Met zonder jas and other antonym errors in the spontaneous speech of Dutch children

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    Abstract

    This paper focuses on antonym pairs in child Dutch. Children sometimes erroneously use the opposite word from what they intend to mean with <±polar> pairs. Psycholinguistic studies in the 1970ties suggest that the <−polar> member of dimensional adjectives, motion verbs and temporal adverbs is acquired before the <+polar> one.
    Another error occurs with the expression of absence. Dutch and German children sometimes say met zonder/mit ohne (‘with without’) as the antonym expression of met/mit. Sauerland, Meyer & Yatsushiro (2023) argue that the <−polar> negative member ohne can be conceptually decomposed in the positive member plus negation (mit-NEG), which children fail to see. They ‘undercompress’ negation. The decomposition also holds for the <−polar> member of dimensional adjectives (NEG-Adj).
    I will argue against both claims, the acquisition order and the undercompression idea. First, I discuss the met zonder/mit ohne data and offer an alternative analysis. Subsequently, other errors with <±polar> pairs are considered.
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)117-132
    JournalNota Bene
    Volume1
    Issue number2
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Dec 2024

    Keywords

    • antonym errors acquisition
    • CHILDES
    • <±polar> antonympairs
    • absolute met-construction
    • dimensional adjectives

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