FLEXIBILITY IN THE SEMANTICS AND SYNTAX OF CHILDREN'S EARLY VERB USE

Linguistic communication almost always concerns events, actions, or states of affairs. Declaratives or informatives invite the listener to attend to some event, action, or state of affairs, and imperatives or directives enjoin the listener to do something to bring about a desired action or state of affairs. Thus, even when young children are using object labels as single word utterances, from the point of view of the communicative intention as a whole there is almost always some underlying event or action at issue. When the infant exclaims ‘‘Airplane!’’ she is exhorting her mother to attend to it or to notice its presence, and when the infant requests ‘‘Juice!’’ she is rousing her mother into action to satisfy her desire. One could argue that the appropriate gloss of such utterances is something along the lines of ‘‘Look at the airplane!’’ (or ‘‘The airplane is there!’’) and ‘‘Get me some juice!’’ The action or state of affairs intended, and its corresponding verb, is implicit; the utterance is what has been called a holophrase. The one potential exception is naming objects. But naming objects is actually a kind of metalinguistic speech act. It is not using language but rather ‘‘mentioning’’ it, mostly teaching it. Western, middle-class parents do this with some regularity with their children, and their children learn the names and then show off by using them in return. But in many other cultures the pedagogical or demonstrative naming of objects is a very rare type of speech act and plays very little role in the acquisition of language.