[Xmca-l] Re: Why Computers Make So Little Difference

[David Kellogg]

Well, of course, from the child's point of view, "Baby Bites" is probably
not even monosemous, merely alliterative.

As Haydi says--how does the child avoid Buridanism before speech? I take it
that what he means is that in order to master the system, what is required
is not simply the mindless internalization of some purely external resource
but rather (as in the crises we find in other forms of development, e.g.
sociogenesis and even phylogenesis) the constraining of some
super-productive neoformation that emerges at the interface between the
child and the environment--that is, the narrowing of the available choices
we find in ('autonomous') child language to fit the phonological system of
the mother tongue (as Halliday points out, learning a mother tongue is
really learning a second language!).

I think the answer is that the child initially treats speech as something
that is not even monosemous but merely alliterative--sound without meaning.
So how does the child master the sounds? According to the genetic law,
sounds would be initially constrained by imitation and then elaborated by
self-imitation: that is, repetition. But how?

Alliteration appears to be clearly differentiated before rhyme in English
poetry (c.f. "Gawain and the Green Knight"). Ontogenesis too? That would
mean that the child is aware of a choice of different consonants before the
child is aware of a choice of different vowels, and that does seem to be
the case.

David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

On 15 March 2015 at 01:40, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co>
wrote:

> Nonsense, David, she's reading the list of ingredients printed on the
> bottom!
>
> And isn't "Baby Bites" wonderfully polysemous?
>
> Martin
>
> On Mar 13, 2015, at 4:17 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > http://www.greatnewplaces.com/images/Kids/img7189_30122012121700.jpeg
> >
> > My students were struck by the fact that the child, surrounded by
> elaborate
> > tools not of her own making, seems much more interested in the objects as
> > objects than in their use as signs.
>
>
>