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[Lois Bloom]

I had used the concept in my 1970 book Language Development:
Form and Function in Emerging Grammer (MIT Press) in the context of the
development of negation (Chapter 7, pgs 216-17).  The children "learned to
express the different semantic categories of negation without learning
different contrastive linguistic structures at the same time.  When [they]
learned to express a new concept (rejection and then denial as categories
of negation), they used a primitive structure that previously expressed an
earlier learned concept, nonexistence" (pg 228).

We reported comparable findings for the acquisition of syntactic
connectives and complex sentences (with "and"), described in Bloom, Lahey,
Hood, Lifter & Fiess, 1980) and the acquisition of causality (Bloom &
Capatides, 1987) (both of these reprinted in Language Development from Two
to Three, Cambridge, 1991).

As far as I know, Werner & Kaplan were the first to describe the
phenomenon, as indicated by Dan, who used the phrase for describing the
general principle in his 1973 book, as he says.

Best --Lois Bloom




On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Goldfield, Beverly wrote:

> I need some help with references to the phrase "new functions from old forms
> and new forms with old functions."  I believe
> it originates with biological research.  In the language literature, I seem
> to remember both Liz Bates and Lois Bloom using it. Any ideas?
>
> Beverly A. Goldfield
> Psychology Dept.
> Rhode Island College
> Providence, RI  02908
>