Frans was 2.9, he lay in bed not knowing that anyone was in the next room, and he was heard to say quite plainly: “Små hænder hedder det--lille hånd--små hænder--lille hænder, næ små hænder.” (“They are called small hands--little hand--small hands--little hands, no, small hands”: in Danish _lille_ is not used with a plural noun.) Similar things have been related to me by other parents, one child, for instance, practising plural forms while turning over the leaves of a picture-book, and another one, who was corrected for saying _nak_ instead of _nikkede_ (‘nodded’), immediately retorted “_Stikker stak, nikker nak_,” thus showing on what analogy he had formed the new preterit. Frequently children, after giving a form which their own ears tell them is wrong, at once correct it: ‘I sticked it in--I stuck it in.’

A German child, not yet two, said: “Papa, hast du mir was mitgebringt--gebrungen--gebracht?” almost at a breath (Gabelentz), and another (2.5) said _hausin_, but then hesitated and added: “Man kann auch häuser sagen” (Meringer).

VII.--§ 5. Word-formation.

In the forming of words the child’s brain is just as active. In many cases, again, it will be impossible to distinguish between what the child has heard and merely copied and what it has itself fashioned to a given pattern. If a child, for example, uses the word ‘kindness,’ it is probable that he has heard it before, but it is not certain, because he might equally well have formed the word himself. If, however, we hear him say ‘kindhood,’ or ‘kindship,’ or ‘wideness,’ ‘broadness,’ ‘stupidness,’ we know for certain that he has made the word up himself, because the resultant differs from the form used in the language he hears around him. A child who does not know the word ‘spade’ may call the tool a _digger_; he may speak of a lamp as a _shine_. He may say _it suns_ when the sun is shining (cf. it rains), or ask his mother to _sauce_ his pudding. It is quite natural that the enormous number of nouns and verbs of exactly the same form in English (_blossom_, _care_, _drink_, _end_, _fight_, _fish_, _ape_, _hand_, _dress_, etc.) should induce children to make new verbs according to the same pattern; I quote a few of the examples given by O’Shea: “I am going to _basket_ these apples.” “I _pailed_ him out” (took a turtle out of a washtub with a pail). “I _needled_ him” (put a needle through a fly).

Other words are formed by means of derivative endings, as _sorrified_, _lessoner_ (O’Shea 32), _flyable_ (able to fly, Glenconner 3); “This tooth ought to come out, because it is _crookening_ the others” (a ten-year-old, told me by Professor Ayres). Compound nouns, too, may be freely formed, such as _wind-ship_, _eye-curtain_ (O’Shea), a _fun-copy_ of Romeo and Juliet (travesty, Glenconner 19). Bryan L. (ab. 5) said _springklers_ for chrysalises (‘because they wake up in the spring’).

Sometimes a child will make up a new word through ‘blending’ two, as when Hilary M. (1.8 to 2) spoke of _rubbish_ = the _rub_ber to pol_ish_ the boots, or of the _backet_, from _ba_t and r_acquet_. Beth M. (2.0) used _breakolate_, from _break_fast and cho_colate_, and _Chally_ as a child’s name, a compound of two sisters, _Cha_rity and S_ally_.

VII.--§ 6. Word-division.

We are so accustomed to see sentences in writing or print with a little space left after each word, that we have got altogether wrong conceptions of language as it is spoken. Here words follow one another without the least pause till the speaker hesitates for a word or has come to the end of what he has to say. ‘Not at all’ sounds like ‘not a tall.’ It therefore requires in many cases a great deal of comparison and analysis on the part of the child to find out what is one and what two or three words. We have seen before that the question ‘How big is the boy?’ is to the child a single expression, beyond his powers of analysis, and to a much later age it is the same with other phrases. The child, then, may make false divisions, and either treat a group of words as one word or one word as a group of words. A girl (2.6) used the term ‘Tanobijeu’ whenever she wished her younger brother to get out of her way. Her parents finally discovered that she had caught up and shortened a phrase that some older children had used--‘’Tend to your own business’ (O’Shea).

A child, addressing her cousin as ‘Aunt Katie,’ was told “I am not Aunt Katie, I am merely Katie.” Next day she said: “Good-morning, Aunt merely-Katie” (translated). A child who had been praised with the words, ‘You are a good boy,’ said to his mother, “You’re a good boy, mother” (2.8).

Cecil H. (4.0) came back from a party and said that she had been given something very nice to eat. “What was it?” “Rats.” “No, no.” “Well, it was mice then.” She had been asked if she would have ‘some-ice,’ and had taken it to be ‘some mice.’ S. L. (2.6) constantly used ‘_ababana_’ for ‘banana’; the form seems to have come from the question “Will you have a banana?” but was used in such a sentence as “May I have an ababana?” Children will often say _napple_ for _apple_ through a misdivision of _an-apple_, and _normous_ for _enormous_; cf. Ch. X § 2.

A few examples may be added from children’s speech in other countries. Ronjat’s child said _nésey_ for ‘échelle,’ starting from u'ne‿échelle; Grammont’s child said _un tarbre_, starting from _cet arbre_, and _ce nos_ for ‘cet os,’ from _un os_; a German child said _motel_ for ‘hotel,’ starting from the combination ‘im‿(h)‿otel’ (Stern). Many German children say _arrhöe_, because they take the first syllable of ‘diarrhöe’ as the feminine article. A Dutch child heard the phrase ‘’k weet ’t niet’ (‘I don’t know’), and said “Papa, hij kweet ’t niet” (Van Ginneken). A Danish child heard his father say, “Jeg skal op i _ministeriet_” (“I’m going to the Government office”), and took the first syllable as _min_ (my); consequently he asked, “Skal du i dinisteriet?” A French child was told that they expected Munkácsy (the celebrated painter, in French pronounced as Mon-), and asked his aunt: “Est-ce que _ton Kácsy_ ne viendra pas?” Antoinette K. (7.), in reply to “C’est bien, je te félicite,” said, “Eh bien, moi je ne te _fais_ pas _licite_.”

The German ‘Ich habe _antgewortet_’ is obviously on the analogy of _angenommen_, etc. (Meringer). Danish children not unfrequently take the verb _telefonere_ as two words, and in the interrogative form will place the personal pronoun in the middle of it, ‘Tele hun fonerer?’ (‘Does she telephone?’) A girl asked to see _ele mer fant_ (as if in English she had said ‘ele more phant’). Cf. ‘Give me _more handier-cap_’ for ‘Give me a greater handicap’--in a foot-race (O’Shea 108).

VII.--§ 7. Sentences.

In the first period the child knows nothing of grammar: it does not connect words together, far less form sentences, but each word stands by itself. ‘Up’ means what we should express by a whole sentence, ‘I want to get up,’ or ‘Lift me up’; ‘Hat’ means ‘Put on my hat,’ or ‘I want to put my hat on,’ or ‘I have my hat on,’ or ‘Mamma has a new hat on’; ‘Father’ can be either ‘Here comes Father,’ or ‘This is Father,’ or ‘He is called Father,’ or ‘I want Father to come to me,’ or ‘I want this or that from Father.’ This particular group of sounds is vaguely associated with the mental picture of the person in question, and is uttered at the sight of him or at the mere wish to see him or something else in connexion with him.

When we say that such a word means what we should express by a whole sentence, this does not amount to saying that the child’s ‘Up’ _is_ a sentence, or a sentence-word, as many of those who have written about these questions have said. We might just as well assert that clapping our hands is a sentence, because it expresses the same idea (or the same frame of mind) that is otherwise expressed by the whole sentence ‘This is splendid.’ The word ‘sentence’ presupposes a certain grammatical structure, which is wanting in the child’s utterance.

Many investigators have asserted that the child’s first utterances are not means of imparting information, but always an expression of the child’s wishes and requirements. This is certainly somewhat of an exaggeration, since the child quite clearly can make known its joy at seeing a hat or a plaything, or at merely being able to recognize it and remember the word for it; but the statement still contains a great deal of truth, for without strong feelings a child would not say much, and it is a great stimulus to talk that he very soon discovers that he gets his wishes fulfilled more easily when he makes them known by means of certain sounds.

Frans (1.7) was accustomed to express his longings in general by help of a long _m_ with rising tone, while at the same time stretching out his hand towards the particular thing that he longed for. This he did, for example, at dinner, when he wanted water. One day his mother said, “Now see if you can say _vand_ (water),” and at once he said what was an approach to the word, and was delighted at getting something to drink by that means. A moment later he repeated what he had said, and was inexpressibly delighted to have found the password which at once brought him something to drink. This was repeated several times. Next day, when his father was pouring out water for himself, the boy again said ‘van,’ ‘van,’ and was duly rewarded. He had not heard the word during the intervening twenty-four hours, and nothing had been done to remind him of it. After some repetitions (for he only got a few drops at a time) he pronounced the word for the first time quite correctly. The day after, the same thing occurred; the word was never heard but at dinner. When he became rather a nuisance with his constant cries for water, his mother said: “Say please”--and immediately came his “Bebe vand” (“Water, please”)--his first attempt to put two words together.

Later--in this formless period--the child puts more and more words together, often in quite haphazard order: ‘My go snow’ (‘I want to go out into the snow’), etc. A Danish child of 2.1 said the Danish words (imperfectly pronounced, of course) corresponding to “Oh papa lamp mother boom,” when his mother had struck his father’s lamp with a bang. Another child said “Papa hen corn cap” when he saw his father give corn to the hens out of his cap.

When Frans was 1.10, passing a post-office (which Danes call ‘posthouse’), he said of his own accord the Danish words for ‘post, house, bring, letter’(a pause between the successive words)--I suppose that the day before he had heard a sentence in which these words occurred. In the same month, when he had thrown a ball a long way, he said what would be in English ‘dat was good.’ This was not a sentence which he had put together for himself, but a mere repetition of what had been said to him, clearly conceived as a whole, and equivalent to ‘bravo.’ Sentences of this kind, however, though taken as units, prepare the way for the understanding of the words ‘that’ and ‘was’ when they turn up in other connexions.

One thing which plays a great rôle in children’s acquisition of language, and especially in their early attempts to form sentences, is Echoism: the fact that children echo what is said to them. When one is learning a foreign language, it is an excellent method to try to imitate to oneself in silence every sentence which one hears spoken by a native. By that means the turns of phrases, the order of words, the intonation of the sentence are firmly fixed in the memory--so that they can be recalled when required, or rather recur to one quite spontaneously without an effort. What the grown man does of conscious purpose our children to a large extent do without a thought--that is, they repeat aloud what they have just heard, either the whole, if it is a very short sentence, or more commonly the conclusion, as much of it as they can retain in their short memories. The result is a matter of chance--it need not always have a meaning or consist of entire words. Much, clearly, is repeated without being understood, much, again, without being more than half understood. Take, for example (translated):

Shall I carry you?--Frans (1.9): Carry you.

Shall Mother carry Frans?--Carry Frans.

The sky is so blue.--So boo.

I shall take an umbrella.--Take rella.

Though this feature in a child’s mental history has been often noticed, no one seems to have seen its full significance. One of the acutest observers (Meumann, p. 28) even says that it has no importance in the development of the child’s speech. On the contrary, I think that Echoism explains very much indeed. First let us bear in mind the mutilated forms of words which a child uses: _’chine_ for machine, _’gar_ for cigar, _Trix_ for Beatrix, etc. Then a child’s frequent use of an indirect form of question rather than direct, ‘Why you smoke, Father?’ which can hardly be explained except as an echo of sentences like ‘Tell me why you smoke.’ This plays a greater rôle in Danish than in English, and the corresponding form of the sentence has been frequently remarked by Danish parents. Another feature which is nearly constant with Danish children at the age when echoing is habitual is the inverted word order: this is used after an initial adverb (_nu kommer hun_, etc.), but the child will use it in all cases (_kommer hun_, etc.). Further, the extremely frequent use of the infinitive, because the child hears it towards the end of a sentence, where it is dependent on a preceding _can_, or _may_, or _must_. ‘Not eat that’ is a child’s echo of ‘You mustn’t eat that.’ In German this has become the ordinary form of official order: “Nicht hinauslehnen” (“Do not lean out of the window”).

VII.--§ 8. Negation and Question.

Most children learn to say ‘no’ before they can say ‘yes’--simply because negation is a stronger expression of feeling than affirmation. Many little children use _nenenene_ (short _ĕ_) as a natural expression of fretfulness and discomfort. It is perhaps so natural that it need not be learnt: there is good reason for the fact that in so many languages words of negation begin with _n_ (or _m_). Sometimes the _n_ is heard without a vowel: it is only the gesture of ‘turning up one’s nose’ made audible.

At first the child does not express what it is that it does not want--it merely puts it away with its hand, pushes away, for example, what is too hot for it. But when it begins to express in words what it is that it will not have, it does so often in the form ‘Bread no,’ often with a pause between the words, as two separate utterances, as when we might say, in our fuller forms of expression: ‘Do you offer me bread? I won’t hear of it.’ So with verbs: ‘I sleep no.’ Thus with many Danish children, and I find the same phenomenon mentioned with regard to children of different nations. Tracy says (p. 136): “Negation was expressed by an affirmative sentence, with an emphatic _no_ tacked on at the end, exactly as the deaf-mutes do.” The blind-deaf Helen Keller, when she felt her little sister’s mouth and her mother spelt ‘teeth’ to her, answered: “Baby teeth--no, baby eat--no,” i.e., baby cannot eat because she has no teeth. In the same way, in German, ‘Stul nei nei--schossel,’ i.e., I won’t sit on the chair, but in your lap, and in French, ‘Papa abeié ato non, iaian abeié non,’ i.e., Papa n’est pas encore habillé, Suzanne n’est pas habillée (Stern, 189, 203). It seems thus that this mode of expression will crop up everywhere as an emphatic negation.

Interrogative sentences come generally rather early--it would be better to say questions, because at first they do not take the form of interrogative sentences, the interrogation being expressed by bearing, look or gesture: when it begins to be expressed by intonation we are on the way to question expressed in speech. Some of the earliest questions have to do with place: ‘Where is...?’ The child very often hears such sentences as ‘Where is its little nose?’ which are not really meant as questions; we may also remark that questions of this type are of great practical importance for the little thing, who soon uses them to beg for something which has been taken away from him or is out of his reach. Other early questions are ‘What’s that?’ and ‘Who?’

Later--generally, it would seem, at the close of the third year--questions with ‘why’ crop up: these are of the utmost importance for the child’s understanding of the whole world and its manifold occurrences, and, however tiresome they may be when they come in long strings, no one who wishes well to his child will venture to discourage them. Questions about time, such as ‘When? How long?’ appear much later, owing to the child’s difficulty in acquiring exact ideas about time.

Children often find a difficulty in double questions, and when asked ‘Will you have brown bread or white?’ merely answer the last word with ‘Yes.’ So in reply to ‘Is that red or yellow?’ ‘Yes’ means ‘yellow’ (taken from a child of 4.11). I think this is an instance of the short memories of children, who have already at the end of the question forgotten the beginning, but Professor Mawer thinks that the real difficulty here is in making a choice: they cannot decide between alternatives: usually they are silent, and if they say ‘Yes’ it only means that they do not want to go without both or feel that they must say something.

VII.--§ 9. Prepositions and Idioms.

Prepositions are of very late growth in a child’s language. Much attention has been given to the point, and Stern has collected statistics of the ages at which various children have first used prepositions: the earliest age is 1.10, the average age is 2.3. It does not, however, seem to me to be a matter of much interest how early an individual word of some particular grammatical class is first used; it is much more interesting to follow up the gradual growth of the child’s command of this class and to see how the first inevitable mistakes and confusions arise in the little brain. Stern makes the interesting remark that when the tendency to use prepositions first appears, it grows far more rapidly than the power to discriminate one preposition from another; with his own children there came a time when they employed the same word as a sort of universal preposition in all relations. Hilda used _von_, Eva _auf_. I have never observed anything corresponding to this among Danish children.

All children start by putting the words for the most important concepts together without connective words, so ‘Leave go bedroom’ (‘May I have leave to go into the bedroom?’), ‘Out road’ (‘I am going out on the road’). The first use of prepositions is always in set phrases learnt as wholes, like ‘go to school,’ ‘go to pieces,’ ‘lie in bed,’ ‘at dinner.’ Not till later comes the power of using prepositions in free combinations, and it is then that mistakes appear. Nor is this surprising, since in all languages prepositional usage contains much that is peculiar and arbitrary, chiefly because when we once pass beyond a few quite clear applications of time and place, the relations to be expressed become so vague and indefinite, that logically one preposition might often seem just as right as another, although usage has laid down a fast law that this preposition must be used in this case and that in another. I noted down a great number of mistakes my own boy made in these words, but in all cases I was able to find some synonymous or antonymous expression in which the preposition used would have been the correct one, and which may have been vaguely before his mind.

The multiple meanings of prepositions sometimes have strange results. A little girl was in her bath, and hearing her mother say: “I will wash you in a moment,” answered: “No, you must wash me in the bath”! She was led astray by the two uses of _in_. We know of the child at school who was asked “What is an average?” and said: “What the hen lays eggs on.” Even men of science are similarly led astray by prepositions. It is perfectly natural to say that something has passed over the threshold of consciousness: the metaphor is from the way in which you enter a house by stepping over the threshold. If the metaphor were kept, the opposite situation would be expressed by the statement that such and such a thing is outside the threshold of consciousness. But psychologists, in the thoughtless way of little children, take _under_ to be always the opposite of _over_, and so speak of things ‘lying under (or below) the threshold of our consciousness,’ and have even invented a Latin word for the unconscious, viz. _subliminal_.[22]

Children may use verbs with an object which require a preposition (‘Will you _wait_ me?’), or which are only used intransitively (‘Will you _jump_ me?’), or they may mix up an infinitival with a direct construction (‘Could you hear me sneezed?’). But it is surely needless to multiply examples.

When many years ago, in my _Progress in Language_, I spoke of the advantages, even to natives, of simplicity in linguistic structure, Professor Herman Möller, in a learned review, objected to me that to the adult learning a foreign tongue the chief difficulty consists in “the countless chicaneries due to the tyrannical and capricious usage, whose tricks there is no calculating; but these offer to the native child no such difficulty as morphology may,” and again, in speaking of the choice of various prepositions, which is far from easy to the foreigner, he says: “But any considerable mental exertion on the part of the native child learning its mother-tongue is here, of course, out of the question.” Such assertions as these cannot be founded on actual observation; at any rate, it is my experience in listening to children’s talk that long after they have reached the point where they make hardly any mistake in pronunciation and verbal forms, etc., they are still capable of using many turns of speech which are utterly opposed to the spirit of the language, and which are in the main of the same kind as those which foreigners are apt to fall into. Many of the child’s mistakes are due to mixtures or blendings of two turns of expression, and not a few of them may be logically justified. But learning a language implies among other things learning what you may _not_ say in the language, even though no reasonable ground can be given for the prohibition.

FOOTNOTE:

[22] H. G. Wells writes (_Soul of a Bishop_, 94): “He was lugging things now into speech that so far had been _scarcely above the threshold_ of his conscious thought.” Here we see the wrong interpretation of the preposition _over_ dragging with it the synonym _above_.