語用論(Pragmatics)を考える

Child psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other child clinicians need to have a solid understanding of child language development. There are at least four important reasons that make this necessary. First, slowing, arrest, and deviation of language development are highly associated with, and complicate the course of, child psychopathology. Second, language competence plays a crucial role in emotional and mood regulation, evaluation, and therapy. Third, language deficits are the most frequent underpinning of the learning disorders, ubiquitous in our clinical populations. Fourth, clinicians should not confuse the rich linguistic and dialectal diversity of our clinical populations with abnormalities in child language development. The challenge for the clinician becomes, then, how to get immersed in the captivating field of child language acquisition without getting overwhelmed by its conceptual and empirical complexity. In the past 50 years and since the seminal works of Roger Brown, Jerome Bruner, and Catherine Snow, child language researchers (often known as developmental psycholinguists) have produced a remarkable body of knowledge. Linguists such as Chomsky and philosophers such as Grice have strongly influenced the science of child language. One of the major tenets of Chomskian linguistics (known as generative grammar) is that children’s capacity to acquire language is “hardwired” with “universal grammar”—an innate language acquisition device (LAD), a language “instinct”—at its core. This view is in part supported by the assertion that the linguistic input that children receive is relatively dismal and of poor quality relative to the high quantity and quality of output that they manage to produce after age 2 and that only an advanced, innate capacity to decode and organize linguistic input can enable them to “get from here (prelinguistic infant) to there (linguistic child).” In “Constructing a Language,” Tomasello presents a contrasting theory of how the child acquires language: It is not a universal grammar that allows for language development. Rather, human cognition universals of communicative needs and vocal-auditory processing result in some language universals, such as nouns and verbs as expressions of reference and predication (p. 19). The author proposes that two sets of cognitive skills resulting from biological/phylogenetic adaptations are fundamental to the ontogenetic origins of language. These sets of inherited cognitive skills are intentionreading on the one hand and pattern-finding, on the other. Intention-reading skills encompass the prelinguistic infant’s capacities to share attention to outside events with other persons, establishing joint attentional frames, to understand other people’s communicative intentions, and to imitate the adult’s communicative intentions (an intersubjective form of imitation that requires symbolic understanding and perspective-taking). Pattern-finding skills include the ability of infants as young as 7 months old to analyze concepts and percepts (most relevant here, auditory or speech percepts) and create concrete or abstract categories that contain analogous items. Tomasello, a most prominent developmental scientist with research foci on child language acquisition and on social cognition and social learning in children and primates, succinctly and clearly introduces the major points of his theory and his views on the origins of language in the initial chapters. In subsequent chapters, he delves into the details by covering most language acquisition domains, namely, word (lexical) learning, syntax, and morphology and conversation, narrative, and extended discourse. Although one of the remaining domains (pragmatics) is at the core of his theory and permeates the text throughout, the relative paucity of passages explicitly devoted to discussing acquisition and proBOOK REVIEWS

Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of language acquisition

The complete title of this book runs ‘Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics using R’ and as such it very well reflects the purpose and spirit of the book. The author guides the reader in about 350 pages from descriptive and basic statistical methods over classification and clustering to (generalised) linear and mixed models. Each of the methods is introduced in the context of concrete linguistic problems and demonstrated on exciting datasets from current research in the language sciences. In line with its practical orientation, the book focuses primarily on using the methods and interpreting the results. This implies that the mathematical treatment of the techniques is held at a minimum if not absent from the book. In return, the reader is provided with very detailed explanations on how to conduct the analyses using R [1]. The first chapter sets the tone being a 20-page introduction to R. For this and all subsequent chapters, the R code is intertwined with the chapter text and the datasets and functions used are conveniently packaged in the languageR package that is available on the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN). With this approach, the author has done an excellent job in enabling researchers and students alike to reproduce the analyses and learn by doing. Another quality as a textbook is the fact that every chapter ends with Workbook sections where the user is invited to exercise his or her analysis skills on supplemental datasets. Full solutions including code, results and comments are given in Appendix A (30 pages). Instructors are therefore very well served by this text, although they might want to balance the book with some more mathematical treatment depending on the target audience. After the introductory chapter on R, the book opens on graphical data exploration. Chapter 3 treats probability distributions and common sampling distributions. Under basic statistical methods (Chapter 4), distribution tests and tests on means and variances are covered. Chapter 5 deals with clustering and classification. Strangely enough, the clustering section has material on PCA, factor analysis, correspondence analysis and includes only one subsection on clustering, devoted notably to hierarchical partitioning methods. The classification part deals with decision trees, discriminant analysis and support vector machines. The regression chapter (Chapter 6) treats linear models, generalised linear models, piecewise linear models and a substantial section on models for lexical richness. The final chapter on mixed models is particularly interesting as it is one of the few text book accounts that introduce the reader to using the (innovative) lme4 package of Douglas Bates which implements linear mixed-effects models. Moreover, the case studies included in this

Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R

A grammar of spoken Chinese = 中國話的文法

The biolinguistic perspective regards the language faculty as an “organ of the body,” along with other cognitive systems. Adopting it, we expect to find three factors that interact to determine (I-) languages attained: genetic endowment (the topic of Universal Grammar), experience, and principles that are language- or even organism-independent. Research has naturally focused on I-languages and UG, the problems of descriptive and explanatory adequacy. The Principles-and-Parameters approach opened the possibility for serious investigation of the third factor, and the attempt to account for properties of language in terms of general considerations of computational efficiency, eliminating some of the technology postulated as specific to language and providing more principled explanation of linguistic phenomena

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Three Factors in Language Design

Heritage speakers are people raised in a home where one language is spoken who subsequently switch to another dominant language. The version of the home language that they have not completely acquired – heritage language – has only recently been given the attention it deserves from linguists and language instructors. Despite the appearance of great variation among heritage speakers, they fall along a continuum based upon the speakers’ distance from the baseline language. Such a continuum-based model enables researchers and instructors to classify heritage speakers more accurately and readily. This article discusses the results of research on lower-proficiency speakers, identifying recurrent features of heritage languages in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Preliminary results indicate that different heritage languages share a number of structural similarities; this finding is important for the understanding of general processes involved in language acquisition. The article also presents implications of the main findings for language education and identifies areas needing further study.

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Heritage Languages: In the 'Wild' and in the Classroom

In this paper, we bring to the attention of the linguistic community re- cent research on heritage languages. Shifting linguistic attention from the model of a monolingual speaker to the model of a multilingual speaker is important for the advancement of our understanding of the language faculty. Native speaker competence is typically the result of normal first language acquisition in an envi- ronment where the native language is dominant in various contexts, and learners have extensive and continuous exposure to it and opportunities to use it. Heritage speakers present a different case: they are bilingual speakers of an ethnic or im- migrant minority language, whose first language often does not reach native-like attainment in adulthood. We propose a set of connections between heritage lan- guage studies and theory construction, underscoring the potential that this popu - lation offers for linguistic research. We examine several important grammatical phenomena from the standpoint of their representation in heritage languages, including case, aspect, and other interface phenomena. We discuss how the questions raised by data from heritage speakers could fruitfully shed light on cur - rent debates about how language works and how it is acquired under different conditions. We end with a consideration of the potential competing factors that shape a heritage language system in adulthood.

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Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

This paper has two main goals: (i) to provide a description of the language of incomplete learners of Russian living in the U.S. and (ii) to identify across-the-board differences between a full language and an incompletely learned language. Most data used here come from American Russian, a reduced and reanalyzed version of Russian spoken in the U.S. by those speakers who became English-dominant in childhood. Incomplete acquirers of Russian demonstrate significant intra-group variation, which corresponds to similar variation found among incomplete learners of other languages. However, there are a number of structural properties that are shared by American Russian speakers regardless of their proficiency level and that distinguish their language from the baseline variety of Russian. American Russian therefore cannot be defined solely on geographical grounds; it differs significantly from varieties of Russian spoken by subjects who maintain language competence appropriate to uninterrupted acquisition. The paper also demonstrates a correlation between vocabulary deficiency and gaps in the grammar of American Russian. Such a correlation suggests a compact method of estimating incomplete acquirers' proficiency based on a concise lexical test. 1. Introduction This paper examines the morphosyntactic consequences of incomplete acquisition for language structure. (1) Let me say from the outset that the descriptive aspect of this paper is unquestionably its most important one, as incompletely acquired languages have received little coverage in linguistic literature, and I hope that this paper will serve to fill a small part of that gap. In addition to describing an incompletely acquired system, I address the interaction between language-particular and cross-linguistic phenomena under incomplete acquisition. I also demonstrate the correlation between lexical attrition on the one hand, and attrition in morphology and syntax on the other. This correlation allows me to propose a vocabulary-based method of measuring language attrition. The crucial data introduced here come from instances of lexical, morphological, and syntactic attrition as they occur in one particular language, American Russian. American Russian is compared to the full version of Modern Russian. As the two languages are compared, it becomes clear that American Russian is not just an offshoot of the Russian spoken in the language metropoly (the place where Russian is the sole or dominant language). Rather, it is a language in its own right, and while some of its properties may be viewed as caricatures of the trends already apparent in the language of the metropoly, many other traits are idiosyncratic and cannot be derived from the full version of Modern Russian. The paper has the following structure: in Section 2 I discuss the basic concepts used in the paper, introduce the elicitation techniques used in this study, and describe the speakers of American Russian interviewed for this study. Some salient lexical properties of American Russian are reviewed in Section 3. Section 4 presents and analyzes structural characteristics of American Russian in nominal morphology, and Section 5 discusses verbal categories. Section 6 summarizes the main characteristics of American Russian in syntax and discourse. Section 7 demonstrates the correlation between lexical and morphological/syntactic attrition, concluding that the proposed method of measuring lexical proficiency can reveal the general level of language competence. The major findings of the paper are summarized in the conclusion. 2. American Russianad Its Spedcers 2.1. Baic Notion This paper examines American Russian, a language variety that is endangered in that it is unlikely to stay around for generations, but does not come to mind as obviously endangered because it is associated with the healthy varieties of Russian spoken in Russia and in the growing Russian diaspora. …

Incomplete Acquisition American Russian

This book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

Introduction Incomplete competence in first language is an intriguing problem, one that subsumes interrupted acquisition, delayed acquisition, and language loss. Incomplete or interrupted acquisition is represented by heritage speakers, who only recently have been recognized as a group separate from those bilinguals for whom one of the languages is strongly dominant. In the last decade, heritage speakers have come to the fore in a number of fields, from language teaching (Kagan & Dillon, 2001; Bermel & Kagan, 2000; Geisherik, 2005) to sociolinguistics (Andrews, 1999; Fenyvesi, 2005; Seliger & Vago, 1991, among many others) to general linguistics (Dorian, 1989; Seliger & Vago, 1991) and psycholinguistics (Sorace, 2004; Tsimpli et al., 2004). Understanding the nature of incomplete acquisition is crucial for our understanding of acquisition, and it is fair to say that heritage speakers provide a crucial missing link between competent L1 learners, balanced bilinguals, and possibly L2 learners. Since very little is actually known about heritage language speakers, studying different aspects of language structure in this population is important. In addition to the challenge of uncovering descriptive generalizations needed to understand incomplete acquisition, the heritage population poses another challenge to language researchers: it is not always clear how to assess what it is that heritage speakers do and do not know in their first language, so developing replicable methodology of language investigation is also essential for heritage language studies as a field.

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Maria Polinsky

Papers

Heritage Languages: In the 'Wild' and in the Classroom

Heritage languages and their speakers: Opportunities and challenges for linguistics

Incomplete Acquisition American Russian

Heritage Languages and their Speakers

Gender under Incomplete Acquisition: Heritage Speakers' Knowledge of Noun Categorization.