children and non-literal meaning ... again

[Isenthia]

Dear All,

some time ago I asked for literature on when children start to
understand non-literal language like metaphor, etc. First of all,
thanks for the answers you gave on that point.

Today I want to ask a related question, arising from my very limited
private experience with the kind of language a young child might be
exposed to.

It seems to me that caretakers do not consciously or deliberatelty
concentrate on only using expressions literally and that children
therefore might learn to understand and later to use expressions right
from the beginning, as it were, with what might be called a non-
literal meaning. Do you have any comments to make on this?

Maybe an example makes clearer what I have in mind. There is this
expression in German `dei dei' which roughly means `to sleep'.
Recently I noticed that my mother, when she was talking to my son (15
months), used `dei dei' to refer to/explain her putting away a remote
control he had been playing with. Intuitively, it seems to me that her
use of `dei dei' is related in meaning to the `to sleep' meaning, but
deviates from it. The question is whether it is necessarily the case
that a child in being exposed to these kinds of uses of an expression
first has to grasp what intuitively seems to be the underlying meaning
and then derives other uses from that or whether he simply will treat
the expression initially as if it were polysemous and only in a later
step connects the meanings in some way with one another.

I hope this makes sense. The point I would like to establish is that
it is possible to intuitively judge a particular meaning as deviating
from what, again intuitively, feels like the underlying meaning, when
in fact in terms of acquisition the intuitively basic meaning was not
necessarily acquired first or before the meaning that is intuitively
judged as deviating.

Although this is probably all rather confusing, I'd be very grateful
for any comments on this idea.

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