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A sociosemiotic perspective on language development1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

M. A. K. Halliday
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Extract

This paper is an attempt to interpret the child's learning of his mother tongue as a sociosemiotic process. What is intended here by ‘sociosemiotic’ will be largely left to emerge from the discussion; but in the most general terms it is meant to imply a synthesis of three modes of interpretation, that of language in the context of the social system, that of language as an aspect of a more general semiotic, and that of the social system itself as a semiotic system—modes of interpretation that are associated with Malinowski and Firth, with Jakobson, and with Lévi-Strauss, among others. The social system, in other words, is a system of meaning relations; and these are realized in many ways of which one, perhaps the principal one as far as the maintenance and transmission of the system is concerned, is through their encoding in language. The meaning potential of a language, its semantic system, is therefore seen as realizing a higher level system of relations, that of the social semiotic, in just the same way as it is itself realized in the lexicogrammatical and phonological systems.

Type
Articles
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 1974 , pp. 98 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1974

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References

2 See M. A. K. Halliday, ‘Early language learning: a sociolinguistic approach’, in William P. McCormack and Stephen Wurm (ed.), Language as bisocial process: papers from the XIth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Chicago, 1973, in press; and ‘Learning how to mean’, in Erie and Elizabeth Lenneberg (ed.), Foundations of language development: a multidisciplinary approach, UNESCO and International Brain Research Organization, in press. The figures in the present paper are reproduced from these two sources.

3 On questions of the transcription of child language, see the papers of the Child Language Project at Stanford University under the direction of Charles A. Ferguson; e.g. C. N. Bush, On the use of the IPA in transcribing child language: a theoretical orientation and methodological approach, Stanford University Committee on Linguistics, 1973. Up to the present this work relates to the mother tongue stage, beginning at what I have called Phase II, but the principles it embodies could be extended to apply to Phase I.

4 See M. A. K. Halliday, ‘Relevant models of language’, Educational Review (University of Birmingham), XXII, 1969; reprinted in Explorations in the functions of language (Explorations in Language Study), London, Edward Arnold, 1973.

5 For discussion of the situation as a semiotic structure cf. M. A. K. Halliday, ‘Talking one's way in: a sociolinguistic perspective on language and learning’, in Dockrell, W. Bryan (ed.), Papers of the SSRC Seminar on Language and Learning, Edinburgh, 1973, London, Heinemann, in pressGoogle Scholar.

6 See Berger, Peter L., ‘Marriage and the construction of reality’, in Dreitzel, Hans Peter (ed.), Recent sociology, 2: patterns of communicative behavior, New York, Macmillan, 1970Google Scholar; also Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas, The social construction of reality, London, Allen Lane, the Penguin Press, 1967Google Scholar.

7 Douglas, Mary, ‘Do dogs laugh? A cross-cultural approach to body symbolism’, Journal of Psychosomatic Research, XV, 1971, 389Google Scholar.

8 Lamb no longer uses this term. But the view that we are adopting here of the levels, or ‘strata’, of the linguistic system, and the relationship among them, is that of Lamb's stratification theory, which would provide a very plausible interpretation of the developmental processes involved. See, for example, Sydney Lamb's discussion in Parret, H., Discussing language, The Hague, Mouton, in pressCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Bühler, Karl, Sprachtheorie: die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Jena, Fischer, 1934Google Scholar; Lyons, John, ‘Human language’, in Hinde, B. A. (ed.), Non-verbal communication, Cambridge, University Press, 1972Google Scholar;Hyines, Dell H., ‘Linguistic theory and the functions of speech’, in International days of sociolingvistics, Rome, 1969Google Scholar.

10 SeeLewis, M. M., Infant speech: a study of the beginnings of language (International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method), London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1936; second ed., enlarged, 1951Google Scholar.

11 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The savage mind, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966Google Scholar.

12 See, for example, Ervin-Tripp, Susan, ‘Social dialects in developmental sociolinguistics’, and Osser, Harry, ‘Developmental studies of communicative competence’, both in Sociolinguistics: a crossdisciplinary perspective, Washington, D.C., Center for Applied Linguistics, 1971Google Scholar.

13 cf. Clark, Eve V., ‘What's in a word? On the child's acquisition of semantics in his first language’, in Moore, T. E. (ed.), Cognitive development and the acquisition of languuge, New York, Academic Press, in pressGoogle Scholar.