The Unrealized Inceptive

Here's a thing I wrote a few weeks ago, when I was riffing on toddlers and their mysterious, repetetive, data-gathering ways:

She spends hours, weeks, months, locking eyes with nearby adults and beginning to do things she has (hypothetically) been told not to do. Every time, the adult demonstrates some form of negative signalling until the Tiny Anthropologist sits back down, or stops shrieking, or backs away from the fire pit.

It's all true. This is what toddlers do. However, it also occurrs to me that this exact behavior has a posited name/verbal inflection in ASL. According to Liddell &/or Johnson, in various articles that I'm not going to look up right now, there is an aspectual inflection in ASL called the "unrealized inceptive" which is basically pretending you're about to do something but then stopping before actually doing it, because of suspense or other storytelling reasons.

In ASL, this works as a narrative device: "I was just about to begin writing on the paper when..."  "I was ready to get into bed when..."  "The swarm of creatures was just coming down the stairs when..." etc.

In toddlerdom, it works as a narrative device also, except that you are forcing other people to participate in your live-action reality television series. "I was just about to dump my cup of water out when..." and then they wait to see what happens next. The narrative is real life.

Next up in strained metaphors: Human toddlers are drunk screenwriters.