An Integrational Linguistic View of Coming into Language

Abstract

An ecology of language acquisition (or, as I prefer to term it, of coming into language) must take proper account of the environment that bears on the phenomenon, interacts with it, and shapes it. An ecology of anything has to be as holistic and inclusive an account of that thing as possible, rather than an account that must continually acknowledge post hoc the influence of factors previously denominated as ‘external’ or ‘contextual’ . For example, if contemporary media such as the Internet, computer games and mobile phones are changing what counts as language acquisition, these cannot be mentioned as mere afterthoughts—any more than we can pretend that coming into language proficiency in a society that places great store by literacy is no different from attaining language proficiency in an oral community. In ways which chime with the views of Leather and Van Dam (Introduction), and Fettes (Chapter 2), I propose that an ecological account of coming into language cannot begin by assuming that a language is a virtual object— an auto nomo us system of u n its and rules for t he i r com bin ation and then represent the child’s task as the ‘problem’ of figuring out what the main units and rules happen to be. An ecological account of coming into language must begin where all the observational evidence suggests that the child begins: with no sense of the world as divided into the linguistic and the non-linguistic; with indeed only a quite blurred and attenuated interest in the world at all the latter only gradually coming into fuller view as basic needs for food and warmth and attention are met in patterned ways from particular communicating caregivers.