I was in a bookstore** a few weeks ago, and I saw a mother there with her daughter, who looked to be about 3 1/2 years old. While the mother calmly leafed through some books, the little girl also took the liberty to take some books off a shelf and look at them. Her mother called her so that they could leave, and the little girl started to try to put the book back on the shelf. But she couldn't, because the other books were there and the space was too tight. She started to get frustrated, and her mother called her again, also getting a bit frustrated that the girl hadn't yet come to her.
Finally, the little girl shouts, "Mama! Help me to put!"
It was such a cute little utterance to me, and so perfectly demonstrated a feature of verb usage here that I had been noticing-- for what are typically phrasal verbs in "my neck of the woods" (Southern USA), the use of the corresponding preposition is optional, OR the verb is substituted for a non-phrasal verb.
You may be thinking-- What???
OK- I've just discovered a lovely website called englishpage.com, with some very useful definitions, examples, and lists of English grammatical structures. They define a phrasal verb as "a verb plus a preposition or adverb which creates a meaning different from the original verb." It may help to think of the following examples:
to cut
to cut off
to cut in
to cut out
to cut up
Think of the variations of all the completely different meanings of "to turn" when you add different prepositions. Think of "put", "put up", "put with", and "put up with." Interesting, right?
Evidently there are separable and inseparable phrasal verbs. This distinction explains why it "sounds funny" to say "leave off it" rather than "leave it off." Leave off would be a separable phrasal verb. By the way, there are also phrasal verbs that don't really have a preference as to position of the object.
I had noticed that in Singapore, many of the phrasal verbs I typically grew up with are used differently. This list will be far from comprehensive, but it may be interesting and amusing to read for you Standard [Southern] American English speakers out there.
put on- wear ex. "Wear your shoes."
take off- take ex. "Why you take the hat?"
clean up- keep ex. "Children, keep the toys!"
hold on[to]- hold ex. "Hold your dog!"
take off- remove ex. "Remove the paper from the table."
pick up- carry ex. "I want to carry the baby."
pick out- choose ex. "Everyone may choose 1 color."
look at- see ex. "See the squirrel."
throw away- throw ex. "Throw the tissue."
**keep can be particularly confusing at first-- since keep to me means to keep on your person, and usually here it means to put the object in its place, away from your person
I'm not saying that people NEVER use phrasal verbs, or implying that they don't use them "correctly"; it's just a tendency that I have noticed. And honestly, I believe that any Standard American English speaker would look at the above list and say that yes, put on typically means wear. I agree, but I admit that my ears perk up when time and time again, young and old, in formal and informal situations, it seems that the non-phrasal verb is preferred.
For some reason, it can be comforting to venture out and learn a new language, but to still see similarities with that new language and your native language. The first foreign language I studied was French, and while it was interesting to get to know what a rich verb morphology was like, what you could do with gender aspect on the noun phrase, part of me wondered why my best friend next to me, who had grown up speaking Spanish at home, was always exclaiming in wonder, "This is just like Spanish!" It was like she got to rediscover her native language as she studied the foreign language.
I finally got to experience this feeling when I studied Swedish in Sweden. Suddenly, English had roots and relations and a history that was fascinating to imagine. I was similarly reassured when studying German in Germamy, when we learned about trennbare Verben. These verbs reminded me of phrasal verbs, but with the complicating addition of CASE (dative, accusative). What had for so long seemed like a clumsy, awkward, and easily errored structure in English suddenly had a place in the history of languages. I could now claim to be staying in touch with my Germanic language roots by using sentences such as, "Put it up!" Forget the whole rule about not ending sentences with a preposition.
Hm... I admit, though, that as I use phrasal verbs to the best of my ability, I often wonder about that rule. It's like this guilty-conscience thing those of us have who've studied the English language or literature. How do we say it then, when the most natural way has the preposition at the end??? Maybe I should adopt the Singaporean English way and just avoid the use of phrasal verbs. If I did that, this is how my first paragraph would read:
I was in a bookstore a few weeks ago, and I saw a mother there with her daughter, who looked to be about 3 1/2 years old. While the mother calmly perused some books, the little girl also took the liberty to remove some books from a shelf and examine them. Her mother called her so that they could leave, and the little girl started to try to replace the book on the shelf. But she couldn't, because the other books were there and the space was too tight. She started to get frustrated, and her mother called her again, also getting a bit frustrated that the girl hadn't yet come to her.
Not too different, but changed enough to notice the difference.
** written in Singapore, 2010
Monday, December 27, 2010
Sunday, December 19, 2010
Reduplication (originally written in Singapore)
For most all mothers, it can be fascinating to observe how your child develops language, whether s/he is exposed to one or many languages at home.
My youngest is now 18 months old, and has recently added his first "Singlish"** word to his expressive repertoire. Sadly enough, from slipping so often on a wet floor, he has always had a high interest in shiny, wet surfaces. This past week, he started saying "wet-wet" when he sees such a surface, complete with proper Singlish phonology, voicing, and intonation (the vowel is of rather short duration and the /t/ is produced as a glottal stop).
His use of "wet-wet" demonstrates use of Reduplication, which evidently has roots in Chinese and Malay. Verbs, adjectives, or nouns are repeated to add qualitative information to the modified word and/or entire utterance. For example--
verb: "You roll-roll the play-doh?" (the speaker is emphasizing the action, denoting that it is just for a short while)
adjective: "My tummy very fat-fat." (the speaker is simultaneously emphasizing the descriptive aspect of his/her stomach, while also suggesting that this isn't a case of morbid obesity, but just maybe a little chubby post mealtime)
noun: "Where the cat-cat?" (again, drawing attention to the cat, and possibly adding an endearing aspect)
Reduplication has an effect on modifying the entire utterance, rather than just the single word, to increase intimacy. As I tend to think of when the interaction involves children, use of Reduplication can increase the "cuteness" of what you're saying, and serve to make your speech more appealing to children, as it draws them in closer. Its use reminds me of the diminutive in Spanish, the suffixes "-ito", "-ico", "-uca", and etc, or "ina/ino" in Italian. As in Singlish, these suffixes can be added to many different parts of speech, and often simply add affection to the entire utterance. In many cases, the use of the diminutive has nothing to do the modified word being of a smaller size. In English, we have the "-y" suffix for nouns (ex. "doggy", "piggy"), but, the English version isn't used nearly as often and for such a wide variety of purposes as similar features are employed in other languages.
To quickly define some useful terminology-- simultaneous bilinguals are typically those children who are exposed to more than one language before 3 years of age; sequential bilinguals are exposed to a 2nd or additional language after 3 years of age. Although my 3 children are, being raised in the same household, they're having quite different preschool language experiences. That story would warrant its own blog entry, but let me just say that my nearly 4-year old daughter came to Singapore 1 year ago as a simultaneous multilingual for English, Spanish, Italian, and German (although she has not maintained Italian and German). She was sequentially exposed to Singlish and Mandarin.
Over the past year, my daughter has been processing the features of Singlish relative to the base of language knowledge she had already constructed in the first 3 years of life. She was really focusing on Reduplication for a period of time. She was reduplicating everything; appropriately, inappropriate, it didn't matter. "Can I have more-more snack-snack?" "Let's put it there-there." It was happening multiple times per utterance, and going way beyond the typical part-of-speech boundaries of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. I suppose she had her language system map of how things typically worked in English, but not ignoring the fact that she had been exposed to potential other uses of language in general from the experiences she had had with the 3 other languages in her repertoire. Maybe she focused so much on Reduplication in English because it was reminiscent of ways her family in Spain or her teachers in Italy would use language-- being able to play with words in an affectionate way, while also drawing attention to specific parts of the utterance or even making a comment about the size. Maybe it was just fun to get to do that in English.
My youngest will probably never make such overgeneralizations of Singlish features. His exposure to Singlish began at around 8 months of age. His use of Reduplication will probably fall more naturally in step with the local population's rules for use of Singlish. But that's not to say that use of overgeneralization of a specific language feature by native language speakers does not occur-- it does, all the time.
During the course of typical development, overgeneralization is quite common. Who hasn't heard a child talk about who "wonned" the game, or that they saw 2 "mouses" running outside? Children typically demonstrate overgeneralization of features for which they have recently learned the "rule"; they will overgeneralize the newly learned grammatical rule for the irregular exceptions to that rule (ex. past tense -ed and plural -s, respectively, for the previous examples). That's probably why my daughter soon stopped reduplicating everything. She heard the feature, liked it, learned how to do it (the rule), tried it out, found the inappropriate usage less socially-reinforcing than the appropriate usage, and stopped using it inappropriately.
I don't know why, but I just have a hunch that maybe there won't be so much overgeneralization with my baby's use of Reduplication, and other Singlish features. We'll see what else happens in his language development. And hopefully formal research will soon help us understand the patterns of language acquisition in the local population.
** written in Singapore, 2010
My youngest is now 18 months old, and has recently added his first "Singlish"** word to his expressive repertoire. Sadly enough, from slipping so often on a wet floor, he has always had a high interest in shiny, wet surfaces. This past week, he started saying "wet-wet" when he sees such a surface, complete with proper Singlish phonology, voicing, and intonation (the vowel is of rather short duration and the /t/ is produced as a glottal stop).
His use of "wet-wet" demonstrates use of Reduplication, which evidently has roots in Chinese and Malay. Verbs, adjectives, or nouns are repeated to add qualitative information to the modified word and/or entire utterance. For example--
verb: "You roll-roll the play-doh?" (the speaker is emphasizing the action, denoting that it is just for a short while)
adjective: "My tummy very fat-fat." (the speaker is simultaneously emphasizing the descriptive aspect of his/her stomach, while also suggesting that this isn't a case of morbid obesity, but just maybe a little chubby post mealtime)
noun: "Where the cat-cat?" (again, drawing attention to the cat, and possibly adding an endearing aspect)
Reduplication has an effect on modifying the entire utterance, rather than just the single word, to increase intimacy. As I tend to think of when the interaction involves children, use of Reduplication can increase the "cuteness" of what you're saying, and serve to make your speech more appealing to children, as it draws them in closer. Its use reminds me of the diminutive in Spanish, the suffixes "-ito", "-ico", "-uca", and etc, or "ina/ino" in Italian. As in Singlish, these suffixes can be added to many different parts of speech, and often simply add affection to the entire utterance. In many cases, the use of the diminutive has nothing to do the modified word being of a smaller size. In English, we have the "-y" suffix for nouns (ex. "doggy", "piggy"), but, the English version isn't used nearly as often and for such a wide variety of purposes as similar features are employed in other languages.
To quickly define some useful terminology-- simultaneous bilinguals are typically those children who are exposed to more than one language before 3 years of age; sequential bilinguals are exposed to a 2nd or additional language after 3 years of age. Although my 3 children are, being raised in the same household, they're having quite different preschool language experiences. That story would warrant its own blog entry, but let me just say that my nearly 4-year old daughter came to Singapore 1 year ago as a simultaneous multilingual for English, Spanish, Italian, and German (although she has not maintained Italian and German). She was sequentially exposed to Singlish and Mandarin.
Over the past year, my daughter has been processing the features of Singlish relative to the base of language knowledge she had already constructed in the first 3 years of life. She was really focusing on Reduplication for a period of time. She was reduplicating everything; appropriately, inappropriate, it didn't matter. "Can I have more-more snack-snack?" "Let's put it there-there." It was happening multiple times per utterance, and going way beyond the typical part-of-speech boundaries of verbs, adjectives, and nouns. I suppose she had her language system map of how things typically worked in English, but not ignoring the fact that she had been exposed to potential other uses of language in general from the experiences she had had with the 3 other languages in her repertoire. Maybe she focused so much on Reduplication in English because it was reminiscent of ways her family in Spain or her teachers in Italy would use language-- being able to play with words in an affectionate way, while also drawing attention to specific parts of the utterance or even making a comment about the size. Maybe it was just fun to get to do that in English.
My youngest will probably never make such overgeneralizations of Singlish features. His exposure to Singlish began at around 8 months of age. His use of Reduplication will probably fall more naturally in step with the local population's rules for use of Singlish. But that's not to say that use of overgeneralization of a specific language feature by native language speakers does not occur-- it does, all the time.
During the course of typical development, overgeneralization is quite common. Who hasn't heard a child talk about who "wonned" the game, or that they saw 2 "mouses" running outside? Children typically demonstrate overgeneralization of features for which they have recently learned the "rule"; they will overgeneralize the newly learned grammatical rule for the irregular exceptions to that rule (ex. past tense -ed and plural -s, respectively, for the previous examples). That's probably why my daughter soon stopped reduplicating everything. She heard the feature, liked it, learned how to do it (the rule), tried it out, found the inappropriate usage less socially-reinforcing than the appropriate usage, and stopped using it inappropriately.
I don't know why, but I just have a hunch that maybe there won't be so much overgeneralization with my baby's use of Reduplication, and other Singlish features. We'll see what else happens in his language development. And hopefully formal research will soon help us understand the patterns of language acquisition in the local population.
** written in Singapore, 2010
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