I'm not sure that over-corrected forms or grammatical forms applied to
contexts in which they are not "correct" usage is easily attributed to
individual appropriation of forms from practice. Nancy Budwig's work on the
development of pronouns, for example, shows that young children use similar
incorrect pronouns on the way to correct usage. Children, for example,
typically use "my" for less agentic contexts of "I"s and "mes". (e.g. "I go
to the store," vs. "My want a cookie.")
There is no doubt an individual-organismic contribution to these uses of
language, but the fact that many of these types of "mistakes" seem to follow
a developmental trajectory across different speakers of a language suggests
there's still a sociocultural "unexplained" out there--likely a functional
one, as Budwig's work suggests.
Bill Penuel
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PreventionInventions
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