ABSTRACT
The view of language acquisition as a process of mapping linguistic forms onto reestablished meanings that the speaker wants to express or communicate is ill-suited to explaining this use of backgrounded meanings in the service of other more explicit meanings. It is only when we limit our attention to our native language that the equation between meaning and communicative intentions might seem tempting. Little explicit attention has been paid in the child language literature to the general phenomenon of errors that set in only after a period of correct usage. The causing event and resulting event can be quite diverse; that is, many unusual combinations are acceptable in adult speech, such as the locusts ate the prairie brown and bare. Two-part verbs like pull up are simply very common combinations. Newport reports that errors indicating sensitivity to sub lexical semantic structure in speakers of American Sign Language (ASL) occur almost exclusively among those who have acquired ASL as native language.
