The realisation of the language economy principle in infantile word creation as evidenced by the use of new transitive verbs

Abstract

The current article deals with infantile word creation as an example of the language economy principle in action. Analyzing examples of children’s use of intransitive verbs as verbs with transitive meaning provides an argument for saying that a child has the potential ability to express the result of an activity immediately, and here the realization of the language economy principle is traced. The creation of new transitive verbs gives a child an opportunity, sparing verbal effort, to express a thought briefly and precisely, and thus to fill the language lacuna. The verb constructed by a child is not an equivalent of the real verb recognized as a literary norm. However, multiple examples of similar verbs, which children create by analogy with regular verbs, provide evidence that language economy is one of the most active processes of language development today.