"correct" usage

[Barbara Zurer Pearson]

Dear All,

I'm sorry to move this (slightly) away from Aliyah's original
query, but the notion of "correct/incorrect," or can we say
"error"--is doubly a problem when talking about bilingual
child speech.  There *is* a reasonable sense
of something which is NOT part of a given target language,
but it gets really fuzzy because many bilinguals live
in places where there is a contact variety spoken, and
so many elements of their target language(s) are
stigmatized, too.  What is immaturity?  What is
dialect?  What is L2? What is OK!!??

I have tried, never to the point of getting something
near publishable, to sort out some of these questions
for the speech of children 4 to 10, learning two languages
at various degrees of proficiency (and low status).
I generally have tried to make reference to a concept
of Eleanor Ochs' about "expressions which would draw
sanction from the interlocutor" ( because of
their form, not content).  It feels pretty "neutral" and
non-judgmental (that is, it displaces the judgment to
someone else in a conceivably observable behavior),
but of course it's not neutral.

I wonder if Ann Peter's notion of units from the linguist's
view would help here, or not.  On the one hand, there is
a sense of system one can refer to to say that something
doesn't follow it, but so many  "incorrect" forms are at a
level of usage beyond "rules and exceptions."
I have fallen back on a term I don't much like,
"morphosyntactic accuracy," but it has the advantage
that people usually know what you're talking about.

To use Aliyah's example of "incorrect determinerless
nouns," there is a definite sense that a count noun in English
without a determiner sounds like Tarzan-speak (or just
L2).  *"Leg go(es) here."  But in a language that lets
people move words back and forth across the count/mass
line, we could all make a context for "leg" as in the kind
of thing Victorian ladies didn't show.  The detective
novel I'm reading just now said, "My eyes were full of gun."

One of my favorite "morpho- or syntactically inaccurate" forms
was in the frog story, where the "boy got hopped onto
a deer."

What would *you* call it?

Barbara

At 10:58 AM 4/9/2002 -1000, Ann Peters wrote:
>Dear Aliyah,
>This is an issue that has bothered me ever since I started working in the
>area of language acquisition! I'm glad it bothers you, too.
>One place where I have attempted to come to grips with the problem of the
>"adult view" vs. the "child's view" was in my 1983 monograph, The Units of
>Language Acquisition (Cambridge Press). In the first chapter I try to
>disentangle "Units From The Adult's Point Of View", "Units From The
>Child's Point Of View", and "Units From The Linguist's Point Of View".
>Unfortunately this book has been out of print for a while, but I did make
>sure to retrieve the copyright from CUP and if you are interested and
>can't find it I can send you an electronic copy.
>Ann Peters
>
>
>****************************
>Dr. Ann M. Peters, Professor
>Department of Linguistics
>University of Hawai`i               email: ann at hawaii.edu
>1890 East West Road, Rm 569         phone: 808 956-3241
>Honolulu, HI  96822                 fax:   808 956-9166
>http://www2.hawaii.edu/~ann/