Table Of ContentSpringer Series in Language and Communication 3
Editor: W. J. M. Levelt
Springer Series in Language and Communication
Editor: W J. M. Levelt
Volume 1 Developing Grammars
By W. Klein and N. Dittmar
Volume 2 The Child's Conception of Language
Editors: A. Sinclair, R. J. Jarvella, and W. J. M. Levelt
Volume 3 The Logic of Language Development in Early Childhood
By M. Miller
Volume 4 Inferring from Language
By L. G. M. Noordman
Volume 5 Retrieval from Semantic Memory
By W. Noordman-Vonk
Volume 6 Semantics from Different Points of View
u.
Editors: R. Bauerle, Egli, A. von Stechow
Volume 7 Lectures on Language Performance
By Ch. E. Osgood
Max Miller
The Logic of
Language Development
in Early Childhood
Translated by Robert T. King
Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg New York 1979
Dr. Max Miller
Max-Planck-Institut zur Erforschung der Lebensbedingungen
der wissenschaftlich-technischen Welt
RiemerschmidstraBe 7, D-8130 Starnberg, Fed. Rep. of Germany
Series Editor:
Professor Dr. Willem J. M. Levelt
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften e. V.
Projektgruppe flir Psycholinguistik
Berg en Dalseweg 79, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
With 1 Figure
Title of the original German edition:
Zur Logik der fruhkindlichen Sprachentwicklung
Empirische Untersuchungen und Theoriediskussion
© by Ernst Klett, Stuttgart, 1976.
ISBN-13: 978-3-642-674\0-5 e-ISBN-13: 978-3-642-67408-2
001: 10.1007.978-3-642-67408-2
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data. Miller, Max H, The logic of lal11luage development in early
childhood. (Springer series in language and communication; v. 3) Translation of Zur Logik der friihkindlichen
Sprachentwicklung. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Language acquisition. 2. Language and logic. 3.
Semantics. I. Title. II. Series. P118.M513 401'.9 79-18415
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned,
specifically those of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, broadcasting, reproduction by photocopying
machine or similar means, and storage in data banks. Under § 54 of the German Copyright Law where copies are
made For other than private use, a Fee is payable to the publisher, the amount of the Fee to be determined by
agreement with the publisher.
© by Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1979
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1979
The use of registered names, trademarks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific
statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and thereFore Free For
general use.
2153/3130-543210
For Maria
ForelVord
The appearance in English of Max Miller's research monograph is an important
event for all those who have a genuine interest in child language acquisi
tion. Certainly, there is no lack of high-quality research in the field. On
the contrary, since the sixties the research domain has markedly expanded in
size, scope, and quality. The initial preponderance of small-scale syntactic
studies rapidly widened into research which also addressed the semantic and
pragmatic .aspects of language development. Moreover, far more substantial
data sets were gathered and analyzed; some of these were comprehensive lon
gitudinal records of children's language development in the first phases.
But Dr. Miller's study is not just another star in this sky. It is unique
in at least two ways. Firstly, one should note that language acquisition was,
and still is, predominantly studied with children acquiring English. And al
though the present worldwide popularity of child language research guaran
tees that some attention will be directed to the acquisition of other lan
guages as well, the publication of large-scale longitudinal studies for
languages other than English is still quite exceptional. There is, for in
stance, a notable lack-of such studies for German since the classical work
of Clara and William Stern which appeared in 1907. This is a regrettable
situation, since some of the core issues in language acquisition cannot be
adequately approached without cross-linguistic comparisons. In the litera
ture many claims concerning universal aspects of language development are
made. Such claims are often of great theoretical interest because they are
closely related to the nature/nurture problem. But they will remain no more
than claims as long as they are made on the basis of English data alone.
German, with its rich morphological structure and relatively free word order,
furnishes an interesting comparison to English in many aspects. As a series
editor, it therefore seemed important to me to publish the translation of
Miller's work including the full - and quite extensive - German corpora on
which it is based. Only in this way is a real opportunity created for cross
linguistic analyses.
VII
The second remarkable property of Miller's work is his theoretical ap
proach. It is not sufficient to characterize it as dealing with syntax as
well as semantics and pragmatics in the first phases of language development.
More important is the way in which the author tries to understand language
development from its underlying force: the urge to communicate. Miller's
model is a functional one: structural syntactic and semantic changes are
logical consequences of changes of pragmatic standards in sequences of com
municative contexts. What can be implicit, for instance, in context for a
very young child may have to become explicit in a later context because of
the increasing number of contextual alternatives. These "logical" interac
tions between contextual requirements of communication and various aspects
of linguistic development are meticulously analyzed on the basis of the two
corpora. No wonder that these two corpora are not only language corpora, but
also context corpora. This makes them particularly useful both for carrying
out further analyses and for cross-linguistic comparisons.
Certainly, Miller's theoretical stand is not as unique now as it was four
years ago. However, it is not only a matter of justice to bring this work on
a par with theoretically related work which appeared more or less at the
same time; but as there is so much additional and thoughtful development of
this theoretical stance in the book, it has largely kept its original fresh
ness.
Nijmegen, June 1979 Willem J.M. Levelt
VIII
Preface
This monograph originated as an interim report on the research project Cog
nitive and Social Determinants on Language Acquisition which I conducted
under the auspices of the German Department of the University of Frankfurt
from September 1971 until the end of 1976. Since November 1972 this project
was financed by the Max-Planck-Institut fur Bildungsforschung in Berlin as
part of the research project Elternhaus und Schule conducted by Oevermann,
Krappmann, and Kreppner.
While the goal of this project on language acquisition is the reconstruc
tion of the language development of three German children: two middle-class
children and one lower-class child from the time of the first linguistic
utterances up to the fourth birthday, this interim report deals only with
early language development, and it is essentially based on a large body of
observational data on the language development of the two middle-class chil
dren from their 16th up to their 23rd months of life.
In its German version this monograph was completed in March 1975 and pub
lished by Klett Verlag in the series "Konzepte der Humanwissenschaften".
The manner in whi ch thi s monograph was written 1a rge ly refl ects the s itu
ation of child language research in Germany during the first half of the
1970s. Since besides the project of PARK (1970b, 1974) and my own project
there did not exist any efforts, worth mentioning, to empirically investigate
the early language development of the child, the contemporary scientific
context for an analysis of the early development of the German language in
children was essentially provided by the vast amount of literature. on child
language development that had been published in the U.S.A. and Great Britain.
In order to relate my analyses to this context, especially to the work of
BLOOM (1970), BROWN (1973), and BOWERMAN (1973a), a first reasonable step
seemed to be to apply previously used models of grammatical analysis, such as
"pivot grammar", "transformational generative grammar", and "case grammar",
to German data of early child language, and to investigate whether structural
descriptions derived from these grammars
IX
a) are empirically adequate if one takes into account large corpora of utter
ances of two children, and
b) whether these structural descriptions can be given an empirical justifica
tion within the framework of a developmental theory of language.
In the main, this part of my analyses leads to a rather negative evaluation
of at least pivot grammar and transformational grammar. Of course it is "old
hat" nowadays to state that pivot grammar and transformational grammar do
not represent descriptively and developmentally justifiable accounts of the
syntax and semantics of early child language. Still there are a few empirical
and theoretical arguments for this that have not been brought up outside this
monograph.
But, more importantly, this outcome of the first part of my analyses mo
tivated a reinterpretation of the same developmental data within the frame
work of a functional, communication-oriented model of early child language.
There is a simple idea behind this shift in the model used for describing
the development of syntactic-semantic structures in early child language:
I assumed that what a child may explicitly say and what is implicitly con
veyed by his utterances during verbal interactions with a caretaker is a
function of certain pragmatic standards a child has internalized by partici
pating in these interactions.
And during the process of reinterpreting my data and writing this mono
graph the central topics of my empirical analyses now turned out to be:
a) Given a corpus of utterances of a child at a certain developmental point,
are there any regularities underlying the distribution of implicit and
explicit information conveyed by the child's utterances relative to on
going communicative situations?
(Context and ellipsis in early child language)
b) What means does the child possess for relating his utterances to an in
tersubjective context?
(Illocutionary and context-referential acts of children at this develop
mental stage)
c) What is the canonical form of propositions the child expresses by means
of "elliptical utterances"?
(Propositional acts of children at this developmental stage)
d) Given a set of chronologically ordered corpora of utterances of a child,
is there any order with respect to the explicit expression of relational
semantic concepts (such as agent, object, locative, etc.) relative to
ongoing communicative situations? In other words: is there a development
x
of pragmatic conditions that determines the distribution of implicit and
explicit information conveyed by the child's utterances? And is there a
developmental logic that relates this change of pragmatic conditions to
the acquisition of syntactic-semantic structures in the child's early
language?
(Perception of contextual alternatives and the. development of syntax and
semantics in early child language).
In order to deal with these questions I first worked out separate analyses
of the mode in which illocutionary, propositional, and context-referential
acts are performed by the two observed children during the developmental
period to which this monograph was confined. Finally, I tried to concentrate
all these efforts in an attempt to reconstruct the developmental logic that
relates an intricate development of pragmatic conditions to the transition
from two-word to three-word utterances. And the reader of this book may
judge himself to what extent I could provide empirical evidence for this
last step of interpretation and all the analyses upon which it is based.
More than three years have passed since I completed this monograph, so
have had enough time to recognize many shortcomings of my approach. Probably
each linguistic term I have used could be given a more explicit definition
than is provided here. And the psychological validity of my description of
communicative acts, especially the propositional acts I imputed to early
child utterances, and my conception of a developmental logic of early child
language are open to a whole range of criticism.
In many respects recent approaches in child language research which I
learned of only after I had already finished this report, e.g., the book by
GREENFIELD and SMITH (1976) and especially the papers by BRUNER and his co
workers during the last years (cf BRUNER, 1975a,b; BRUNER and SHERWOOD, 1976;
NINIO and BRUNER, 1978; RATNER and BRUNER, 1978), proceed along similar the
oretical lines of interest and intrude much deeper into the pragmatic con
text of language development. However, they are focussed on an earlier stage
of development of the child than the work reported on in this monograph.
In addition to the usual problems of translating a scholarly text from
German into English, this monograph presents some special difficulties in
the form of the sample utterances of the children investigated. In order to
make the translation accessible to readers whose knowledge of German is not
extensive, it was decided to translate these utterances wherever they occur
in the text (except in the tables and in the appendix) into corresponding
utterances as might be used by English-speaking children at the same stage
XI
