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Acknowledgements
Chapter 1: Setting the Stage: Animating Ideas, Ambitious Goals, and
Ardent Commitments
The Prism
Every sentence enters our ears as just a stream of sound. Instantly an inner grammar analyzes it—like a prism divides light—and links diverse strings of information to different domains of mind (or “modules”). (nn1) Memory, vision, emotions, intentions, are all alerted by the contents of a sentence. The same kind of subdivision happens inside grammar: a sound system, vocabulary, structure-builder, reference determination, pronoun analysis, and a host of hidden rules are all alerted and galvanized, much like the whole body goes to work to catch a baseball.
We will try to take that stream of speech apart, reverse course, and follow the sound back to see how the speaker’s mind puts language meaning together---all in just milliseconds. One theme of ours will be that it happens so fast that a real mechanism must be present. We will do our best to disassemble the deeper structure of grammar with a minimum of technical language. Most of the microscopic fine grain of grammar (child or adult) remains largely unseen and uncharted territory. We hope to get the reader close to the edge of what we know about grammar now. There we will see tantalizing opportunities to study one’s own intuitions or do simple explorations. We focus on the challenge before the child whose task is acquiring his first language. We will reveal to the reader, over and over, the intricacy of adult language. As the child progresses, the adult expressions provide endless odd puzzles for her to solve. The puzzles lead to “mistakes” which often elicit smiles or laughs from adults. Looking at those mistakes closely will, I believe, turn casual amusement into profound respect. The image of the child we come to witness reveals free will in thought, good will in conversation, and self-respect--- a person whose recognizeable dignity we should bear in mind (nn2)
The language crafted by grammar then becomes a laser into life. It gives glimpses of the microscopic structure of human nature amid the great blur of human affairs. One singular commitment of ours is to confront the great issues of the age, the "good" and the "evil" of linguistics and life. There are positive or negative social consequences for most new discoveries which should not be hidden beneath the mantle of "scientific objectivity." Scientists must realize and accept that their work--their partial insights--have an instant impact upon society. Just like doctors who have to use the best knowledge available in choosing medicines, citizens need to use whatever knowledge is available to make linguistic decisions in their daily lives; for example, should my child have a reading tutor or will she catch up on her own? Should I correct my four-year-old’s spelling? It is impossible to postpone the social relevance of ideas. As soon as Einstein proposed relativity as a theory of physics, it had social implications. People were soon asking, is all morality relative too?
The structure of society is instantly implicated as well. Very often scientific studies are tinged with social overtones that favor one group of people. A New York Times article (nn3) quoted a geneticist on race: “Scientists got us into this problem in the first place, with its measurements of skulls and emphasis on racial differences. Scientists should now get us out of it.” Scientists should acknowledge that abstract ideas have social implications and try to clarify what they are. Putting ideas on the public platter is part of our responsibility. The philosopher Simon Blackburn has argued that “Contemporary culture is not very good on responsibility.” (nn4) Maybe we can see our way to some improvements. Our credo is simply
that knowledge entails responsibility.
Here's one thought that carries responsibility: Knowledge of how language works is part of what we need to eliminate or reduce our quick, prejudicial social judgments about accents and tiny grammatical differences. From my perspective, human society must fight language prejudice as we fight racial prejudice. If we grasp in detail scientific arguments that every language and every dialect, like African American English, (sometimes called Ebonics) is systematic, comprehensible, and legitimate, it will help achieve an egalitarian society.
This view of the role of knowledge entails the philosophy of democracy: the consequences of science are for society, not just scientists, to determine. Language policy should be consistent with insights from linguistic research, but it must also flow from the values of the society. We must all help our social policies to absorb what research reveals.
Not every reader will agree with the views I have derived from my work in language acquisition. I hope to engage the reader's opinions and values. We will often fence with common sense in this book. For instance, Common Sense says that it is pointing to the world around us and fulfilling desires within that world which provide the child's motivation for communication and thus the vehicle of instruction in language. But common sense can err. Science is most profound and successful when it departs from common sense.
We shall argue that the social and physical environment is necessary to language learning, but it is little more than a crude crutch upon which is perched a wonderful and delicate kind of mental growth, quite free of the physical world. A child's language reveals how much the "real" world is a world of imagination, and a child's words are about ideas and not about things. Montesquieu once said that the present is nothing but the past colliding with the future. Language is where the practical facts of communication collide with the philosophical disposition of human beings. Every utterance entails an "attitude" toward the world. Children do not simply refer to things. The child who said “Don’t uncomfortable the cat” is producing an imaginative imperative from her own perspective by giving a power to English grammar that it does not have, but grammars of other languages do have, that is, making an adjective, uncomfortable, work like a verb. (nn5)
Modern theory, for which this book is an advocate, argues that grammar is fundamentally innate just as vision is. Our discussion will show, through a welter of detail, how it must be true that there is no real alternative to the innateness assumption, especially where grammar coordinates information from other parts of mind: principles of grammar are inborn. That is, guided by genetic structure, a child utilizes her innate knowledge of what grammar must be like in the act of identifying the words and the special structures of one particular grammar. Our goal will be to give an intuitive representation of the deepest formal principles of grammar. Here and there I draw from my own work in linguistic theory and the various experiments in first language acquisition that have been pursued by my colleagues and students over the past quarter century, but I will focus on introducing new areas.
One might ask: why put philosophy, grammar, actual experiments, and social implications in one book? (nn6) It is precisely my goal to make a triangle of connections between philosophy, empirical detail, and social implications. Whitehead once said that one should have "a devotion to abstraction and a passion for detail." My hope is that will see how philosophically deep questions, and a child's basic dignity, are connected to cute examples. The child who said “My mind is very angry, and so am I” (nn7) assumes two levels of mind, perhaps a body and a soul, and underscores the reality of the soul for a six-year-old. And last but not least, my hope is that every reader will see the social significance of abstract theories.
In general, I invite the reader to pick and choose a bit, not to stumble over abstractions, nor be deterred by dozens of details, but simply to press on to those sections that are of greatest interest.
Explorations
Wherever possible, we offer specific “explorations” (see our list) that one can use informally to get inside the grammar of a child. Our explorations aim to mix depth and delight. Our first goal is to bring grammar to life for everyone, by gazing at what is unusual in grammar and in the language of children. The fact that we speak English does not mean that we know what it is. Having a heart does not mean that one knows how it works. Linguists discover new facts about grammar all the time which reshape our vision of the mechanisms in it. We discuss a contrast in the chapter on “The Structure of Silence” that was not appreciated until fairly recently (nn7):
John wanted someone to wash the dishes, and so I did
(=wash the dishes)
whose meaning is quite different from:
John wanted someone to wash the dishes and so did I.
(=want someone to wash the dishes)
How does a child learn that a simple difference in inversion leads to a totally different interpretation? Is this just remote adult stuff beyond the ken of any schoolkid? Remember our quote from the six-year-old who said “my mind is very angry and so am I” but, notably, did not say something quite different “and so I am.” Howevermuch grammarians must still ponder the explanation of this piece of grammar, the six-year-old has already got it right. As in most sciences, it is the extremes--the outer edges of grammar--that provide the most insight into the properties of grammar and mind, and provide the deepest challenges to the child.
Discussions with philosophers, psychologists, teachers, and parents all reveal that we often do not share a common vision of what grammar is. How could we, if our current linguistic analyses are constantly deepening, like going from molecules, to atoms, to quarks? Each discovery both affirms and alters our insights. It is easy to misconceive grammar fundamentally, if we do not see the abstract features and the new perspectives just coming into view. For that reason we always try to keep the endpoint in sight: it is the final state of the adult grammar where complexity forces hidden principles out into the open.
Sharp examples are the best means to get a real grip on what grammar does. We adopted the discipline of finding a way to explore structures with children to provide real ways to enter their grammar. The explorations are often fun for adults, bilinguals, and second-language learners as well. Equally important is the effort to create the transparency and concreteness that should be the bedrock of any philosophical or social discussion of language.
The explorations are generally possible with simple household objects or as a part of dinner table conversation. The most important discussion in this book surrounds this simple sentence, which one can ask any child at dinner:
Who is eating what?
Adults know that we need to give pairs as answers: “Daddy is eating bread, Mommy is eating salad, and I am eating beans.” A competent English speaker knows that who and what call for a potentially infinite list, and the answer must be given pairwise.
This kind of double question plays a crucial role in the Communications Disorders test developed by Harry Seymour, Jill de Villiers and me (with many colleagues) called the Developmental Evaluation of Language Disorders (DELV) (nn8) that we discuss below. It took more than twenty years of theoretical and acquisition research to discover the centrality of such sentences to language competence and language disorders---like discovering a tiny but powerful enzyme.
Related questions pop up everywhere. Plurals, for example, involve sets, too. Do children understand two ways that plurals work? If you ask your child:
Do people have heads?
He should answer “yes,” but if you ask:
Does every person have heads?
He should answer “no.” Our chapter on plurals discusses why and where this difference comes from and why it can be a conundrum for a child.
Most of our work has been built around stories and pictures, as it has been throughout the field of acquisition. In the course of writing this book, it became clear to me that it is easier to manipulate real objects than to understand stories or pictures in many cases. So a number of the explorations below can be turned into experiments that will reveal children’s knowledge of structures that have been elusive to experimentalists.
Deliberately, very little is said about ages in these pages. It is important not to convert these explorations into tests that give parent and child a sense of failure. They should be closer to informal mathematics games, or Piagetian conservation games, that parents or teachers often play with their children. Children learn gradually and at different rates. For instance, most children learn to skip rope in elementary school. A parent can enjoy teaching his child how to skip rope. He does not need to know whether the average child learns to skip rope at 6 1/2 or at 8 1/2. We enjoy playing mathematics games with children, but we do not need to know exactly when a nursery child can first do subtraction. Language games should be the same.
If a child does not perform like an adult for some exploration, probably they are using a grammar different from English. It is not an absence of grammar. If a child has difficulty with something, then just wait six months and try it again. Many of the explorations in this book will be possible with two and a half-year-olds, while others might be best suited to seven-year-olds, and most fall in between. Knowing where they fall exactly is not a goal of this book.
Common Sense
All of our explorations circle around the notion of common sense. It is partly how common sense itself works that we need to decipher in order to build an image of the mind which the child brings not only to language but to life. But more often our proposals about reference treat common sense like the enemy of understanding. Much of science succeeds by making the obvious seem strange, like gravity (why do things fall down instead of up?) The diversity of grammars means that what is common sense to adults may not start out as common sense to a child. To grasp the child’s task we must undo our own common sense.
Topics
Most of the usual topics that are discussed in the acquisition literature are left out. Nor do I dwell on the work of students or colleagues, nor on my own work. One might ask why develop a new range of questions rather than explore what has been done? One answer is that it is important for everyone, especially language professionals, to see the full scope of the acquisition problem. So it is important to bring in as many dimensions as we can. In medicine, doctors cannot discuss only the diseases they understand well. To have a sense of “good health,” one needs to keep in mind both the well-understood terrain, and the equally important but still under-explored aspects of human physiology. Still much remains omitted here, for instance, the role of phonology in acquisition.
It is also important to expand the acquisition agenda. My colleague, Angelika Kratzer commented that philosophy had made a serious mistake for half a century in looking primarily at the quantifier every and not other quantifiers like most. We need to guard against that possibility as well, as one of the acquisition pioneers, Roger Brown, pointed out, by not looking at too few structures in acquisition. So I hope to open up new avenues of research by stepping into new domains.
In fact, many of the proposed explorations could turn into important dissertations if they are carefully researched. (If someone wants to research one carefully, I would like him or her to contact me because there is much more to be said about how to do each one.)
The last reason for these topics is simply one of personal preference: moving abstract linguistic discussions into new experimental domains intrigues my imagination more than rethinking old experiments.
Style
This book is written informally for several reasons. One reason is to have a human rhetoric for a very human domain. Our first response to what children say is as human beings, not grammarians.
Another reason is more serious. Colleagues sometimes urge professionals not to mix morals with intellectual discussion. One should keep the science clean. Others lament the absence of public intellectuals who interpret their results in a larger framework. For this scholar, once in one’s life at least, an intellectual should discuss what light his field sheds on the world at large. An informal style helps us to avoid claiming undue authority for views that are partly personal in origin.
The chapters on acquisition (chapters 2 – 11) share a common design. They begin with a commonsense look at how structures work. Then we discuss simple acquisition methods to get inside them, and move gradually to the surprising examples that motivate modern work. Finally we return to the literary and human dimensions of grammar. As we proceed to greater and greater complexity, we may outstrip what some readers wish to deal with. We cannot be true to the acquisition challenge unless we present the outer reaches of grammar that every speaker masters. The reader should get a taste of what each structure is like even if some details seem opaque. Each new chapter starts out again from a simple perspective. So the reader should just move on if he is so inclined.