Vidar is really beginning to put in past tense now. At first he had the progressive participle, untensed verbs, and also modals (must, can and will), but now he also has the past tense and some instances of do-support coming in with negation.
His Swedish past tenses came in first, and are more consistent. His irregular past tenses are not very visible in Swedish though with lots of clear overgeneralization.
In English, they are just beginning to come in in spontaneous speech, both regular and irregular. No perfect tense yet. Still no consistent inversion in Wh-questions, at least no do-support for inversion purposes that I have heard yet.
However, he is begining to do V2 in two clear kinds of context in English (i) after temporal and framing adverbials (ii) quotative inversion (even with pronouns!)
Some examples:
Now shall we watch tv.
No said I
hello said you.
Pronominal indexical reference is now pretty solid.
He asks `what you doing?' and `where are we now?' and `What called that?' but he doesn't ask any Why questions. He however does happily answer why/questions, and he likes to use the word `because'.
He has relative clauses but no CP complementation so far. He says 'I don´t know', but I haven't heard him use the verb 'think' yet. I need to check whether he has object relatives as well as subject relatives, but I think so.
He still can't pronounce \k\ and \g\.
His fantasy world has become extremely rich and active. He is always pretending this and pretending that. You are a this mamma, and I am a that. Taking mundane objects on the beach and pretending they are bowls of porridge or blueberries or other things he is making. He goes into the upstairs bathroom and closes the sliding door and says we are on a train going to various places, sometimes Trinidad, sometimes Öland.
He likes to say maybe, and speculate about reasons for things.
When he sees something he likes to comment right away `That was a tractor, mamma´. He generally likes to keep up a running commentary on what he observes. He often says things more than once and often in both languages one after the other, actively translating. The other day, hotdog came out as 'warm hund' in the Swedish version.
If he doesn´t want to do something he usually says 'I will not do that´, using the auxiliary 'will´, also when he agrees to a suggestion he sometimes says 'yes, we must DO that. we must do that NOW´, or 'yes, I WILL do that´. but I have noticed that when he wants some Thing, he does not use 'will' at all, but just the present tense of 'have': 'I have that one'.
We are reading more advanced poems now than just nursery rhymes. He knows all the nursery rhymes by heart but some of it is just sound copying, especially where there are words he doesn´t know.
He likes poems when we are going to bed.
We make up funny language games and nonsense words for different kinds of monsters. He finds language jokes very funny. Like when you start with one nursery rhyme and mix it in with another.
Or when you make silly rhymes. He also says, but I think its just a straight copy from me, 'That was funny' , when there is something a little odd or amusing that happens.
He loves Penguin Cafe Orchestra. He always asks the name of songs he likes when they are playing on the stereo. The other day, Björn said it was a band called Ved, and he said 'That´s a funny word'. I found that level of metalinguistic comment quite striking/interesting. I wonder if bilinguals do that more than monolinguals.
Ok, that is all I can think of for now.
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