David, Monica,
Can we agree then on something like this: the
affordances/constraints of the young child's social
situation (especially relations and interactions with
significant others) contain sufficient organization/
information to able the child to acquire language on all
levels - acoustic (syllables not phonemes, following
Vygotsky), lexical (following Vygotsky, and also recent
work by Eve Clark on how child- directed adult speech
provides information about conventional word- meaning),
and grammatical (following Bruner) - without needing to
appeal to innate capacities (such as the LAD)? (Though
obviously since chimps can't do it, something biological
is necessary.)
Martin
On Jul 25, 2009, at 3:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Martin:
Yes, definitely! If you read pp. 49-50 in the Minick
translation of
Thinking and Speech, we get Vygotsky's remarks on
Saussure's
phonology in pure form. Of course, he rejects (again and
again) the
Saussurean view of semantics; it's nothing but
associationism. But
since he rejects associationism on the basis of its
arbitrariness,
its lack of an intelligent link, and its lack of system,
he has to
reject Saussurean phonemes too, no?
No! As you say, there are two points here for Vygotsky
to
appropriate. The first is that the phoneme is part of a
gestalt,
specifically, a contrast with some other word (e.g.
"back" and
"bag"). But the second is that that gestalt is defined
by MEANING
and not by sound.
Here is where Vygosky really parts company, not only
with Saussure
and structuralism but also with Gestaltism. For
Saussure, the
relationship between phoneme and meaning is entirely
arbitrary; but
for Vygotsky it is fully determined by the social
situation of
development.
For Gestaltism, the structural relationship is not
unique to
language; it's shared with perception. But for Vygotsky
the
consciousness that is created by thought is never
reducible to the
consciousness that is created by perception.
The question I have is what Saussure would have made of
all this.
Saussure was actually quite skeptical about his own
system; he had
good reason to instruct his wife and students not to
publish any of
his work. And as the article Mike sent around (on the
Mandelshtam
poem) makes clear, he had big big problems with
precisely the
concepts at issue: the arbitrariness and linearity of
language.
Notice that Vygotsky doesn't really use the word
"phonetic" very
much. The word which is usually translated as "phonetic"
is actually
"phasal". But in the example Vygotsky gives about the
psychological
vs. grammatical predicate/subject, where he talks about
psychological/grammatical gender, and number, and even
tense, it is
very clear that for Vygotsky ALL the linear aspects of
language, the
aspects which (unlike thought) include TIME in their
compositionality, are to be considered "phasal", not
just phonetics.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Fri, 7/24/09, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
wrote:
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech
complexity ;
From 2-?
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:03 AM
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_______________________________________________
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Martin Packer, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Psychology Department
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 15282
(412) 396-4852
www.mathcs.duq.edu/~packer/
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