children and non-literal meaning ... again

Fri May 28 14:17:54 UTC 2010

Dear Kristen,

I'm just about to finish a book on Stage I of syntactic development that 
will come out in OUP, entitled "/Syntactic development: Its input and 
output/."  One of the things I checked in a large corpus of 
English-language parental speech was parents' use of Light Verb 
Constructions with the 5 canonical verbs -- /take, have, give, do/, and 
/make/  -- addressing children whose mean age is not a lot above 2 
years. These combinations are by definition non-literal or idiomatic, 
some more than others.  It appears that parents use these in large 
numbers.  When I checked the children, they, too used them at this early 
age quite extensively.  As far as this type of  non-literal usage is 
concerned, parents don't hold back and children don't have a problem 
taking this up.

I'm glad Barbara Pearson brought her 1990 paper to our attention, I'm 
off to find it right now!  I agree with her conclusions to the full!

The best with your project,

Anat Ninio

Barbara Pearson wrote:
> Dear Kristen,
> I don't know how I missed your original query in January (except that 
> I was traveling at that time)--but your question is exactly the thesis 
> of my dissertation (1988!), and a small article in JCL, 1990.  I 
> argued that far from being more difficult to understand, metaphor, and 
> metonymy more generally, were part of the central core of children's 
> meaning-making.  Their prowess in symbolic play, especially using 
> generic props that do not literally look like a car or a spoon, in the 
> second year of life indicates that they have no trouble understanding 
> the use of one thing for another--although it will be many years 
> before they can be intentional and explain it metalinguistically.  In 
> fact, using language metaphorically might make fewer demands to have 
> just one aspect of a "family resemblance" definition that must be 
> relevant, compared to the more stringent requirements for literal 
> language.  Adults'  familiarity with metonymy in their own discourse 
> might make children's earliest denotations easy and unremarkable for 
> them to understand.
>
> I hear from people occasionally on this topic, but I haven't pursued 
> it. I confess I did not follow up on the interesting summaries other 
> Infochildes-ers sent you in January.  I especially do not have a clear 
> way to test where on the slope between literal and figurative many 
> uses fall, but will be interested if you decide to try.  I probably 
> don't have an electronic version of my dissertation to pull out the 
> review of the literature (which was quite amusing to read--the 
> literature, that is).  The JCL article has a few references like 
> Chukovsky and Verbrugge (1979) which may spur your thinking further.
>
> Keep us posted.
> Barbara Pearson
>
> On May 28, 2010, at 4:34 AM, Isenthia wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>> -- 
>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google 
>> Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
>> To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
>> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
>> info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
>> For more options, visit this group at 
>> http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.
>>
>
>
>
> ************************************************
> Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D.
> Research Associate, Depts of Linguistics and   Communication Disorders
> c/o 226 South College
> University of Massachusetts Amherst
> Amherst MA 01003
>
> bpearson at research.umass.edu
> http://www.umass.edu/aae/bp_indexold.htm
> http://www.zurer.com/pearson
>

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Info-CHILDES" group.
To post to this group, send email to info-childes at googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to info-childes+unsubscribe at googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/info-childes?hl=en.