2 Creativity and conformity

At this stage in development, children are making over-generalisations with words (e.g. saying ‘feets’ and ‘sheeps’) and with meaning (e.g. calling all four-legged creatures ‘dogs’) and they are also making grammatical over-generalisations. For example, some verbs can appear in both transitive and intransitive constructions, as in ‘the man walked the dog’, ‘The dog walked’, some prefer to appear in the transitive ‘I take the bread’ vs ‘I take’ and some prefer to appear in the intransitive ‘I vanished’ vs ‘I vanished the dog’. Sometimes children use intransitive verbs in transitive constructions and transitive verbs in intransitive constructions (see Table 1). That children are creative with what verb goes with what construction shows us they are experimenting with what constructions can do for them in different communicative contexts. Sometimes their creativity strays beyond what is conventional, and they need to learn to conform with how others use their language.