Abstract The study of encoding of motion events is best approached as a search for potentially interacting factors, linguistic and non-linguistic. Every language presents a cluster of typological variables. In the domain of motion events, sets of variables co-occur in at least two major patterns (verb‑ and satellite-framed). These types are idealizations of a range of diverse solutions to encoding dimensions of Path and Manner. However, the more we probe linguistic expressions of motion events, the more we uncover mixed types, indeterminate types, hybrid forms, and changes in progress. Numerous factors can act to limit or modify the expression of typological potentials – that is, patterns of language use that are predicted by the typological categorization of a language. The encoding of Path and Manner is not carried out independently of a language’s morphosyntactic and morphophonological characteristics. Data of historical linguistics, language contact, and translation are beginning to reveal interactions of factors over time. Suggestive findings demonstrate diachronic transitions between language types (with examples from Latin and Romance languages, Slavic languages, Chinese), as well as changes in the manner verb lexicon over time (English, Italian).

The chapter is a case study of a particular kind of speech-for-self produced by a preschool-aged girl, characterized as “externalized dramas.” Unlike most such records of vocalized thought, this speech is not involved with guiding ongoing behavior, but rather with acting out problems of interpersonal relations with peers. Using two or more voices in dialog, the speech is full of insults and denials, claims and counter-claims, promises, excuses—all of the continuing struggles to define social roles and one’s own position. Externalized dramas practice and refine pragmatic devices of prosody, lexicon, and speech acts, while dealing with underlying problems of emotional states, violence, fantasy and reality, and other minds. It is suggested that audible inner speech goes inward to become silent speech that continues to be concerned with social dynamics and individual status and roles. As Eve Clark has often pointed out, “social interaction is essential to the process of acquisition” (Clark, 2004, p. 472). Her studies of early language development have illuminated the role of caregiver– child interaction in the development of grammar and lexicon. The invitation to contribute a chapter in Eve’s honor in a book entitled Language in interaction has led me back to the Berkeley-Stanford work of the 1960s on the development of “communicative competence” (Slobin, 1967) and to some unusual data that I’ve wanted to work on for a very long time. I present these data to Eve, who has been an intellectual and personal friend ever since that era, helping to guide the way toward understanding of how we learn to talk and how language works. The data I present here reflect another kind of social interaction—discussions and disputes between children. The skills to be acquired here are pragmatic, in addition to grammatical and semantic.

Melissa Bowerman & Penelope Brown (eds), Crosslinguistic perspectives on argument structure: Implications for learnability. New York/London: Erlbaum (Taylor & Francis Group), 2008. Pp. 370. ISBN 978-8058-4194-7—0-8058-4194-6 (cloth: alk.paper) and 978-1-4106-1645-6—1-4106-1645-2 (e book). - Volume 36 Issue 3

Cross-linguistic studies of child language seek to compare the acquisition of comparable and contrasting languages in order to discover the mechanisms and processes that drive the course of development in general. Studies of first-language acquisition have been carried out on a great range of languages, both spoken and signed, revealing common developmental patterns. The comparative method makes it possible to determine the roles of many interacting factors in the acquisition process, such as perceptual saliency, type of linguistic construction, semantic categories, frequency of use, and communicative functions of linguistic forms.

There seems to be an irrestible tendency for people to take the child as a model of the primordial state of the species. For the past several centuries, philosophers and psychologists and anthropologists have made analogies between children and animals, children and “primitive” peoples, and, inevitably, children and our proto-hominid ancestors. Advances in developmental and comparative psychology, along with anthropology, have made the first two analogies untenable. Human children are not the same as mature monkeys and apes, and preliterate societies are not childlike. But in the current scientific fascination with the origin of the species, it has become fashionable again to propose that human children are in some ways models of mature proto- or pre-hominids. Nowhere has this proposal received more circulation than in discussions about the evolution of language (e.g., Bickerton, 1990; Givon, 1998). I suggest that this recent form of the recapitualitionist argument will fail. In its classical version, the proposal was abandoned on the basis of evidence from embryology and physiological development. The current proposal, by contrast, is not compatible with what we know about the psycholinguistic development of human children and the processes of historical development of existing human languages. There are three longstanding questions about the role of the child in language evolution and diachrony—that is, the processes whereby language arose in our species and the ceaseless changes of human language once it is present in the species. Briefly, the questions are:

The chapters in this volume, along with the extensive list of frog-story studies in Appendix II, provide a rich database for the exploration of particular questions of language use and acquisition. The studies reported in Part I reflect a range of languages of different types, making it possible to focus on the role of linguistic typology in narrative construction. 1 A recurrent concern in those studies is the expression of motion, which is one of the dominant themes of Frog, where are you? In one way or another, all of the studies confront Talmy’s by now familiar typology of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000b). Briefly, the typology is concerned with the means of expression of the path of movement. In verb-framed languages (“V-languages”) path is expressed by the main verb in a clause (‘enter’, ‘exit’, ‘ascend’, etc.), whereas in satellite-framed languages (“S-languages”) path is expressed by an element associated with the verb (‘go in/out/up’, etc.). This dichotomy has engendered a good deal of research and debate in the literature on motion-event descriptions over the past decade or so. 2 In this concluding chapter on typological perspectives I suggest that several different sorts of factors “conspire” to produce a range of frog-story varieties. These varieties result from combined influences of linguistic structure, on-line processing, and cultural practices. Talmy’s typology was designed to characterize lexicalization patterns, and it has provided important insights into the overall set of structures that define individual languages. However, the typology alone cannot account for discourse structures, because language use is determined by more than lexicalization patterns. It is striking how much has been learned by application of the V-language/S-language contrast, and it still plays a part in the mix of factors considered here. But a fuller account of narrative organization will require attention to a range of morphosyntactic, psycholinguistic, and pragmatic 220factors. Some of these factors are explored in this chapter, with regard to motion events in the frog story. The aim is to come to a fuller explanation of the ways in which languages differ in rhetorical style.

Carruthers’ “mentalese expressions” take the form of English sentences, thus suggesting an isomorphism between thought and language that ignores linguistic diversity. Furthermore, complex syntax is not the only linguistic means of combining information from various domain-specific modules into domain-general expressions, nor is such syntax the preferred means of encoding basic experiences in all languages. The analysis seems to rest on an unacknowledged version of linguistic determinism.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.