Bogoyvalenskiy, D

[Thora Tenbrink]

> One twelve year old at a youth group who amazingly found all this
>interesting, asked to do the task. She came out with 'bad-badder',
>'good-gooder' and just afterwards said to her younger friend 'I did better
>than you!' Isn't it strange?

John,
I think there is a very simple explanation for this: "I did better than
you" surely is a piece of prefabricated speech; I do not think that
speakers really think of "better" as a comparative of "good" when using
this sentence at all. Even more so because there is no such form as "I did
good" - you would have to use the adverb. (Asked for the comparative of
"well", what would the girl have said?) While I do not know about the tasks
you mentioned, I suppose that the aim is to find out how much children know
about comparatives and superlatives, which are abstract metalinguistic
concepts. Such concepts do not have much to do with children's linguistic
skills, because quite a lot of what we say in everyday life consists of
strings of words that we have heard many times before, and which are
therefore readily available.
- Thora



http://www.spatial-cognition.de


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Thora Tenbrink		
Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV
Universitaet Hamburg
FB Informatik
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D-22527 Hamburg

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