In this week’s reading (Clark and Hecht, 1982), I thought a lot more than I had before about the progression of learning and vocabulary/language skills development. We have looked a lot into what language is made of (such as on syntactic structure, in early readings) and how it develops but less often talked about is the order in which it develops and why that is.
The word ending -er specifically is an interesting one to be studied because it is such a confusing one, and thus plays a good example of the simple language rules that actually are so nuanced and complex (i still get confused time to time by -er, though typically in another usage, adjective comparing things, with things like “funner” or “madder”), yet create such obvious mistakes when misused (like ‘cooker’ as opposed to ‘chef’ or ‘cook’).
What particularly interested me while reading was wondering why, the agent form tended to catch on before the instrumental form, which was later presumably explained by the more numerous/varying alternates to -er in instrument use:
This made me wonder about other uses of -er and whether that would play an effect also. The one I could think of was the previously mentioned adjective comparison use (i.e. bigger, louder), and it made me wonder if that plays a role also in the more effective early comprehension of agent meanings for -er. It is probably unrelated by I thought that perhaps, since adjectives are often first learned in usage to describe people (such as “tall, small, happy, sad”), and this seems to be a quickly developed use in children (presumably due to the lack of many more common, transparent, or productive endings than -er), that perhaps the ability to associate -er with a person, assigning agents, comes even more naturally due to the previously established connection of that suffix and describing people.
In essence, is perhaps another factor in the earlier acquisition of agent -er labelling skills the fact that those describing instruments ('pusher' or 'holder'), come less naturally to children than those describing agents ('dancer' or 'singer'). If so, could this be because -er is (possibly) already more well-established in describing people through basic comparison learning ('louder,' 'older'), since this learning is often, at least as I remember (and as seems to be commonly used even now in my beginning french classes), rehearsed primarily with regards to people ('John is bigger than Tom' or 'Ernie is happier than Bert'). Just a theory.
Throughout your post you reference adjectives that end in -er. I find this take on why agents are more easily understood to make a lot of sense. I did not think of this before and I feel that this may solve the question. If -er is used most often for adjectives, perhaps children think it is for agents because they learn most about characteristics. In learning, children first learn about how to describe colors and shapes but also how to describe people that do things. Because we are social animals, we learn about other people first. We look up to other people, not to instruments. Perhaps this is why. I bring this up because, obviously, adjectives can describe instruments as well.
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