Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ; From 2-?

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

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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