[307]. Compare the similar instances given above, p. [287].
[308]. See above, p. 19 f.
[309]. Compare above, p. [254].
[310]. Later on towards the end of the year he oddly enough seemed disposed to reverse his early practice, using for example ‘she’ for ‘her,’ and even going to the length of correcting his sister for saying ‘Somebody gave her,’ by remarking with all the dogmatism of the most pedantic of grammarians, “No, E., you must say ‘Gave she’”.
[311]. Compare above, p. [176] f. C.’s father probably makes too much of the principle of economy here. Thus, like other children, the boy was wont to use double negatives, e.g., “Dare isn’t no water in dat cup,” where there is clearly a redundance.[redundance.]
[312]. Compare above, p. [163] f.
[313]. On the use of antithesis in children’s language and on the early forms of negation, see above, p. 174 f.
[314]. A note in the diary says that C.’s sister had also used ‘this morning’ in a similar way for any present. Can this curious habit arise, he asks, from the circumstance that children hear ‘this morning’ more frequently than ‘this afternoon’ and ‘this evening,’ or that they are more wakeful and observant in the early part of the day?
[315]. (Note of the father.) C., on leaving D——, had travelled by the train. He may, therefore, have intended merely to say “removed from sight through the agency of the locomotive”. From other examples, however, it would look as if the boy meant to explain all disappearance as a removal from his own local sphere.
[316]. The chronicler observes here that C.’s sister had also used the same expression for ‘I’ and ‘mine,’ viz., “my”. It looks as if the me and its belongings were not at first differentiated. Even of the later and maturer ideas of self a well-known American psychologist writes: “Between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw”. Compare above, p. [181].