annabellelukin
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"Fallen" heroes? Tell me what really happened instead.

7/4/2013

2 Comments

 
A couple of weeks ago, a visiting 7-year-old noticed that one of my son’s dolls had only one arm. This kid rushed to blame my son: “You pulled it off”. In his defence, my son said “I didn’t pull it off, it fell off.”

This is an important line of defence that kids learn very young: I didn’t do it! It just happened. The distinction is not just about the choice of words. Kids are, unconsciously, recruiting an important grammatical distinction when they say these kinds of things.


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    Annabelle Lukin is a linguist in the Centre for Language in Social Life, Macquarie University.

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