Bogoyvalenskiy, D

[Annette Karmiloff-Smith]

Don't Americans say "I did good" - I hear them say in response to
"how are you"  = "Good" and it is creeping into British english too,
replacing "well".  I've heard anecodatlly bestest, betterest amd
gooder but never goodest..
Annette

At 12:46 pm +0200 13/8/01, Thora Tenbrink wrote:
>  > 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
>
>
>---------------------------------------------
>
>Thora Tenbrink		
>Spatial Cognition Priority Program & WSV
>Universitaet Hamburg
>FB Informatik
>Vogt-Koelln-Str. 30
>D-22527 Hamburg
>
>Tel.: +49/*40/42883-2382
>Fax:  +49/*40/42883-2385
>e-mail: tenbrink at informatik.uni-hamburg.de
>http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/WSV/hp/tenbrink-english.htm

--
________________________________________________________________
Professor A.Karmiloff-Smith,
Head, Neurocognitive Development Unit,
Institute of Child Health,
30 Guilford Street,
London WC1N 1EH, U.K.
tel: 0207 905 2754
fax: 0207 242 7717
http://www.ich.ucl.ac.uk/units/ncdu/NDU_homepage.htm
________________________________________________________________