[Linganth] Is "motherese" universal?

[Harriet J. Ottenheimer]

David's arguments make sense.  My own (not-yet-ready-for-publication)
idea is that children actually might have had a fairly active role in
making the leap to duality of patterning.  I flesh it out a little bit
in the intro text I've just completed but it's just an intro text so I
don't go into great detail there.

I've been thinking about the slings a lot. Gatherers would need to have
had some sort of slings anyway, as it is pretty inefficient to have to
carry each root or handful of berries/nuts back to camp separately. A
sling would make it possible to carry more than a handful of stuff at a
time. It would also be useful for carrying/balancing a baby on one's hip
or back. So what could such slings have been made of? Netting or animal
hide come to mind from looking at contemporary gatherers. Now, as a
sometime fiber artist it it is clear to me that nets are made out of
strings (via macrame or crochet or fishnet technology or something like
that) so the next question has to be whether there could have been
string-making (spinning) technology as early as the period we are
talking about. I don't remember when the first spindle whorls are found
but that would be a good clue. So my guess is that if slings were being
used that early for gathering and child-carrying then they would most
likely have been made of animal hide.  I don't know why Falk imagines
that early hominins are gathering but does not allow them to have slings
to carry the fruits of their labor back to camp. It doesn't make sense
to me. Maybe I'm not being egocentric enough.

Seriously, I do think that one of the major problems with this kind of
theorizing is the fact that individual scholars in the four subfields of
anthropology are no longer reading one anothers' work much. I am not
sure, and have no evidence to back it up, but it seems to me that there
are a great many anthros in the other three subdisciplines who just do
not read linguistic anthro (and may not even ever have taken an intro
course in the subdiscipline, or taken one but thought it was too
difficult to go any further, what with all that stuff about phonetics
and such). Depressing.  Perhaps we need an Indiana Jones type of movie
about a daring linguist anthropologist to make the field seem more
accessible!

Cheers,

Harriet

samuels at anthro.umass.edu wrote:

>I, too, had a chance to read Falk's article. I have no egocentric data of my
>own to add to Harriet's insights. But I did find it interesting that Falk's
>inspiration for her theory was her own experience of wanting to speak
>motherese whenever she picks a baby up, yet her theory is that motherese
>developed because caretakers were putting their babies down.
>
>To her credit, Falk sees language as having originated in forms of social
>interaction, not individual brains; she has a view of language that extends
>beyond lexicon and syntax; and she gives the credit for the invention of
>language to children and not adults.
>
>The universality of motherese strikes me as immaterial to Falk's theory,
>actually. Motherese doesn't have to be universal in order for us to imagine
>that our hominin ancestors interacted with their infants in ways that were
>different from the ancestors of chimpanzees and bonobos, ways that derived
>from upright, furless women giving birth to helpless infants (although she
>seems to assume that our hominin ancestors had maturation rates similar to
>homo sapiens). Falk wants the supposed universality of motherese (and in
>Falk's view its prelinguistic, pedagogical features) to support a claim of an
>underlying genetic-adaptive basis for the whole thing. But the presence of
>motherese today, even if it were universal, wouldn't necessarily mean that
>motherese was the driving force of evolution.
>
>More important, I think, is that Falk's theory posits a sort of blank stage
>during which our upright ancestors were unable to fashion slings for their
>infants. Her justification for this, as I understand it, is that my cousin
>Susan, who grew up in an apartment in Queens, wouldn't be able to make one out
>of the materials in Flushing Meadows. (To answer another question that was
>raised, Falk knows that contemporary caretakers around the world use slings to
>carry their infants and keep their hands free.)
>
>My $.02....
>
>David
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