The child's initial linguistic state, II
March 09, 2003
by Dr Winford James
Children everywhere develop idiolects out of the sociolects of dialects of languages that they acquire. The child growing up in Charlotteville develops an idiolect out of a sociolect of a dialect of Tobagonian English, and the child growing up in Goodwood Park develops a different idiolect out of a sociolect of a dialect of Trinidadian English. Both types of child do so essentially without being formally taught but with the aid of a biological language learning mechanism linguists call UG, Universal Grammar.
Children must listen to, interpret, and speak the sounds of the language around them in a meaningful way, but they do so through the filter of UG. UG enables them to separate language signals from the rest of the background noise, to make sense out of routinely fragmentary and chaotic-sounding speech, and then to build a richly textured system of language knowledge.
But how do linguists know that UG is there? What kinds of structural evidence do they adduce?
To answer these questions, let's first consider easily identifiable evidence. Let's take pluralisation structures, for example. In many Englishes, count nouns (that is, nouns that refer to entities that can be counted) are pluralized (in speech) by sticking s- or z- or iz- or uhz-sounds to their ends, depending on their final sound. So we have, for example, 'cat-s', 'dog-z', 'kiss-iz' and 'kiss-uhz'. But in English Creoles, nouns are pluralized by placing 'and them' or 'them' after them; and so we have 'cat and them' or 'cat them'. 'S' and company and '(and) them' are pluralisers that participate in pluralisation rules. In both sets of language, therefore, the device of pluralisation exists, most probably because entities in our universe of experience typically are not unique in number but come packaged in quantities greater than one, and so we can make most nouns plural by adding the relevant pluralisers - a state of affairs UG is prepared to deal with.
But in both, the device verbalises itself in different structures and rules. In the Englishes, it takes the form of a sound that is not a whole word but rather a piece of word that attaches with an invariable meaning to the end of a whole word. In the Creoles, on the contrary, it takes the form of two whole words coming after the noun-word. Another difference is that while in an English sentence the complex word 'cat-s' can stand by itself with the meaning 'cats in general', in a Creole sentence the sequence 'cat and them' neither has the meaning 'cats in general' nor can stand independently; indeed, the Creole sequence must be preceded by a specifying word such as 'the' or 'she', in which case, it carries the meaning 'a specific group of cats'.
It appears then that children socially exposed to both sets of language must learn how to pluralise in two different ways. They seem to accomplish their learning by intuiting from the speech they hear around them that the Creoles do it one way and the Englishes another way. But they intuit through the general cognitive processes of analogisation and regularisation. On the basis of a small number of pluralized English nouns they hear, they work out that if particular nouns (obviously they don't call them so; that's the linguist's label!) are pluralized by, say, a final 's', then others like it must end like it too; and then they conclude that if a certain (small) number of nouns end in 's' when they are plural, then all other similar-sounding nouns that they have not yet heard must also be pluralized with 's'. UG seems to have incorporated within it schemas not only for the separation and organisation of human sounds, but also for the detection of the grammatical rules of adding 's' (and its friends) or '(and) them' to nouns.
So that UG has a detection component. But when linguists speak of UG, they are not talking merely about its detection component but about its actual configuration in terms of neural templates, blueprints or circuitry. It's much harder to find specific evidence of such templates than to find evidence of the detection component. But consider the following English sentences, focusing on the underlined nouns and pronouns/pronoun-like words, and pay particular attention to the sentence (#2) with the star:
1. Manning said that he was happy.
2. *He said that Manning was happy.
3. When he talks with his wife, Manning is happy.
4. The people who saw him talking with Hazel said that Manning was happy.
5. His wife said that Manning was happy.
Did you notice that the noun-pronoun pairs in sentences #1, 3, 4, and 5 could be interpreted as coreferring, that is, referring to one and the same person, but that the pair in #2 cannot? English-acquiring children hearing such sentences will quickly intuit that there is coreference of noun and pronoun in sentences #1, 3. 4, and 5, but not in #2. How can they come to that knowledge? How did you, cherished reader, come to that knowledge?
In the case of our pluralisation rules, it could be argued that there is easily identifiable plural marking, which not only children can 'see' but also teachers. In fact, teachers of English (not those locked in the tradition of English as a written language with a grammar based on writing!) will seek to teach English by attention to the rules of pluralisation, among other rules. But (and this is an important key!) the average English teacher does not teach the rules or grammar of coreference, and no parent or caregiver does either. Critically, they do not show children why coreference is good in #1, 3, 4, and 5, but fails in #2. They do not because they simply have no conscious knowledge of those rules or that grammar. Period!
What is the grammatical principle of co-reference as suggested by the small data set of five sentences above? How do English-acquiring children know, without being taught, that (in terms of co-reference, bear that in mind) #2 is not good but the others are? How?
When we look carefully at the sentences, we find that they can be analysed as in #6-10 below where the bracketed portions are crucial to our understanding of their grammar:
6. Manning said that [he was happy].
7. *[He said that Manning was happy].
8. When [he talks with his wife], Manning is happy.
9. The people who saw [him talking with his wife] said that Manning was happy.
10. [His wife] said that Manning was happy.
The sentences are repetitions of #1-5. Notice that #6, 8, 9, and 10 have bracketed portions that include only the pronouns, not the nouns. Notice also that #7 is entirely bracketed, including therefore both the noun and the pronoun. It took MIT linguist Howard Lasnik to draw to the attention of linguists that coreference is impossible when name-nouns are in the structural domain of the pronoun. (The domain of an element A is the phrase that immediately contains A.)
It is because the pronoun in #2 and 7 is not a phrase per se and thus insufficient as a domain that it requires the whole sentence as its domain. But the sentence as its domain includes a name-noun that it might refer to. But, tacitly, English speakers know that it does not refer to the name-noun. They know as a result of having Lasnik's principle built into their UG.
Lasnik formulated his understanding in a principle of non-coreference based particularly on sentences such as # 2 and 7. To state it again, coreference is denied for a pronoun and name-noun when the name-noun is in the pronoun's structural domain.
Speakers of English tacitly possess the principle of non-coreference and automatically and unconsciously apply it to new sentences requiring interpretation of the reference of pronouns. But neither caregivers nor teachers consciously know the principle (though they may have it tacitly and unconsciously), and so can't teach it to children.
Where does it come from? Linguists assume that it is a template in the structure of UG and, therefore, not learnt. If it is a UG template, then Trinbagonian children acquiring Standard English, Tobagonian English/Creole, or Trinidadian English/Creole also have it.
The child's initial linguistic state 1
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