children and non-literal meaning ... again

[Lorraine McCune]

Dear Kristen,

My early work was on the development of 
representational play during the second year of 
life. When children can convey non-literal 
meaning through play, they are engaging in a 
metaphor of action. If you look closely at how 
their uses of a given word extend across events, 
you will see that a non-literal aspect is seen 
there as well. Words that refer to dynamic 
aspects of events are particularly salient. While 
one can say there is something literally similar 
across uses, the extension from one situation to the next does involve analogy.

Examples of open:

Shanti—Gesturing at toy milk bottle she wants mother to open
Prior to opening the jack-in-the-box
Taking bottle after mother opens it
Janis—Pushing on cover of workbench, trying to open it
Trying to open book
Mira—Trying to get object out of bottle that is already opened

or some for "allgone":

Janis—Showing mother an empty juice cup
Looking in empty bucket when toys have been removed
Setting a book down when finished with it
Meri—Looking in empty bottle after removing objects
Holding up blanket; answering mother’s question, “What happened
to the baby?”
Mira—Looking in empty cup;her juice gone.
Shanti—Waving her empty juice glass in the air
After dumping an object from the large bottle
Searching for a doll
Looking for more objects to put in the bottle after the appropriate
ones have been put in

bye-bye  (Used as "allgone" by some.)
Janis—Dropping lid in pot
Before and while closing the lid on the jack-in-the-box
Putting objects in the bottle
Covering mother’s face with her hair


The bye-bye use is reminiscent of your example 
re: sleep. I believe the children do their 
extending by analogy in general because  few 
situations involving extension of meaning are 
exactly the same as one another. Because there is 
some sense of similarity across uses, children's 
early words are usually described as naming 
"categories". However, it may be that they are 
simply reminded of prior uses of words in new 
situations by analogical extension. The 
similarities lead us to define these as 
categories. If the child's use is too far off, we 
term it an "over-extension". The fact that they 
engage in levels of representational play 
requiring analogical processes suggests that 
these processes are available for language as well.

Lorraine





At 04:34 AM 5/28/2010, 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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