Reflections on Knowledge of Language
I’m starting this series as a vehicle for some reflections on how the human mind works--or at least some aspects of how it works. Of course, the aspects in question will all be ones that pertain to our possession of language. And the main focus will be on re-examining what I see as insufficiently examined assumptions that are likely to affect the direction of our research efforts.
From a different perspective one might say that what I’d like ultimately to do is throw some light on the distinctive features of the human brain that make language possible. Of course, the approach will necessarily be extremely indirect: I don’t have any expertise in neurological matters. It will just focus on identifying the particular capabilities that humans have (and other species lack) that make human language possible--on what you have to be able to know and do to become a “speaker” of a language. And the most obvious way I know to approach to this is to try to figure out what individuals do have to know and be able to do in order to qualify as acceptable “speakers”--as “knowing” the language.
I’ll often lump these capabilities together under the single cover term “knowledge of language” (often shortened to KOL). (The reference to “capabilities” would indicate that the KOL consists as much of what has been called “knowledge-how” as of “knowledge-that”).
But I should make clear that the KOL that I think we should be concerned with doesn’t include everything any randomly-selected speaker would know about language--not even everything speakers do know about their own languages. An obvious category that should be excluded is any knowledge connected with writing. It’s obvious that children have to be taught to read and write, and that this is only accomplished after they’ve acquired some command of the language.
It also seems obvious that the effect of writing extends much further; it can influence the community’s views of how their language is structured and, accordingly, of what is involved in language “acquisition”. In such circumstances it seems virtually inevitable that the caregivers of infants in such a community will model the ambient conception of how the language is structured and what the infant should be aimed at learning and that this will affect both the process and the result.
The Contributions to this series so far are:
The Role of the Holistic Mode
Where does "Knowledge of the World" Fit in?
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Put on the Web 17 March 2007
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