Tomasello, Michael;
Constructing a Language: A Usage-based Theory of Language Acquisition
Harvard University Press, 2005, 388 pages
ISBN 0674017641, 9780674017641
topics: | language | cognitive | developmental | acquisition
Basic premise is that social cognition, a broader view of theory of mind, is innate and specific to humans. Given this, language follows based on usage and nothing else.
other animals do not refer one another's attention to outside entities
such as juice, they do not make disinterested comments to one another
about missing doggies or the like... 1
whereas individuals of all nonhuman species can communicate effectively with
all of their conspecifics, human beings can communicate effectively only with
other persons who have grown up in their same linguistic community --
typically, in the same geographical region.
[This is an unfair remark. a Bengali tourist speaking Bengali in Paris
can be quite effective in communicating her wants - to the degree that
non-humans can comm within their species - prosody, body lg, gesture,
etc. prosody - where do universals in intonation come from?]
[the learning of] words and conventionalized expressions [as well as]
all of the different types of abstract constructional patterns [takes]
a longer period of learning - by many orders of magnitude - than is
required of any other species on the planet. 2
[AM: What of song birds? esp as %age of lifespan?]
Two sets of skills [emerging in human ontogeny around 9-12-mos] are of
particular importance for language Acq:
[Theory of mind, broadly conceived]: the ability to - share attention with other persons to objects and events of mutual interest [Bakeman/Adamson:84] - follow attn and gesturing of other persons to distal objects and events outside immediate interaction [Corkum/Moore:1995] - actively direct the attention of other persons to distal objects by pointing, showing and using of other nonling gestures [Bates:1979] - culturally (imitatively) learn the intentional actions of others, incl the communicative intentions underlying their their communicative acts [Tomasello/Kruger/Ratner:1993; Tomasello 1998] These skills... basically define the symbolic or functional dinension of ling communicn - which involves in all cases the attempt of one person to manipulate the intentional or mental states of other persons. [FN: comm intention of a piece of language = its function]. 3 The functional dimension enables certain kinds of abstraction processes, such as analogy, that can only be effected when the elements to be compared play similar functional (communicative) roles in larger linguistic expressions and/or constructions. 4 Intention-reading skills, very likely unique to humans ... are domain general in the sense that they do not just enable linguistic comm but also enable a variety of other cultural skills and practices that children routinely acquire (such as tool use, pretend play, rituals). [Somehow does not pay much heed to songbird ontogeny]
(categorization, broadly defined), include the ability to):
- form perceptual and conceptual categories of "similar" objects and
events (e.g. Rakison and Oakes, in press]
- form sensory-motor schemas from recurrent patterns of perception and
action [Piaget 52, Schneider 99; Conway/Christiansen:2001]
- perform statistically-based distributional analyses on perceptual
and behavioral sequences [Saffran/Aslin/Newport:1996,
Marcusetal:1999; Gomez/Gerken:1999;Ramusetal:2000]
- create anaologies (structure mappings) across two or more complex
wholes, based on similar functional role of some elements
[Gentner/Markman:1997]
connectionist and other computer models ... suggest that young
children should be able to do the same thing with similar skills -- or
even more with more skills. 4
linguistic core = universal grammar, algebra underlying it
linguistic periphery = lexicon, conceptual system, irreg
constructions / idioms and pragmatics.
Dichotomy between core and periphery ==> dual process approach to language acq -
also called "words and rules" approach by [Pinker:1999] - while
peripheral objects are learned using "normal" learning processes, the
linguistic core, UG, cannot be so learned, 5
( or Usage-based Linguistics)
Texts:
[Langacker 87, 91, 2000]
[Croft 1991, 2001]
[Goldberg 1995]
[Givon:1995]
[Bybee:1985,1995,2002]
[Barlow/Kemmer:2000]
as opp to conceiving grammar rules as meaningless, this approach
conceives linguistic constructions are themselves meaningful linguistic
symbols 5
If there is no clean break between the more rule-based and the more
idiosyncratic items and structures of a lg, then all constructions may
be acquired with the same basic set of acquisitional processes -
namely, those falling under the general headings of intention-reading
and pattern-finding. 6
cognitive and social learning skills that children bring to the acq
process are much more powerful than previously believed 7
UG problems in language acq:
1. Linking Problem: How does UG get linked to a particular language leading
to so much cross-lg diversity
2. Continuity Problem: how does child language grammar morph into adult
grammar, if both are licensed by the same UG 7
[AM: isn't it also diff to explain historical change - how a grammar
once fixed with parameters by UG, can change over time to another
grammar]
Human linguistic communication differs from the communication of other
animal species in two main ways. First, and most importantly, human
linguistic communication is symbolic. Linguistic symbols are social
conventions by means of which one individual attempts to share attention
with another individual by directing the other's attentional or mental
state to something in the outside world. Other animal species do not
communicate with one another using linguistic symbols, most likely
because they do not understand that conspecifics have attentional or
mental states that they could attempt to direct or share (Tomasello,
1998b). To oversimplify, animal signals are aimed at the behavior and
motivational states of others, whereas human symbols are aimed at the
attentional and mental states of others. It is this mental dimension that
gives linguistic symbols their unparalleled communicative power, enabling
them to be used to refer to and to predicate all kinds of diverse
perspectives on objects, events, and situations in the world.
The second main difference is that human linguistic communication is
grammatical. Human beings use their linguistic symbols together in
patterned ways, and these patterns, known as linguistic constructions,
take on meanings of their own — deriving partly from the meanings of
the individual symbols but, over time, at least partly from the pattern
itself. The process by which this occurs over historical time is called
grammaticalization (or syntacticization), and grammatical constructions
of course add still another dimension of communicative power to human
languages. The process of grammaticalization depends crucially on a
variety of domain-general cognitive and social-cognitive processes that
operate as people communicate with and learn from one another. It is
also a speciesunique process — because if other animals do not use
symbols, the question of grammar is moot.
Human skills of linguistic communication are also unique in the way they
are acquired during ontogeny. The main point is that, unlike other animal
species, the human species does not have a single system of
communication. Different groups of human beings have conventionalized
different systems of communication (there are more than 6,000 of them),
and children typically acquire only the system(s) of their natal
group(s). Children take soveral years to acquire the many tens of
thousands of linguistic conventions usod by those around them, whereas
most other animal species do not learn any of their species-typical
communicative signals at all.
Note: in Handbook of child psychology, (eds. William Damon; Richard M. Lerner
etal 2006, Tomasello in his article on "Acquiring linguistic constructions"
(chapter 6), rewrites the third aspect as follows:
Human linguistic communication differs from the communication of other
animal species in three main ways. ... is moot
Third, unlike all other animal species, humans do not have a single
system of comm used by all members of the species. Rather, diff groups
of humans have conventionalized over historical time diff, mutually
unintelligible systems ... more than 6K natural lgs in the world. This
means that children must learn the communicative conventions used by
those around them...
the Generative Grammar hypothesis focuses only on grammar and claims that the human species has evolved during its phylogeny a genetically based universal grammar. The theory is unconcerned with the symbolic dimensions of human linguistic communication. The usage-based view — or at least the version of it espoused here — is precisely the opposite. In this view, the human use of symbols is primary, with the most likely evolutionary scenario being that the human species evolved skills enabling the use of linguistic symbols phylogenetically. But the emergence of grammar is a cultural-historical affair — probably originating quite recently in human evolution — involving no additional genetic events concerning language per se (except possibly some vocal-auditory information-processing skills that contribute indirectly to grammaticalization processes).
Discerning the unique features of human symbolic/linguistic communication is sometimes made more difficult by anthropocentric accounts of nonhuman primate communication. The most important instance of this is the well-known case of the alarm calls of vervet monkeys. [Cheney/Seyfarth:1990]: 3 diff tpes of alarm calls and response actions (A): - loud barking call - leopards and other cats - A: run for tree - short cough-like call - two species of eagle - A: look up in air and sometimes run into bueshes, - "chutter" call for a variety of dangerous snake species - A: look down at ground, sometimes from a bipedal stance Each call elicits a diff escape response (A). The responses are just as distinct and frequent when researchers play back recorded alarm calls over a loudspeaker - indicating that it is a response to info contained in the call itself. * predator-specific alarm calls turn out to be quite widespread - ground squirrels to domestic chickens [crows cawing in cacophonous chorus when they see a snake] * no alarm calls or other referential vocalizations among great apes - so not evolutionarily connected * no evidence of symbolicicty or referentiality - do not point or gesture to outside objects or events for others, do not hold up objs to show others, not even hold out objects to offer others [Tomasello/Call:1997] [AM: This last is extremely surprising! but perhaps it is true - but parent birds do offer their babies; and i would imagine some mammals who regurgitate food for their offspring may also offer it. Could it also be related to the inadequacy of motor control in the upper limbs that makes for a difference... ] * non-human primate vocalizations and gestures are not socially learned - even monkeys and apes raised outside their normal social environs vocalize in much the same way. Some nonhuman gestures are socailly learned - but not by imitation, but by a process of ritualization in which individuals shape one another's behavior over repeated social interactions. 11 [Again not true of songbirds] most likely Modern humans emerged 200K yrs ago. Why lg? [Deacon:1998] - this adaptation concerned symbolic skills directly, [Tomasello:99] - concerned a new kind of social cognition more generally 11-12 As a result of facts such as these, a number of primatologists and behavioral ecologists have cautioned against using human language as an interpretive framework for nonhuman primate communication (Owings and Morton, 1998; Owren and Rendell, 2001). They concur with the current analysis that nonhuman primates do not use communicative signals toconvey meaning or to convey information or to refer to things or to direct the attention of others, but rather use them to affect the behavior or motivational states of others directly. If this interpretation is correct, then the deep evolutionary roots of human language lie in the attempts of primate individuals to influence the behavior, not the mental states, of conspecifics. To find the most direct precursors of human linguistic symbols as tools for directing attention, therefore, we can only look at the history of the human species since it began its own unique evolutionary trajectory.
it is very likely that human symbolic skills arose as a more or less direct result of a biological adaptation — most likely occurring very recently with the emergence of modern humans some 200,000 years ago. According to Deacon (1998), this adaptation concerned symbolic skills directly, whereas according to Tomasello (1999) it concerned a new kind of social cognition more generally, in which human beings understood one another for the first time as intentional and mental agents — which then led them to attempt to manipulate one another's intentional and mental states for various cooperative and competitive purposes. * language learned socially (imitatively) from others ==> hence symbols understood by their users _intersubjectively in same sense that users know their interlocuteors share the convention (see Saussure - "bidirectionality of the sign" - everyone is a producer and a comprehender). 12 * language symbols are not dyadic - to regulate social interactions directly, but are triadic - involving a third (referential) object [Grice 75: non-natural meaning of ling symbols] 12 * language sometimes used "declaratively" - simply to inform others abt something - with no expectation of an overt behavioural response - see Robin Dunbar's Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language * language symbols are primarily _perspectival - person may ref to same: - entity as dog, animal, pet or pest - or to same event - event as running, fleeing, moving, surviving depending on her communicative goal w.r.t. listener [Langacker 87] --Are there any "Language Universals"? - Leaving aside for the moment nouns and verbs— which may or may not be universal in all the world’s languages—virtually all linguists who are involved in the detailed analysis of individual languages cross-linguistically (known as linguistic typologists) now agree that there are very few if any specific grammatical categories and constructions that are present in all languages. Many languages simply do not have one or more of what are conventionally called relative clauses, auxiliary verbs, passive constructions, grammatical markers for tense, grammatical markers of evidentiality, prepositions, topic markers, subject markers, a copula (to be), case marking of grammatical roles, subjunctive mood, definite and indefinite articles, incorporated nouns, plural markers, conjunctions, adverbs, complementizers, and on and on. The fact is that many languages (or language families) have grammatical categories and constructions that seem to be unique to them, that is, that do not correspond to any of the European categories and constructions as these have been defined over the centuries... For sure, we can force all languages into one abstract mold, which mostly means forcing the grammatical entities of non-European languages into European categories. Foley and van Valin (1984) speculate about what our linguistic categories and theories would look like if we had begun by analyzing the languages of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean and then attempted to assimilate European languages to them. The conclusion is that they would look very different. Croft (2002) also points out the “methodological opportunism” routinely employed by many linguists looking for language universals. In effect, they focus on a subset of the features that characterize, for instance, English subjects, and claim that any category in any language characterized by this subset is a subject—basically ignoring the features that don’t match. From a very practical perspective, Dryer (1997) points out that when different investigators, whatever their theoretical persuasions, look long enough and in enough detail at a given language, they mostly come to agreement about the basic grammatical categories and how they work. The problems arise when they then try to decide if any of these categories correspond to such things as “subject,” “preposition,” and “auxiliary verb,” as these have been defined for European languages. p.17
Some languages would seem to be more verb-friendly since many clauses consist of verbs only with no nominals (for example, when Chinese speakers indicate an ongoing event such as a boy kissing a girl, they quite often say only the equivalent of Kiss), and verbs are often more salient than nouns in the speech stream. Most critically, in basically all languages individual verbs—and many other relational words and function words—occur with higher token frequency in the language children hear than do nouns (since many relations and actions such as coming and going recur in the child’s experience regularly, across many different situations, whereas particular objects such as ducks and flowers are mostly experienced irregularly).
A number of researchers have claimed that the hypothesis
does not hold for particular languages, for example, Korean (Choi and
Gopnik, 1995), Chinese (Tardif, 1996), and Tzotzill (de León, 2000).
These are all very verb-friendly languages, and when spontaneous speech
samples are taken the children quite often use more verbs than nouns early in
development. The problem is that because children use each of their verbs
more frequently than they use each of their nouns, spontaneous speech samples
tend to underestimate children’s noun vocabularies—since the probability that
a child will use any particular noun in one hour of sampling is not very
high.
Caselli, Casadio, and Bates (1999) : used parent
interview measure to estimate vocabularies of English- vs
Italian-speaking children. Italian has some of the properties of a
verb-friendly language (e.g., verbs occur quite often at the ends of
utterances in child directed speech) --> Italian children show almost as
strong a noun advantage as American children.
Tardif, Gelman, and Xu (1999) addressed this issue directly by measuring
Chinese children’s vocabularies in both ways (spontaneous sample and parent
interview), and the verb advantage for these children mostly disappeared with
the interview measure.
Gentner (1982) provided a plausible explanation for the developmental
priority of nouns: the Natural Partitions hypothesis. In brief, her hypothesis
was that the nouns children learn early in development are prototypically
used to refer to concrete objects, and concrete objects are more
easily individuated from their environmental surroundings than are states,
actions, processes, and attributes. Concrete objects are spatially bounded
entities, perceptible at a glance, whereas actions and events have more
fluid temporal boundaries, and these are defined in different ways for different
verbs (cleaning is over when things are clean, but running and smiling
have no such clearly defined endpoints).
Verbs also vary in basic parameters such as whether causation is an essential
semantic element (die versus kill).
Gentner and Boroditsky (2001) elaborated on this explanation, as depicted in
Figure 3.1. The argument is that nouns and other open-class words show
relative cognitive dominance, in that their primary function is to denote
perceptible entities in the world, whereas relational words (especially
closed-class items) mostly serve to provide linguistic connections among the
more referential, open-class words.
Relational terms are thus more linguistically dominant, in the sense that
they take their meaning partially from other linguistic items in the
context. Verbs are somewhere in the middle of this continuum since they rely
on their arguments (He kicked the ball) to denote a referential situation
fully—leading Langacker (1987a) to say that nouns are more conceptually
autonomous, whereas verbs are more conceptually dependent. p.47
<-- open class (cogitive dominance) closed class (linguistic dominance) -->
proper concrete kinship verbs spatial determiners
names nouns terms prepositions conjunctions
(relational)
Ida dog grandmother skate on the
uncle enter over and
As one piece of evidence for this view, Gentner and Boroditsky (2001) cite
Gillette etal:1999, video without sound. Adults find it easier to
determine labels for objects rather than actions. 47
Quite often the first words children learn are not nouns but personal-social
performative words such as hello, goodbye, please, no, and thank you
(e.g., Gopnik, 1988; Bloom, Tinker, and Margulis, 1993; Caselli et al.,
1995). 47