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The normal pattern among children learning language for the first time is to learn words in isolation and only later pick up the rules. Perhaps, because you may not have as much exposure to your granddaughter as you did to your children, you missed the stage where she was using irregular (strong) forms of verbs, only noticing when she learned the rule for weak verbs and began applying it to all verbs. Some children even use the strong form of a verb but apply the weak past tense marker anyway, e.g., "I sawed a man." She doesn't mean she tried a gender bender version of the magician's trick.
The important thing for you to remember, this isn't a step backward; this is a step forward.
I no longer have the papers I read - they got dumped several house moves ago - and so I can't quote, but nearly all children seem to learn language in much the same way, the detail of their approach depending on the language being learned.
At the same time as I was scrivening my way towards my post-grad diploma, my niece was rising two and a half years old and talking fit to bust. She was quite bright and learned new vocab at an impressive rate. But she had a grammatical/linguistic quirk which I found fascinating. She would say:
"I talk" for the present
"I talked" for the imperfect past, and
"I have talkted" for the perfect past.
The "talkted", as far as I could make out, was an attempt to add an extra "ed" to "talked", creating "talkeded", so to speak, the beginner's approach to parsing perfect past participles. It seemed to show that she had absorbed the idea that the perfect tense sometimes took a different form of the verb than the imperfect, and it was better to be "safe" than sorry.
Examples of this of course are fairly common, but for example:
"I grow"
"I grew"
"I have grown"
Why she, or any child, would be struck by this relatively small difference in verb formation to the extent that she would form a word-formation rule based on it, I have no idea.
And the rule of thumb she used kind of stuck, because I would correct her when she did it to one particular verb, e.g. "talked", but she would merrily continue to apply it to the next verb along.
At the time, I put it down to her being just her, but I've heard similar constructs out of the mouths of other near-babes and ex-sucklings since, so the papers I was reading would appear to be empirically corroborated even if it is based on a rather small sample.
Didn't help with the computational linguistics in the slightest, unfortunately ...
FWIW
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
Proto-Indo-European probably didn't have a weak inflexion at all. I've got to admit this is more complicated than I understand and I would need to study several of my geet big thick books some more to get a handle on it. But basically, the sing-sang-sung kind of pattern was regular at the proto-Indo-European level.
It is theorized to derive from pre-Indo-European accent patterns, changing the vowels. I really should know more of this.
P.S. Hi.
Thank you for the lovely post.
OP
How interesting that you use sleepy primarily in that sense, Faldage. I always use it in the "needing sleep" sense. If I'm jolted (partly) awake and still semi-comotose, I am "groggy" or "half-asleep."
OP
Thanks for all the explications, guys.
If I've been awake for thirty hours straight and I'm all hyped up on caffeine and sugar or whatever, I wouldn't describe myself as sleepy. Yinged out, maybe, but not sleepy. To me sleepy is characterized by yawning, heavy eyelids and difficulty staying awake.
OP
I'd call that wired.
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