Using Innovation as a Bridge to Convention: The Art of Child-ing

In Learning to Coin Agent and Instrument Nouns, Clark details a segment of child language-learning and acquisition, specifically as it relates to the use of the suffix -er- in creating noun forms (for instruments and agents). In the paper, Clark details the principle of conventionality, wherein eventually, the conventional word forms take precedence for innovation once they have been fully learned. In the interim, however, kids engage in lots of innovation, compounding words to create noun forms ("cleaner-people") ("zibbing-man") and filling in the gaps in their vocabulary by creating new words they don't yet know the right words for ("cut-grass" instead of lawnmower). Once we're adults, we don't engage in this degree of innovation anymore it seems. I know the word for "microwave", so why would I make up something like "food-heater," even if theoretically people would be able to infer what I'm talking about? This is a mechanism for noun learning that children engage in, and not adults. The fact that a kid can make up "cleaner-people," which is not copied from any adults, but is a combination of forms and words the child already knows, in order to express something, is one of the wonders of word-learning. But it's also not something adults necessarily need anymore. We make up new slang words and grammars ("FOMO, woke, lit, random things we make up as young people, etc.), but on a day to day basis we don't engage in quite the degree of innovation that it seems children do, because we already know our language quite well, and don't need to. 

And it makes sense! Convention needs to take precedence over innovation for the most part, in order for all of us to be speaking the same language! If we were constantly inventing new words by combining old ones, language would become quite the mouthful, and also it would change dramatically. This weekend I was hiking with some friends from my dorm, and there was a visiting student from Switzerland. He grew up in the German part of Switzerland, and thus speaks Swiss German, which apparently is in some areas so drastic from Germany's German, that Germans cannot understand some dialects of Swiss German. So it is very interesting to think about the constant balance between innovation and conventionality, and how it plays itself out with children who are first learning language. But it is also interesting to consider on a broader scale- languages are always changing, but how and why and when do they become new languages? When did Swiss German diverge from German? How has it changed so much? We know that language is always growing and evolving; it is as living and breathing as the humans who carry it on their lips. But children seem to have a gift for flexibility, they play around with their words more, they are constantly changing the ways language can communicate a given expression. It is how they bridge the gaps in their learning, the way they make themselves heard in a world of language that they haven't mastered. And that's pretty incredible.