Wednesday, September 19, 2007
"Momma Owie"
I was checking my yahoo e-mail today and saw an interesting video of a 2-year old girl that called 911 and saved her mother by simply saying "Momma Owie" I thought that this pertained to what we have been talking about in class discussions. I thought I would post to tell you guys about it. To see the video go to yahoo.com it is under features for today. Just click play video.
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I saw that video clip this morning as well. Even from the headline it had me thinking about our class. After watching the video, I was able to look at the little girl and place some of her actions into the topics that we have been discussing. I would classify her as being in Stage I language development from the video. The little girl is using a two-word utterance. Mommy owwie. Where mommy is the possessor and owwie is the attribute. This state is a telegraphic statment. The little girl is deleting prepositions, conjuctions, articles, and pronouns. I also believe that the little girl is imitating her mother. Her mother said that she had taught the little girl which numbers to call 911 and to only do this when there is a BIG owwie. Anyway, this is just my thoughts on the video.
Great connections, Lisa!!! The child was describing the mom - - an owwie - so that was an attribute of the mom!!
Now . . . the tough part...when you have a possessor - - you have to have a possession. There wasn't one here - there was an attribute, a description. So, we have to go back and change the ROLE the mommy is playing. Instead of the possessor she will be something else. Can you figure that out from your reading?
Semantics can be TOUGH - -
So, the mom could be either a demonstrative, aka the object, or she could be an agent where owie is the action. The example in the book of agent + action is daddy eat. This is where I am coming from on the second answer.
Mom is the subject of this two word utterance. The next word we initially said was describing her and thus an attribute. Attributes are descriptions of entities.
Or, as I typed that - actually is there another way to think of this (the whole mommy sock concept that Bloom encountered)?
Is the child describing her mother - giving an attribute? (Mommy sick) Or, is the child telling what the mother possesses(Mommy has a bad headache)? Or, is the child telling what mommy is doing, Mommy is passing out.
In all of those - the child is conveying the meaning of MOM NEEDS HELP!!! The semantics - the meaning is MOM IS SICK.
The syntax, the grammar, the structure and the ROLE or the part of speech for the words in each of those sentences is different.
Could be agent + action, could be possessor + possession, could be entity + attribute
Why this is important is HOW we communicate messages to children and adults in normal conversation as well as in school. If the way we STRUCTURE what we say to children CONFUSES them we must be certain that we teach them ALL ways of constructing sentences to convey whatever it is they want to communicate.
Hearing this amazes me. It just shows that children do know whats going on! they can tell when something is wrong! they feel emotions, even if they may not be as clearly defined as ours. How wonderful is that?
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