Met zonder jas and other antonym errors in the spontaneous speech of Dutch children

Abstract

This paper focuses on antonym pairs in child Dutch. Children sometimes erroneously use the opposite word from what they intend to mean with <±polar> pairs. Psycholinguistic studies in the 1970ties suggest that the <−polar> member of dimensional adjectives, motion verbs and temporal adverbs is acquired before the <+polar> one. Another error occurs with the expression of absence. Dutch and German children sometimes say met zonder/mit ohne (‘with without’) as the antonym expression of met/mit. Sauerland, Meyer & Yatsushiro (2023) argue that the <−polar> negative member ohne can be conceptually decomposed in the positive member plus negation (mit-NEG), which children fail to see. They ‘undercompress’ negation. The decomposition also holds for the <−polar> member of dimensional adjectives (NEG-Adj). I will argue against both claims, the acquisition order and the undercompression idea. First, I discuss the met zonder/mit ohne data and offer an alternative analysis. Subsequently, other errors with <±polar> pairs are considered.