Re: Linguistic term for ease of changing word-class (was: 'out-' affix in conlangs?)

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 10:06 AM, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
>> What really bemuses me is that Calvin didn't
>> analyse "weird" as the past participle of a verb
>> "weir", illiterate as he presumably is...
>
> Calvin isn't illiterate. One can tell from the various strips where he's taking
> (and mostly abysmally failing) various tests at school - he's clearly able to
> read the questions.
Indeed.  He's a 6-year-old boy enrolled in public school.  Why would
you assume he's illiterate?

He's also highly intelligent, just, shall we say, not very interested
in most of the material being presented to him at school.  Poster
child for gifted programs.  He must even have a store of wisdom
somewhere, at least if you are a "Hobbes is all in his head" partisan.

I also think English is too full of non-derived -d words (like "word"
itself) for such an assumption to be reasonable.  Valid for wordplay,
sure.  Automatically assumed by a native speaker?  Not without further
supporting evidence.

--
Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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