Білім беру бағдарламасына арналған торм 5206 тілдерді оқытудағы психологиялық МӘселелер пәні бойынша лекция тезистерінің жинағы

More recently, with an increase in constructivist approaches to the study of language, we have seen a shift in patterns of research. The shift has not been so much away from the generative/cognitive side of the continuum, but perhaps better described as a move even more deeply into the essence of language. Two emphases have emerged:

(a) Researchers began to see that language was one manifestation of the cognitive and affective ability to deal with the world, with others, and with the self;

(b) Moreover, the generative rules that were proposed under the nativistic framework were abstract, formal, explicit, and quite logical, yet they dealt specifically with the forms of language and not with the the deeper functional levels of meaning constructed from social interaction. Examples of forms of language are morphemes, words, sentences, and the rules that govern them. Functions are the meaningful, interactive purposes, within a social (prag­matic) context, that we accomplish with the forms.

Lois Bloom (1971) cogently illustrated the first issue in her criticism of pivot grammar when she pointed out that the relationships in which words occur in telegraphic utterances are only superficially similar. For example, in the utterance "Mommy sock," which nativists would describe as a sen­tence consisting of a pivot word and an open word, Bloom found at least three possible underlying relations: agent-action (Mommy is putting the sock on), agent-object (Mommy sees the sock), and possessor-possessed (Mommy's sock). By examining data in reference to contexts, Bloom con­cluded that children learn underlying structures, and not superficial word order. Thus, depending on the social context, "Mommy sock" could mean a number of different things to a child. Those varied meanings were inade­quately captured in a pivot grammar approach.

Lewis Carroll aptly captured this characteristic of language in Through the Looking Glass (1872), where Alice argues with Humpty Dumpty about the meanings of words:

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."

"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."

"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master— that's all."

Bloom's research, along with that of Jean Piaget, Dan Slobin, and others, paved the way for a new wave of child language study, this time cen­tering on the relationship of cognitive development to first language acqui­sition. Piaget (Piaget & Inhelder 1969) described overall development as the result of children's interaction with their environment, with a comple­mentary interaction between their developing perceptual cognitive capac­ities and their linguistic experience. What children learn about language is determined by what they already know about the world. As Gleitman and Wanner (1982) noted in their review of the state of the art in child language research, "children appear to approach language learning equipped with conceptual interpretive abilities for categorizing the world. . . . Learners are biased to map each semantic idea on the linguistic unit word."

Dan Slobin (1971, 1986), among others, demonstrated that in all lan­guages, semantic learning depends on cognitive development and that sequences of development are determined more by semantic complexity than by structural complexity. "There are two major pacesetters to language development, involved with the poles of function and of form: (1) on the functional level, development is paced by the growth of conceptual and communicative capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of cognition; and (2) on the formal level, development is paced by the growth of perceptual and information-processing capacities, operating in conjunction with innate schemas of grammar" (Slobin 1986). Bloom (1976) noted that "an explanation of language development depends upon an explanation of the cognitive underpinnings of language: what chil­dren know will determine what they learn about the code for both speaking and understanding messages." So child language researchers began to tackle the formulation of the rules of the functions of language, and the relationships of the forms of language to those functions.