the squibix family blog

who pays any attention to the syntax of things

Leah is making a list of the words Harvey can say; it must run to a couple hundred items at this point. Impressive enough I suppose, but I'm already on to the next step. Now that he's stringing words together in primitive sentences, I feel that it's more important to focus on the syntax of his language. So far, though, I've been unable to effectively communicate to him that English is in fact a word-order language, and specifically one that requires a SVO pattern. "On chair" has an entirely different meaning than "chair on" to fluent speakers of the language, to say nothing of "hat on Harvey" as opposed to "Harvey on hat." But I guess he's still just trying things out. Cute little guy.

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