Studies in Child Language Development
In enumerating his claims about the trajectory of children's language development, Halliday eschews the metaphor of "acquisition", in which language is considered a static product which the child takes on when sufficient exposure to natural language enables "parameter setting". By contrast, for Halliday what the child develops is a "meaning potential". Learning language is Learning how to mean, the name of his well-known early study of a child's language development.
Halliday (1975) identifies seven functions that language has for children in their early years. For Halliday, children are motivated to develop language because it serves certain purposes or functions for them. The first four functions help the child to satisfy physical, emotional and social needs. Halliday calls them instrumental, regulatory, interactional, and personal functions.
- Instrumental: This is when the child uses language to express their needs (e.g.'Want juice')
- Regulatory: This is where language is used to tell others what to do (e.g. 'Go away')
- Interactional: Here language is used to make contact with others and form relationships (e.g. 'Love you, mummy')
- Personal: This is the use of language to express feelings, opinions, and individual identity (e.g. 'Me good girl')
The next three functions are heuristic, imaginative, and representational, all helping the child to come to terms with his or her environment.
- Heuristic: This is when language is used to gain knowledge about the environment (e.g. 'What the tractor doing?')
- Imaginative: Here language is used to tell stories and jokes, and to create an imaginary environment.
- Representational: The use of language to convey facts and information.
According to Halliday, as the child moves into the mother tongue, these functions give way to the generalized "metafunctions" of language. In this process, in between the two levels of the simple protolanguage system (the "expression" and "content" pairing of the Saussure's sign), an additional level of content is inserted. Instead of one level of content, there are now two: lexicogrammar and semantics. The "expression" plane also now consists of two levels: phonetics and phonology.
Halliday's work represents a competing viewpoint to the formalist approach of Noam Chomsky. Halliday's concern is with "naturally occurring language in actual contexts of use" in a large typological range of languages whereas Chomsky is concerned only with the formal properties of languages such as English, which he thinks are indicative of the nature of what he calls Universal Grammar. While Chomsky's search for Universal Grammar could be considered an essentially platonic endeavor (i.e. concerned with idealized forms), Halliday's orientation to the study of natural language has been compared to Darwin's method.
Read more about this topic: Michael Halliday
Famous quotes containing the words studies in, studies, child, language and/or development:
“[B]y going to the College [William and Mary] I shall get a more universal Acquaintance, which may hereafter be serviceable to me; and I suppose I can pursue my Studies in the Greek and Latin as well there as here, and likewise learn something of the Mathematics.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“What an admirable training is science for the more active warfare of life! Indeed, the unchallenged bravery which these studies imply, is far more impressive than the trumpeted valor of the warrior.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
—Frederico Fellini (1920–1993)
“And then ... he flung open the door of my compartment, and ushered in “Ma young and lovely lady!” I muttered to myself with some bitterness. “And this is, of course, the opening scene of Vol. I. She is the Heroine. And I am one of those subordinate characters that only turn up when needed for the development of her destiny, and whose final appearance is outside the church, waiting to greet the Happy Pair!””
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)