children and non-literal meaning ... again

Fri May 28 15:51:14 UTC 2010

Dear Anat and Kristen,
we find exactly the same thing in French (but we only looked at three  
children and their parents and 6 verbal constructions so far).
Best,
Aliyah MORGENSTERN

Professeur de linguistique
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
Institut du Monde Anglophone
5 rue de l'Ecole de Médecine
75006 Paris

Le 28 mai 10 à 16:17, Anat Ninio a écrit :

> 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.
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> ************************************************
>> 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
>>
>
>
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