LINGUIST List 14.36

Tue Jan 7 2003

Qs: EFL Errors, Child Acquisition of 'bad words'

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. John Hammink, Typical mistakes made by Estonians
2. Carsten Otto, The acquisition of insults/swearwords/bad words

Some of you may recall my query from a few months back:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-1775.html#1

This time, I've been asked to design and deliver a short course in
''Writing with Precision'' in English for an audience of Estonian
native speakers.

Many of them have asked me about what are some of the typical
''mistakes'' made by Estonian speakers when writing in English.
Specifically, I'm interested in those things which affect the clarity
of the writing or speaking style itself.

Better yet, as many non-native English writers often ''borrow''
syntactic devices from their own languages (to the adopted language),
what might some of these be?

As before, I'll post a summary when I hear your responses.

Thanks,

John Hammink 

P.S. You can read the two-part summary for a similar study I did
about Finnish speakers of English. The links are:

http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-2133.html#1
http://linguistlist.org/issues/13/13-2172.html#1 

Subject-Language: Estonian;Northern Estonian;English; Code: EST 

Fellow listeros,

a happy and peaceful new year to all of you.

This morning I was asked as a linguist how and why children acquire or
better recognize what I will sum up as "bad words" (bw), i.e. insults,
swearwords and the like.

The example given was as follows: Two (or more) adults are having a
conversation with children in the same room. The adults are talking a
lot about different topics in a "normal way", i.e. in normal voices,
normal styles, pitches, etc. In a passage of a 30 min. discourse (of
the two) a bw the child never heard before appears, let's e.g. take
german "schei**e" (equals with engl. "sh*t", just for the case). The
child looks up, right to the interlocutor using the bw and repeats:
"schei**e", smiling, knowing that it has caught up and recognized a
bw.


Is this possible? How can these words be recognized as bws if used in
an unmarked sense, ie. in no different way than the rest of the
uttered words?

Has anybody any information about research being done in this area,
concerning recognition and/or acquisition of "bad words" of children
between the age of two and - say - six?

Need some help, thanks in advance.

Carsten Otto

Univ. Bonn, Germany.