LINGUIST List 2.232

Friday, 17 May 1991

Disc: Pronoun Doubling, Word Games

Editor for this issue: <>

Directory

1. Jan Olsen, Re: Pronoun doubling
2. , Responses: Children's Language Games, Green Ideas
3. Dale Savage, children's speech play
4. Michael Gasser, Language games

Joe Bayer (Linguistic Review 3:1984) discusses a couple of facts from
Bavarian, especially lower Bavarian, which somehow resemble the Dutch
pronound doubling data, e.g.
 dass-ma mia noch Minga fahrn
 that-1pl we to Munich go-1pl
 fahr-ma mir noch Minga
 go-1pl we to Munich
 mir fahr-ma noch Minga
# we go-1pl to Munich
Notice the difference between the 1pl-ending on the verb in final position
(/n/) and the morpheme that shows up on COMP, and the verb in first or
second position /ma/. Since
 noch Minga fahr-ma
 to Munich go-1pl
is okay as well, one might think that /ma/ is a clitic pronoun. Bayer, however,
argues against this; he sees it as sort of a pro-drop phenomenon. One would
have to see if his arguments go through for Dutch as well.

G. Fanselow

 The Opies might have called all playground games "language games". But
see Chp 14 "Some Curiosities" in the Lore and Language of Schoolchildren
(Oxford, 1959) for ... some curiosities.
 John Gilbert

>From: Charles (C.A.) Hoequist <HOEQUISTBNR.CA>
>I am looking for citations concerning children's language
>play. Any type is fine, but best of all are games involving
>puns or phonologically-oriented play (e.g. Pig Latin). The
>younger the children, the better.>

A very good general volume is:

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, ed. _Speech Play: Research and 
 Resources for Studying Linguistic Creativity_. University of
 Pennsylvania Publications in Conduct and Communication. 
 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976.

Several of the articles in _Speech Play_ deal directly with childrenUs
language play, and the volume has a good bibliographic survey. 
<UPA Press currently has this volume on sale at a give-away price,
 but I donUt know how long the sale lasts>.

I have one older volume that seems relevant to the issue:

Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. _The Language and Lore of Schoolchildren_. 
 Oxford: Oxford University Press (at the Clarendon Press), 1959.

It is literally filled with rhymes, tongue twisters, puns, jibes, riddles, 
etc. of school children from the length and breadth of Britain. There is 
a wealth of data in Opie & Opie. I also understand that the duo 
(or perhaps, dual-O) published another book with Oxford Univ Press
 about 10 years later that had to do with childrenUs playground 
games. IUve never seen it, though, and so do not know whether it 
involves speech play or just nonlinguistic play.

Dale Savage

See also two papers in the book _Experimental Phonology_ (eds.
John J. Ohala, Jeri J. Jaeger), Academic Press, 1986:
 Lyle Campbell, "Testing phonology in the field"
 Jean-Marie Hombert, "Word games: Some implications for analysis
 of tone and other phonological contrasts"

Mike Gasser

[End Linguist List, Vol. 2, No. 232]