An Introduction to Language and Society

Martin Montgomery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134908356
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

An Introduction to Language and Society explores how our ways of seeing and engaging with the world may be shaped by the categories, systems and patterns of language. This second edition includes new material on gender, register, the speech community, language and subcultures, and language and representation.

Part One
The Development of Language

In the beginning was the word.

(John 1:1)

In the beginning was the deed. The word followed as its phonetic shadow.

(Leon Trotsky^*)

*Trotsky, L. (1925) Literature and Revolution

1	The Beginnings of Language Development

Learning Language: The First Words

It first becomes obvious that children are actually learning to talk some time between twelve and eighteen months of age when they begin to use single-word utterances of the following type:

juice	dada	biscuit
there	no	that
byebye	big	wassat
hi	shoe	allgone
car	look	dirty
hot	up	ball

Such simple single-word utterances may look like a very primitive and rudimentary communication system. The vocabulary in the early stages is limited in range and its application is restricted to the immediate here and now. Consequently, it is hardly possible for the child to express or give shape to complex relationships, such as:

the conditional (‘if…, then…’);

the temporal (‘before’, and ‘after’);

notions of probability (‘might’, ‘may’, could’, etc.)

But the first one-word utterances are not as simple as they look. For one thing, children use them in a variety of ways. Thus, whilst the list above includes expressions for salient objects in their immediate environment (items such as shoe, car, ‘juice’, ‘biscuit’, etc.), it also includes items for opening and closing encounters (‘byebye’, ‘hi’), items for attracting someone’s attention (‘dada’) and focusing it in a particular direction (‘look’), items for refusing or resisting a particular course of action (no!’) and for commenting on a particular state of affairs (‘dirty’, ‘allgone’). Furthermore it is not uncommon for the child to have at least one question form (e.g. ‘wassat?’) and to be able to use some of the items to request actions of others (e.g. ‘up’ as meaning ‘lift me up’). And, while some of the items seem only ever to be used for one purpose (e.g. ‘hi’ as a greeting), others can serve a variety of purposes: for example, ‘dada’ can be used as a call, a greeting or a comment (as meaning ‘there’s a man in the photograph’); ‘biscuit’ can be used as a request (I want a biscuit now’), or as a comment (‘that’s a biscuit on the table’), or even as a kind of acknowledgement, as in the following interchange:

ADULT: here’s your biscuit

CHILD: biscuit ((takes biscuit))

There is, then, more to the child’s first words than might at first appear. They are from the beginning much more than merely names for objects, ways of referring to things around them. Indeed, even such a restricted range of items provides a highly subtle means of engaging with and responding to others. They enable the child to establish and maintain contact with others and they allow for the expression of diverse dispositions such as hunger, interest, curiosity, pleasure, warmth and anger. So, although the range of items that initially comprise the child’s vocabulary may be small, the purposes that such items can be made to serve in use are highly varied.

Studies of child language development usually refer to these oneword utterances as ‘holophrases’, implying thereby that these single items carry a broader and more diffuse range of meaning than do their equivalents in the language of adults: basically, children at this stage make single words do the work of the fully constructed sentences they will probably be producing a year or so later.

Some Precursors of Language Development

Language development, however, does not begin suddenly out of the blue with the ‘holophrastic stage’. Children can, for instance, understand and respond in appropriate non-verbal ways to the utterances of others long before they begin to produce holophrases. This is partly because in the everyday routines of feeding, washing, dressing and play the infant will be exposed to myriad repetitions of identical linguistic forms in recognizably similar contexts; and so, by the time the child begins to speak, s/he has already begun to grasp the basic outlines of the language system of his/her culture.

The Infant Cry

The first year of life sees the gradual emergence of very generalized capacities to interact – capacities that precede and provide a basis for the specifically linguistic developments later on. From the moment of birth, for example, infants can impinge dramatically on those around them: they can cry. Indeed, from the first weeks of life they have a repertoire of at least three distinguishable types of cry – the hunger cry, the pain cry, and a cry associated with fatigue, boredom or discomfort – each sounding subtly different from the other. The hunger cry, or ‘basic cry as it is sometimes known, is a moderately pitched loud cry that builds into a rhythmic cycle made up of the cry itself followed by a short silence, then an intake of breath followed by another short silence before the next cry resumes the cycle. Repetition of the series through successive cycles gives the cry its rhythmic quality. The discomfort cry or ‘grumble’ is lower in pitch, more variable in volume, though generally quieter than the basic cry. Its rhythm is slower and may be interspersed with grunts and sucking noises. The pain cry is markedly different again, taking the form of an inward gasp followed by a high-pitched, long-drawn-out rising shriek.

These cries are, of course, most important for survival in the first weeks of life. They provide a key resource, perhaps the only resource, open to the infant for signalling crucial physiological states such as hunger or pain; and as such they seem pitched at a level likely to evoke most disturbance in another human. Initially they may well be purely reflex responses to physiological states; but, if matters are ever that simple, they do not remain so for long. For one thing the different forms of cry often shade into one another. A child may begin with a grumble that gradually shifts into a hunger cry, or begin with a pain cry that gradually subsides into the basic cry rhythm. An adult accustomed to looking after a particular child or children may know instantly what a specific cry indicates, but just as often there is some indeterminancy and it requires the exercise of several kinds of awareness simultaneously to interpret what a particular instance of crying is all about. Thus, any one cry has to be gauged against the others that may have preceded it. It has also to be interpreted in the context of the recurring cycle of child care (Is it long since the last feed? How long since the last nappy change? etc.). And finally any particular cry is interpreted in the light of any known special circumstances affecting the child; for instance, a tendency to get fretful after a wakeful period late in the day. Basically, those involved in the care of the child find themselves discriminating between the different noises that the child makes, and arriving at different interpretations of them.

The noises themselves, of course, do not as yet amount to fully fledged acts of communication. They seem to b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• General Editor’s Preface
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• Introduction
• Part One: The Development of Language
• Part Two: Linguistic Diversity and the Speech Community
• Part Three: Language and Social Interaction
• Part Four: Language and Representation
• References
• Index