<html>
Dear Helen,<br>
To me, these errors are in the twilight zone of grammaticalization and
diachronic change. Many have pointed out that child language
represents the canary in the coal mine for the death of certain
grammatical structures. I am 100% certain that I have made all of
these "errors" in conversation, especially in informal
speech. My standard when training students is to say that it has to
be an error that would not be used by the speakers of the input
language. So "Kitty not go" is always wrong, but
"There's not a lot of kitties here" can't be judged an error,
since it is frequent in the input. I know that I and many other
U.S. speakers would say this. <br><br>
Where this rule flounders would be in cases like: "One hundred
people is attending the service". For a child acquiring my
dialect, this should not be in the input, therefore would be classed as
an error. But it seems wrong to code it as an error when uttered by
a child exposed to dialects where number agreement in the auxiliary is
optional. Ideally, research participants should not be compared
unless acquiring the same dialect, but this is difficult to establish in
practice. An alternative would be to code only errors that all
likely input dialects reject, including the most common regional, social,
and ethnic variants of U.S. English. <br><br>
<br>
Lynne Hewitt<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
At 10:32 AM 9/4/2002 -0400, htagerf@bu.edu wrote:<br><br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite><font size=2>We are currently
coding language samples and are interested in the presence of grammatical
errors. One concern is how to distinguish between 'vernacular use'
and genuine errors. Here are examples that we don't know what to do
with: - regarding the use of "there are"- I am finding
many subjects using it as a contraction in the singular when the plural
form is called for- i.e. "there's more people here then
expected" or "there's 100 people attending the service Also
using "good" instead of "well"- "He ran really
good at the race"? The other issue was dropping "ly" from
adverbs- "he drew nice" or various combinations of both
"she plays real good"<br>
</font><br>
<br><br>
<font size=2>Any ideas on this? rules to follow?<br>
</font><br>
<font face="arial" size=2>thanks in advance for advice,<br>
</font><br>
<font face="arial" size=2>Helen
Tager-Flusberg</font></blockquote></html>