[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ; From 2-?
On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:46 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
I think Vygotsky actually finds the single kernel of truth in
Saussure's course when he argues that a science of phonetics needs
to be founded on MEANING MAKING and not on the physical description
of noises people make with their mouths. However, his ability to
find this kernel in a mountain of structuralist chaff should not
deceive you; he is no uncritical consumer of Saussureanism.
David,
Coincidentally I was reading yesterday the section in Problems of
Child Psychology (vol 5 of the Collected Works) where Vygotsky again
makes this point. It is evidently Saussurian linguistics that V is
enthusiastic about: he refers to it as phonology and contrasts it with
an older phonetics which focused solely on articulatory definitions.
Phonology has the advantage of seeing the sounds of language as a
system, and so the child never learns a single sound in isolation but
always one sound against the background of the others. V points out
that this is a basic law of perception: figure/ground, and also that
the ground in the case of oral language is provided by the speech of
adults (so the 'ideal' endpoint of development is present and
available from the start, as emphasized in the passage that Lois
quoted a few days ago).
V is critical once again of analyses that divide a phenomenon into
elements and in doing so lose the properties of the whole. Phonology,
he says, has the advantage that in studying the sounds of a language
as a system it doesn't divide it into separate elements, nor does it
lose the central property of language, namely that it has meaning. V
adds that sounds always have meaning: "the phoneme," he writes "is not
just a sound, it is a sound that has meaning, a sound that has not
lost meaning, a certain unit that has a primary property to a minimal
degree, which belongs to speech as a whole" (271).
V's analysis makes a good deal of sense to me. But my own limited
knowledge of Saussure - guided in part by Roy Harris' writing - has
indeed included the dogma that the sound level of language carries no
meaning. You are saying, I think, that V has a reasonable reading of
Saussure, if not the canonical one. Can you say more about this way of
reading Saussure? V seems to be suggesting that the child does not
learn first sounds, then words, but always acquires the sounds of
language in the context of the use of words in communicative settings,
and this has the consequece that the sounds would be aquired as
aspects of a meaningful unit. Am I on the right track here?
Martin
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca