I have noticed for the past several days that my daughter, while struggling with her seat belt, will call to me, “I’m helping!” The tone in her voice is clearly one of need. Her obvious meaning is, “I need help,” but my psycholinguistic sleuthing was fired up by the question of how she had come to mistake the progressive “-ing” with the meaning “need.” But today, as breakfast approached, the clues began to come together.
- “I’m helping” is the frequent cry when she can’t get her seat belt undone
- “I’m drinking” occurred before breakfast when she couldn’t find her juice cup
So far I was still delightfully perplexed by her mis-conjugation. Then, preparing for lunch, I called my wife:
- “We’re praying!”
With this, I had demonstrated the ambiguity that has confused my toddler: literally, my words mean what I’m DOING; but SJ had picked up on the pragmatic use of the word, meaning, “Please come here; we need to pray.”
Now, I haven’t often called people that way, so she probably didn’t learn it there. Instead, her learning coincides with her recent potty-training when, atop her bathroom seat, “Are you pooping?” is, for her, ambiguous between “do you need to…?” and “are you doing it?” Hence her excited and frantic statements in the living room, “I’m peeing!” which, it turns out, is not revealing as to how dry her pants may be (if she runs quickly enough).