Adventures in Language Acquisition (the ongoing saga)

Children ask questions that have never been asked before (“What does blue look like from in back?”)

-- Eric Lenneberg, “The Capacity for Language Acquisition” (1964)

As I headed out to go to work, there stood little Marya next door, alone on the lawn.  Whenever I had previously addressed a word to her, it was in the course of chatting with her parents, and she had been very much the toddler, fussy and fussed-over and sky.  But now she had the stage to herself, and was quite of a mind to have a regular adult conversation.   She hailed me, for the first time, addressing me as  “Mister David”,  thus unconsciously reproducing the pattern prevailing in the Middle East, of using the title with the given-name rather than the surname.  (The Saudis I used to do business with  always called me "Doctor David".)
Then she said what sounded like “I’d like to introduce you to my imaginary friend,” gesturing prettily to her left.  (I bowed vaguely in the direction indicated, uncertain of the etiquette in such a case.)  And then:  “I saw you mowing your lawn the next day;”  I had in fact mowed it the day before. At first I figured that, despite the syntactic perfection of her sentence, she had a problem with the semantics of that tricky phrase the next day, which, like its French equivalent le lendemain, requires some expertise at deixis; she had meant to say yesterday.  But later it occurred to me that, like that imaginary friend, the insides of her mind are ultimately inaccessible, and that she really did mean ‘the next day’ -- that is, the day subsequent to the previous time she and I had conversed (upon the pleasant subject of her tricycle helmet disguised as a princess’s crown):  an event that may have loomed rather large in her tiny budding world, and which thus served to anchor the temporal reference.

Small children are well-known for being the utter solar center of their own deictic grid.   Running indoors from playing in the yard, announcing:  “But he took it away from me!”  Then patient Mom, wiping her hands on her apron (my own deixis, the reader will have noticed, is pretty much stuck under Eisenhower), must elicit the pronominal references;  what obscure class of expectations led to the “but”  is probably best left unprobed.

And so here, if our hermeneutical unfolding of Marya’s temporary reference is correct -- what poignancy!   For the whole conversational move -- “I saw you mowing your lawn the next day” was made in the deliberate spirit of Adult Conversational Gambits (How to Win Friends and Influence People, Rule #2:  Show Interest in the Other Person), her spirit striving to the empyrean -- while her little Mary-Jane-shod feet  remained mired in the deixis of childhood.

~

That such matters of relative time-reference have long taxed the immature mind (and by this, are designated not only the infantile, but those that never managed to mature) is suggested by the French terms for ‘today’ and ‘the next day’.  In the parent language, Latin, these were simple:  hodie (lit. ‘this day’), and postero die (lit. ‘next day’).  Hodie gave Spanish hoy, still in use unchanged; in Old French it was hui.  But French speakers kept somehow falling over themselves, and needing to clarify, so that today the word is aujourd’hui -- etymologically, ‘on the day of today’.  Le lendemain is even better:  ‘the-the-on-of-morning’.

~

[Update 2 May 2012]

Today I was chatting with her mother on the lawn, and up the little tyke triked.    For her mother’s benefit,  I recalled our conversation, asking if she remembered having introduced me to her imaginary friend.   She said she did, but quickly corrected my misimpression:  She doesn’t really have any friends like that, she said: “It was just my imagination.” 

This revelation relieved me greatly, as it dispelled a moral dilemma.   The temptation is to play along with the fantasies of a toddler (or a schizophrenic), a temptation widely yielded to by her mother’s friends, so I’m told;  but it seems unsound.  So I leaned in and confided, “You know -- I’m glad to hear you say that.  Because when you introduced me to her, fact is -- I couldn’t see her!  She was invisible!”

And then, unexpected, came another scholarly, almost pedantic  mise-à-point.  No, she corrected:  Imaginary friends are perfectly visible, “just like you and me” (she added, pointing to both of us, by way of illustrating her point by ostention).  She did not elaborate;  but I gathered that, merely, she personally, contingently, happens to have no such friends at present.  (Indeed her father had reported her saying that one of them had “gone to Cambodia and died”.)

So, we seem to be in some kind of Freudio-Jungio-Meinongian territory here.   I simply nodded, noting her précision.

It further developed that, the other day, Suzanne drove up to our house, and Marya asked her mother, “Who is that?”  “That’s Suzanne,” was the reply, “Mr David’s wife.”

And Marya called out:  “Hello-o, Mr David’s wife!”

Her mother professed herself (mildly) mortified, and feared that Suzanne might have taken it ill;  but surely not.  And again, from the standpoint of the information available to her, this form of salute was quite defensible.   She had not acquired the negative rule that certain expressions are not used vocatively;  to the adult-preferred vocative “Mrs Justice!” she had not been introduced; the only other possibility, “Suzanne!” was over-familiar, to a grown-up to whom one has not been introduced.

~

Chomsky derides Quine’s account of language acquisition (in Word and Object) as “narrowly Humean”.   Indeed, observing the behavior -- and guessing at the mind -- of a small child, suggests the process might be more accurately described as pataphysical.

[For the further adventures of little Marya, click here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/06/adventures-in-attitude-acquisition.html ]