Understanding Language Acquisition

Lough Neagh, near Bushmills

It has been a long, uneven process. It has taken me twenty years to distill everything I have observed about language acquisition into one word, rather, one acronym.

Gialil  (Gall, without the auxiliaries)

Grammar is Acquired. Language is Learned.

Seo dhuit é. どうぞ


In the unlikely event that this is true—stranger things have happened—the rest of the (so-called) language acquisition literature is an untidy footnote to this simple observation. And the field needs a new label.

I should probably leave it there, in the interests of brevity, were it not that brevity and I have rarely shared any deep interests, or modi operandi: she cuts too many corners, leaves so many stones unturned. We're not even on first-name terms. (She might be called Amy or Eve; Anastasia or Evangeline would be a cruel irony). Hence, some elaboration is necessary, or—if not entirely necessary—forthcoming regardless...

There is only one problem with claiming that grammar is acquired. That problem is not that it annoys anti-nativists, since straw men are pretty unrufflable, at least figuratively speaking; even if they weren't—straw men, or unmoved by ruffling, take your pick—I would cheerfully stoop to the challenge. Everyone with enough intelligence to understand the question is a nativist to some extent: not even the most dyed-in-the-wool emergentist—an unfortunately inapt metaphor—believes that the smartest sheep can learn syntax. No, the problem is that after 20 years, I have less idea than ever what grammar is. I know what a grammar is, of course; three years in Japan have not robbed me of that fine distinction. Grammar, on the other hand, may be more like the 'present King of France'; if Minimalists are right, it's just as bald. Thus, a better formulation might be: 'Grammar [if such a thing exists] is acquired.' Though, it must be admitted, Gisateialil hardly rolls of the tongue with the same...languid motility.

Then there's the problem of language, or rather Language (the concept, not the journal). Chomsky's surely correct—merely confidently rehearsed?—assertion of the stupendous incoherence of notions like 'the English Language', 'French Grammar', etc should  have persuaded language teachers and other language professionals, including SLA researchers, to jack it in or sling their hook, or otherwise extricate themselves from the Querk of confusion and despond that is Language, years ago. That they remain unpersuaded—and/or, in the field—may be due to the fact that: (i), most said language professionals have never read Chomsky on E-language; (ii), have, but don't believe him—which in this instance is like not believing in man-made climate change; or (iii), which is the case of many of my colleagues, believe the assertion, but think it doesn't apply to them: 'E-language is incoherent alright, but we are studying Interlanguage/we are teaching TOiEC'. Hm. Unlike the participants in their experiments, who wouldn't pay a brass farthing to acquire a such a coherent theoretical construct, but who fork out millions of yen and sundry other currency units to learn "English". (I shouldn't complain perhaps, since it is the incoherence, and unattainability of language, that guarantees me my job and lets me send my bilingual children to international schools. Let incoherence prevail!)

The point of all this is that Language is not learned or taught; but aspects of languages—the 90% we care about—are learned, and require constant reinforcement to reach convergence. In spite of appearances, 'learn English' is not an accomplishment predicate, nor is it an achievement: at best, it is an activity, though usually not a very active one: a dynamic state (of mind) possibly... If one cannot even classify the associated predicate, the chances of adequately grasping the concept are remote. And grasping the concept of language would seem to be necessary condition for learning it. So, perhaps a better way to express this would be: 'some aspects of language are partially internalized through experience.'

Which brings us to:

Gisateialil, Saolapite.

Much better, I don't think. Should have listened to brevity. Or to Robert Benchley:

'Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.'

It's not my problem (with Chomsky)

(For linguists only, probably, this one)

 

First, we had Humboldt’s Problem, then Plato’s, then Descarte’s, then Broca’s. Along the way, there was Orwell’s Problem. Now we have Darwin’s Problem.

I have been a card-carrying generativist for over twenty years—though I have to confess that I stopped paying the (figurative) dues somewhere around 1998—and remain reasonably loyal to the general spirit of the program. Yet I have to ask:

 “Why (the [your favourite expletive here]) is it always somebody else’s problem?”

As the father of a pre-teen, the prospect looms of hearing this rhetorical ploy on a near-daily basis (albeit the ‘owners’ of my son’s problems are likely to be more humble souls than the Greatest Figures in Western Thought, namely, his parents, his teachers, his siblings, his school-friends, in that order). Coming from a petulant adolescent, it is something I suppose I have to thole; but as an escapable part of mature generativist discourse, this stock device is wearing my patience pretty thin.

Or is it just me (my problem)?

PS. Don’t get me started on the shameless misappropriation of Kepler, Galileo and Einstein in other acolytic work.

Take any child (cross-posting)

Click for Justin on New Year's Eve

Generally, I try these days to separate my posts: Devenish (this blog) for family-related material; Inishmacsaint, for other writing. But time constraints—as well as the subject matter of this post—force me to merge and be done with it. If you only want to read family news, look away now; the same applies if you don't like opinion pieces informed by personal details. It's Friday afternoon, and I've allocated just one hour for this piece, so the results may be patchy and loose-ended...

Over the last few weeks, especially since the school shootings in Newtown, CT, I've been continually troubled by some aspects of that particular tragedy that seem to have gone unreported and so un-discussed. No, that's wrong, for it is the reporting itself, and the associated commentary, which bothers me as much as the deaths of so many children.

What upsets me is what seems to be a kind of pressure for moral equilibrium in many people's minds: that the victims of a mass killing are viewed as better, purer, more innocent, more spiritually enlightened human beings in virtue of having died together than they would have been considered to be had their deaths come not at the hands of a deranged killer, but individually, as the result of separate acts of violence, clinical negligence, childhood diseases or simple accidents in the home. Conversely, the perpetrator is viewed as increasingly evil or depraved in direct proportion to the relative youth, number, and helplessness of his victims. (As if age matters; as if teenagers or unarmed adults are any less helpless in the face of a gunman). And more evil the perpetrator, it seems the more blessed, the more innocent, even the more beautiful the victim. So, it goes, this Good and Evil, like pre-schoolers on a see-saw, each moving out from the fulcrum of moral neutrality.

One only has to examine the press and public reaction to other news stories to see the workings of our perverse moral scales. Consider these two news headlines from the UK in recent months:

• Tragic two-year-old 'who died after sipping mother's methadone from beaker had also ingested heroin and cocaine' Read more

• Girl, 15, who died after ecstasy overdose told her friends not to call ambulance. Inquest hears that Isobel Jones-Reilly found pills in university lecturer's drugs stash during an unsupervised house party. Read more

Was Riley Rettipierre less beautiful, less intelligent, less sorely missed than the CT kids because his mother was—it seems—a negligent, perhaps abusive, drug-user? Because he wasn't killed by a relative stranger but by a strange relative? And would he have been regarded as even more worthless had he died at age six, running out into the road for the first time after a ball? Was Isobel Jones-Reilly's death any less tragic than that of the children in Newtown, because she was older, or because she was to a some extent responsible for what happened? At two days, two months, two years, two decades, every child is some parent's son or daughter: the desolation and loss a parent feels is—I imagine—in no proportion to the objective beauty, intelligence, moral probity, or characteristic behaviour of their child. Nor is it greatly relevant whether the child is killed by falling off a ladder one Sunday morning (as happened to a school friend of mine, when I was 13), by being struck by a car driven by an elderly woman on her way to church, or by a joyrider high on solvents. The child is dead—and the manner of their death—however malicious, however violent, however unintended—does not alter the value of the life lived. At least, it shouldn't.

My father—to my mind, and in the view of many—was a good, kind and generous man. He died slowly of the consequences of Parkinson's disease over a period of months, a condition exacerbated by a heart operation that should have given him more, not fewer, active years. But he was not better, kinder and more generous because of this lingering death: had he died suddenly in surgery, I would miss him no less. Nor would he have been any less of a good, kind, generous man if—years earlier—he had yielded to alcoholism and died in his forties: the fate of his younger brother, Ronald, and Ronald's son, my cousin, Peter Duffield.

The story also draws attention to another related problem with popular morality: the notion—inescapable in our culture, and perpetrated by Hollywood, and popular fiction (including the tabloid press)—that there are good guys and bad guys: the children of Sandy Hook were good people in virtue of being children, the adult victims of Adam Lanza were good people by association with those children ("innocence", rather than guilt, "by association"); Adam Lanza himself was a bad person, the type of person the NRA proposes arming us all against, his evil predisposition sufficient explanation of his actions. This kind of moral fundamentalism is perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the whole thing: like other kinds of religious and political dogmatism, such 'purity' destroys and corrupts everything it touches, as violently as acid on a Muslim girl's face (albeit less obviously). A facile distinction between the fair maid and the evil witch may be harmless in fairy stories for the under-fives, but it has no place in mature discourse, past elementary school. The idea that there are angels and sinners, and that we can reliably tell them apart—the bad guys are always 'the other'—or the related notion, which cognitive anthropologists call the Fundamental Attribution Fallacy, that people who act badly are inherently bad people, and conversely: these are ideas that blind us to deeper, but messier, truths. Jimmy Savile was no Josef Mengele: the many serious crimes he has been discovered to have committed do not invalidate the good things he did for other children, any more than his occasional selflessness excuses his egotistical abuse. (In one sense, Josef Mengele was not Josef Mengele either, but no amount of special pleading can really mitigate the awful suffering for which he was directly responsible.)

When my middle son Julian asked me about the shootings in Connecticut, if the same thing could happen in Japan, I told him no, it could not. 'Is that because there are only bad people in America?' he asked (Julian has persistent difficulties with grammatical scope, but that is a topic for another day). No, I said: 'it's because there there are no guns in Japan...And anyway, there are no such things as bad people: there are people who do bad things.' I really believe this, and its opposite (i.e., there are no good people, though when I look at Justin, I'm not quite sure. But that is just parental bias, probably: it also shows that I am as prey as anyone else to the first impulse I talked about: to think that being cute and relatively defenceless makes a child with Down Syndrome any more virtuous than one without. I know this though, as every parent knows: that none of my children are any less than perfect, or than perfectly equal, to me.

Well, my hour is (more than) up.

Grammatica una et eadem est (revised)

Reflections on Universal Grammar and the importance—or otherwise—of Language Diversity.

[This is the revised text of an earlier paper on Language Universals and Language Relativity: it appears in a Festschrift for my colleague David Rycroft, to mark his retirement from full-time teaching at Konan]

Download paper here