2.3.3 Pragmatic directions and lexical acquisition
When speakers plan an utterance, they choose a specific perspective on what they wish to
speak about. This perspective, marked by word choice, allows them to present to their
addressees a specific conceptualization of an object, property, relation, or event. Word
choices allow speakers to conceptualize the same entities and events in different ways.
They therefore allow speakers to highlight properties pertinent to the goal of the discourse.
As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) put it “ In making a statement, we make a choice of
categories because we have some reasons for focusing on certain properties and
downplaying others (p. 163)”. Depending on one’s conversational goal, one might refer
to a neighbour variously as the cellist, the mother of three, my cousin, or the Mayor.
The notion of conceptual perspective is important in lexical acquisition because of two
radically different proposals. One is that children can take different perspectives on the
same object or event, and so accept and produce multiple terms for the same referent, from
as soon as they have the necessary words. This is the many perspectives view. The other
is that children at first take only one perspective on each object or event because this
simplifies their word learning in the early stages. As a result they can accept and produce
just one word for a referent type. This is the one perspective view.
To establish a perspective, speakers and addresses rely on a host of pragmatic directions
every time they converse. Pragmatic directions offer guidance to how an addressee should
treat the speaker’s utterances. They depend on non-linguistic information about the
speaker’s locus of attention.
Specifically pragmatic directions to a child addressee may serve to indicate what meaning
to assign to unfamiliar words, for instance, through Ostensive statements like “That’s a
wallaby"-, and how to relate the meaning of familiar and unfamiliar terms. In spelling out
the nature of such connections, pragmatic directions offer specific information about such
relations as inclusion, parts, properties, and functions. Pragmatic directions are relevant
to all facets of language use, the mutual knowledge speakers and addressees have about
each other and about the current conversation, the words and constructions chosen, the
manner of delivery, direction of gaze, gestures, the physical setting of the conversation,
and so on (Clark, 1996; Clark & Carlson, 1981; Levinson, 1983).
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