Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 In the beginning was the verb
- 3 Methods and an introduction to T's language
- 4 Change of state verbs and sentences
- 5 Activity verbs and sentences
- 6 Other grammatical structures
- 7 The development of T's verb lexicon
- 8 The development of T's grammar
- 9 Language acquisition as cultural learning
- References
- Appendix
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Dedication
- 1 Introduction
- 2 In the beginning was the verb
- 3 Methods and an introduction to T's language
- 4 Change of state verbs and sentences
- 5 Activity verbs and sentences
- 6 Other grammatical structures
- 7 The development of T's verb lexicon
- 8 The development of T's grammar
- 9 Language acquisition as cultural learning
- References
- Appendix
- Index
Summary
In 1922 Ludwig Wittgenstein published Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a formal analysis of language in terms of logical propositions. He promptly quit philosophy. Seven years later when he returned to academic life Wittgenstein had a completely different view of language; he now began talking about “language games,” “forms of life,” “family resemblances,” and other ethnographic sounding phenomena. What happened in the intervening years is well known. He worked with children! And in particular he attempted to construct for the children he was teaching a dictionary that defined words in terms of the atomic propositions of predicate calculus. His utter failure in this attempt quickly convinced Wittgenstein that, whatever its other merits, formal logic was not the stuff of human language use (Fann, 1969).
In the 1960s linguistics came to be dominated by formalistic theories not unlike Wittgenstein's Tractatus. Theories such as Transformational Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1957, 1965) were designed to abstract language away from its use in meaningful communicative contexts and to describe and explain it in terms of disembodied algorithms. This approach was immediately transported to the study of early child language, but with no more success than Wittgenstein had in transporting his formal theory to children's language. Researchers such as Brown (1973), Bowerman (1973), and Braine (1976) all concluded that young children do not operate with the formal apparatus of Transformational Generative Grammar. This failure caused a brief hiatus in the writing of formal grammars for early child language, but now the enterprise is back – and with a vengeance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- First VerbsA Case Study of Early Grammatical Development, pp. 1 - 8Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992