Learning to think for speaking

Abstract

What does one learn when one acquires the grammar of a language?Most child language researchers would probably say that one learns systems of grammatical morphology and synbactic constructions, as described in terms of the researcher's preferred grammatical model.It would be noted that grammatical forms relate to semantic entities and pragmatic functions, and, depending on the theory, various roles would be allolted to semantics and pragmatics in the learner's construction of the granlmar.Here I wish to propose that the child acquires more than a system of grammatical forms and semantic/communicabive functions.In acquiring the grammar of a particular language, the child comes to adopt a particular framework for schematizing erperience.That is to say, the grammabical system also expresses meanings.These meanings are of a general sort, in contrast with the specific contents of lexical items.Grammatical meanings apply across all possible lexical contents, putting the specific confent of any particular sentence into a framework of bemporal and spatial relations, modality, voice, illocutionary force, and so forth.Much recent work in the emerging field of cognitiue linguistics is concerned with the conceptual side of grammar.[n an important paper on the semantics of grammar, under the title of "The relation of grammar to cognition," Leonard Talmy proposes that:The grammatical specifications in a sentence... provide a conceptual framework, or, imagistically, a skeletal structure or scaffolding, [or the conceptual maberial that is lexically specified.Comparing a number of languages, Talmy concludes that, universally, grammar expresses a restricted set of general notions that make up what he calls ttthe basic schematic framework for conceptual organization within the cognitive domain of language."This is a framework for locating objects and events in space and time, lrom given perspective points, and with given force-dynamic contours of events.Albhough languages exhibit great diversity within these broad outlines, Talmy has succeeded in drawing out the cognitive unity thab underlies crosslinguistic diversity.His work points to a universal set of conceptual systems that are basic to human cognition, and specialized for verbal expression by means of grammatical devices.Here, however, I wish to focus on the diuersity within that unity, rabher than on the cognibive universals.Briefly, I want to propose that a special kind of thinking is called into play, on-line, in the process of speaking in a particular language.For almost two centuries-going back to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt in bhe 1820s-anthropologically-oriented linguists have asked whebher linguistic diversity implies

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