Development of Linguistic Forms: English 1

The English frog stories were collected in California from children and adults of middle-class background, monolingual speakers of American English. Except for occasional higher-register vocabulary used by some adults, their style is colloquial, spoken English. For example, gerundive -ing forms are preferred to Latinate nominalizations (Section 1.2.1); Germanic verb-particle combinations are used rather than more formal, Latinate monolexemic locative verbs — e.g., go up vs. ascend, run after vs. pursue (Section 2.1); and everyday connectives like and, so, also are preferred to expressions like moreover, therefore, furthermore (Sections 4.2, 4.3).