The precise way in which these pronominal forms first appear is very curious. Many children use ‘me’ before ‘I’. Preyer’s boy appears to have first used the form ‘to me’ (mir). ‘My’ too is apt to appear among the earliest forms. In such different ways does the child pass to the new and difficult region of pronominal speech.
The meaning of this transition has given rise to much discussion. It is plain, to begin with, that a child cannot acquire these forms as he acquires the name ‘papa,’ ‘nurse,’ by a direct and comparatively mechanical mode of imitation. When he does imitate in this fashion he produces, as we have seen, the absurdity of speaking of himself as ‘you’. Hence during the first year or so of speech he makes no use of these forms. He speaks of himself as ‘baby’ or some equivalent name, others coming down to his level and setting him the example.
The transition seems to be due in part, as I have elsewhere pointed out, to a growing self-consciousness, to a clearer singling out of the ego or self as the centre of thought and activity, and the understanding of the other ‘persons’ in relation to this centre. Not that self-consciousness begins with the use of ‘I’. The child has no doubt a rudimentary self-consciousness when he talks about himself as about another object: yet the use of the forms ‘I,’ ‘me,’ may be taken to mark the greater precision of the idea of ‘self’ as not merely a bodily object and nameable just like other sensible things, but as something distinct from and opposed to all objects of sense, as what we call the ‘subject’ or ego.
While, however, we may set down this exchange of the proper name for the forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ as due to the spontaneous growth of the child’s intelligence, it is possible that education exerts its influence too. It is conjecturable that as a child’s intelligence grows, others in speaking to him tend unknowingly to introduce the forms ‘I’ and ‘you’ more frequently. Yet I am disposed to think that the child commonly takes the lead here. However this be, it is clear that growing intelligence, involving greater interest in others’ words, will lead to a closer attention to these pronominal forms as employed by others. In this way the environment works on the growing mind of the child, stimulating it to direct its thoughts to these subtle relations of the ‘me and not me,’ ‘mine and thine’. The more intelligent the environment the greater will be the stimulating influence: hence, in part at least, the difference of age when the new style of speech is attained.[[113]]
The acquirement of these pronominal forms is a slow and irksome business. At first they are introduced hesitatingly, and alongside of the proper name; the child, for example, saying sometimes, ‘Baby’ or ‘Ilda,’ sometimes ‘I’ or ‘me’. In some cases, again, the two forms are used at the same time in apposition, as in the delightful form not unknown in older folk’s language, ‘Hilda, my book’. The forms ‘I’ and ‘me’ are, moreover, confined at first to a few expressions, as ‘I am,’ ‘I went,’ and so forth. The dropping of the old forms, as may be seen by a glance at the notes on the child C., and at Preyer’s methodical diary, is a gradual process.
Quaint solecisms mark the first stages of the use of these pronouns. As in the case of the earlier use of substantives, one and the same form will be used economically for a variety of meanings, as when ‘me’ was by the boy C. used to do duty for ‘mine’ also, and ‘us’ for ‘ours’. Here it is probable there is a lack of perfect discrimination. The connexion between the self and its belongings is for all of us of the closest. When a child of two, who was about to be deprived of her doll, shouted, ‘Me, me!’ may we not suppose that the doll was taken up into the inner circle of the self?[[114]] Sometimes in this enrichment of the vocabulary by pronouns new and delightful forms are struck off, as when the little experimenter invents the possessive form ‘she’s’.
The perfect unfettered use of these puzzling forms comes much later. Preyer quotes a case in which a child Olga, aged four years, would say, ‘She has made me wet,’ meaning that she herself had done it. But this perhaps points to that tendency to split up the self into a number of personalities, to which reference was made in an earlier essay.
The third year, which witnesses the important addition of the pronouns, sees other refinements introduced. Thus the definite article was introduced in the case of Preyer’s boy in the twenty-eighth month, in that of an English boy at the age of two years eight months. Prepositions are introduced about the same time. In this way childish talk begins to lose its primitive disjointed character, and to grow into an articulated structure.[[115]] Yet the perfect mastery of these takes time. A feeling for analogy easily leads the little explorer astray at first, as when the child M. said ‘far to’ after the model ‘near to’.
Through this whole period of language-learning the child continues to show his originality, his inventiveness. He is rarely at a loss, and though the gaps in his verbal acquisitions are great he is very skilful in filling them up. If, for example, our bright little linguist M., at the age of one year eight and a half months, after being jumped by her father, wants him to jump her mother also, she says, in default of the word ‘jump,’ “Make mamma high”. A boy of twenty-seven months ingeniously said, ‘It rains off,’ for ‘The rain has left off’. Forms are sometimes combined, as when a boy of three years three months used ‘my lone,’ ‘your lone,’ for ‘me alone’ or ‘by myself,’ ‘you alone’ or ‘by yourself’. Another girl, two years ten months, said, ‘No two ’tatoes left,’ meaning ‘only one potato is left’. Pleonasms occur in abundance, as when a boy of two would say, ‘Another one bicca (biscuit),’ and, better still, ‘another more’.