Pragmatics Reading Group - Josephine Bowerman

Speaker: Josephine Bowerman

Title: Innovative and non-literal reference-making before age 4: a corpus study of young children’s spontaneous production

Abstract: My focus is the development of children’s reference-making abilities in everyday communication. Existing evidence suggests that, from at least as young as three years old, children are able to produce novel noun-noun compounds (e.g. ‘clown boy’ = boy who is a clown) (Clark, Gelman & Lane, 1985) and novel instances of referential metonymy (e.g. ‘the flags’ = game involving flags) (Falkum, Recasens & Clark, 2017). Further, children’s apprehension of so-called relations of contiguity (e.g. between an individual and his/her distinctive features), which is claimed to underlie both referential metonymy and many cases of early nominal compounds, appears to emerge early in the preschool years (Rosch, et al., 1976). 

However, additional questions remain unanswered. How do young children use creative/non-literal referring devices like referential metonymy and noun-noun compounds in spontaneous speech in a naturalistic setting, and how does this usage change over time? In light of research from Rundblad and Annaz (2010a, b) that suggests that metonymy may develop at a faster rate than metaphor, might we see differences between children’s use of referential metonymy (e.g. ‘the football’ = boy with a football) vs referential metaphor (e.g. ‘the hedgehog’ = spiky-haired boy who resembles a hedgehog), and metonymic compounds (e.g. ‘kittens book’ = book about kittens) vs metaphorical compounds (e.g. ‘kitten cloud’ = cloud that looks like a kitten)? Finally, how does the acquisition of reference-making abilities relate to the development of other pragmatic phenomena, such as metalinguistic awareness?

In this talk, I report on an ongoing exploratory investigation of 18 months’ worth of production data from the CHILDES database, gathered from two children— Eleanor (2;6-2;12) and Thomas (2;6-3;12)— and the adults with whom they interact. Strikingly, the data reveal that, even before the age of three, Eleanor and Thomas are able to use phenomena including referential metonymy and noun-noun compounds to produce innovative labels for entities in an adult-like manner. The data also point to interesting differences in the frequency of occurrence of the different referential phenomena; in particular, the predominance of compounds in both the children’s and the adults’ speech. This suggests that each phenomenon may offer distinct communicative advantages that determine its pattern of use. Finally, I discuss how the corpus data provide insight into aspects of the children’s broader pragmatic development that are relevant to reference-making; most notably, their apprehension of, and capacity to exploit, relations of contiguity vs relations of resemblance; their ability to take into account common-ground information; and their emergent metalinguistic awareness.

Along the way, I highlight the utility of the corpus method to pragmatics, and discuss the value of using real-life performance data to enhance our theoretical understanding of pragmatic competence.

The talk will take place online on Zoom - a link will be sent out nearer the time. 

For further information and future updates on the seminars, go to the Pragmatics Reading Group web page: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/research/linguistics/linguistics-events/pragmatics-reading-group