At first each word has only one form for the child, but he soon discovers that grown-up people use many forms which resemble one another in different connexions, and he gets a sense of the purport of these forms, so as to be able to imitate them himself or even develop similar forms of his own. These latter forms are what linguists call analogy-formations: by analogy with ‘Jack’s hat’ and ‘father’s hat’ the child invents such as ‘uncle’s hat’ and ‘Charlie’s hat’—and inasmuch as these forms are ‘correct,’ no one can say on hearing them whether the child has really invented them or has first heard them used by others. It is just on account of the fact that the forms developed on the spur of the moment by each individual are in the vast majority of instances perfectly identical with those used already by other people, that the principle of analogy comes to have such paramount importance in the life of language, for we are all thereby driven to apply it unhesitatingly to all those instances in which we have no ready-made form handy: without being conscious of it, each of us thus now and then really creates something never heard before by us or anybody else.
VII.—§ 2. Substantives and Adjectives.
The -s of the possessive is so regular in English that it is not difficult for the child to attach it to all words as soon as the character of the termination has dawned upon him. But at first there is a time with many children in which words are put together without change, so that ‘Mother hat’ stands for ‘Mother’s hat’; cf. also sentences like “Baby want baby milk.”
After the s-form has been learnt, it is occasionally attached to pronouns, as you’s for ‘your,’ or more rarely I’s or me’s for ‘my.’
The -s is now in English added freely to whole groups of words, as in the King of England’s power, where the old construction was the King’s power of England, and in Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays (see on the historical development of this group genitive my ChE iii.). In Danish we have exactly the same construction, and Danish children will very frequently extend it, placing the -s at the end of a whole interrogative sentence, e.g., ‘Hvem er det da’s?’ (as if in English, ‘Who is it then’s,’ instead of ‘Whose is it then?’). Dr. H. Bradley once wrote to me: “One of your samples of children’s Danish is an exact parallel to a bit of child’s English that I noted long ago. My son, when a little boy, used to say ‘Who is that-’s’ (with a pause before the s) for ‘Whom does that belong to?’”
Irregular plurals are often regularized, gooses for ‘geese,’ tooths, knifes, etc. O’Shea mentions one child who inversely formed the plural chieves for chiefs on the analogy of thieves.
Sometimes the child becomes acquainted with the plural form first, and from it forms a singular. I have noticed this several times with Danish children, who had heard the irregular plural køer, ‘cows,’ and then would say en kø instead of en ko (while others from the singular ko form a regular plural koer). French children will say un chevau instead of un cheval.
In the comparison of adjectives analogy-formations are frequent with all children, e.g. the littlest, littler, goodest, baddest, splendider, etc. One child is reported as saying quicklier, another as saying quickerly, instead of the received more quickly. A curious formation is “P’raps it was John, but p’rapser it was Mary.”
O’Shea (p. 108) notices a period of transition when the child may use the analogical form at one moment and the traditional one the next. Thus S. (4.0) will say better perhaps five times where he says gooder once, but in times of excitement he will revert to the latter form.