Osokina S.A.
Altai State University, Russia
FORMATION OF LANGUAGE CAPACITY:
THESAURUS APPROACH
Modern linguistics pays much attention
to studying of language knowledge and ways of its formation and development. A heuristic
view on the system of language knowledge is offered within the thesaurus
approach which is becoming popular in a number of humanities and natural
science. Thus, informatics, or computer science, understands thesaurus as a sum
of verbalized interpretations of reality, in literature studies thesaurus is an
author’s picture of the world, in sociology and culturology thesaurus is an
individual configuration of orientation information which forms the basis of
culture perception and social modeling of reality.
In linguistics thesaurus is viewed as a
kind of ideographical dictionary, but in some latest works thesaurus is
understood as the language system of knowledge. Such conception of the
thesaurus originates from U.N. Karaulov’s works. He stands upon the idea that
thesaurus is not only an ideographic dictionary which shows all semantic links
of the word but a complex lexical system which includes grammar characteristics
and grammar links of the word [1]. Studying language personality, Karaulov
describes the thesaurus as an individual verbal net, or personal vocabulary,
which forms the individual picture of the world [2].
In general, thesaurus is a system of
knowledge which is formed in the process of communication between people.
Therefore, the language is not just the mean of knowledge expression, but the
system that defines the formation and development of the knowledge. We speak
about the knowledge which is not directly connected with sensual experience but
is developed in the process of verbal communication. We should emphasize that
thesaurus is not just a vocabulary system but a dynamic system of word links
and interconnections. This system is formed in the process of word
communication which includes talking, reading, writing, listening and other
ways of processing verbal information.
Formation of this system takes place in
early childhood as teaching little babies to speak by their parents. Therefore,
both, word vocabulary and word orders that a child composes trying to speak,
directly depend on vocabulary system and word expressions most frequently used
in the family environment. Such usual for the family communication word orders
become the basis for further development of the system of language knowledge:
they create conditions for understanding the incoming verbal information,
principles of selecting and remembering new words as well as mechanisms of
their usage in one’s one speech.
The expressed idea is proved in
synergetics studies. D.S. Chernavskiy describes the formation of language
knowledge system this way: a child gets language information from his/her
parents forming the first level of the thesaurus – the information system which controls the selection of new coming
information; getting older a person chooses a profession (and the choice is
directly connected with the formed to the moment thesaurus) and develops a
professional thesaurus; then, the professional thesaurus will play considerable
part in the selection of new information, and so on [3, p. 20-21].
However, synergetics does not pay much
attention to the language part of the question, and it does not have to since
it has different research goals. To describe the process of formation of
language capacity it is more reasonable to take psycholinguistics studies of
babies’ speech into consideration.
Psycholinguistics does not study the
thesaurus system as it is since it pays more attention to the process of speech
generating and understanding. Within the thesaurus approach we study rather the
results of these two processes – language knowledge that a person gets and
shares while communicating with other people. That’s why it is helpful to use
the thesaurus methods to study the findings of psycholinguistics works on
babies’ speech.
We took a research diary of a baby’s
speech by a famous Russian linguist A.N. Gvozdev [4] as language material for
our study. The author observed the way his son Zhenya started to speak from the
age of 1 to 7. In the diary A. Gvozdev does not give any linguistic
commentaries, so that the reader can make conclusions different from the
intended by the author.
Having examined the first described in
the diary period of Zhenya’s speech (up to two years), we came to the following
conclusions.
The formation of the language capacity
is tremendously influenced by the word vocabulary used in the family environment.
Thus, the vocabulary of Zhenya Gvozdev, a son of the Soviet intellectual,
besides the words common for the children of his age (as мама, папа, тётя, киська, мака (молоко), кася (каша) etc.) there are
such words as писи (пиши), нига (книга), маня (монах), мусина (мужчина), меся (месяц).
Making phrases, or word orders, by the
child is a process of repeating the adults’ phrases, the main goal is to bring
the articulation of the phrase to perfection. It means that making phrases does
not have the primary goal to express meaning, the primary goal is to repeat the
parents’ articulation properly. For instance, the baby tries to pronounce the
word карандаш by such
expressions as галянда, глянця, глянда, калянда, but on the
following pages of the diary we do not see this word again. It seems that it
was not necessary for the baby to remember the word as the name of the shown
object, it was much more necessary to work out the articulation.
At the same time, on each next page we
can see the improvement of pronunciation of the words which are used most
frequently as well as modification of phrases with these words. Moreover, we
think that understanding the meaning of the word comes as the result of
repeated articulation. It means that the system of knowledge which is commonly
understood as the system meanings is obviously formed on the basis of the
material part of the language.
What’s more, we suggest that comprehension
of grammar structures also comes as the result of the repeated phrases
articulation. Firstly the child repeats a phrase as a whole, but having
reproduced it many times, the baby starts understanding it can be broken into
parts which can be replaced by other words.
Thus,
the phrase Мама ниська цитать (Мама книжку читает) is the first phrase with the sentence
structure written in the diary and it is the only sentence phrase repeated on
the diary pages in the beginning. Only after its many times repetition there
appears a phrase Папа ниську цитать, and then Мама мася купать (Мама пошла покупать масло). We think that
the two latter phrases reproduce S-O-P structure because this structure was
fixed in the child’s system of knowledge after constant repetition of the first
phrase. Then there are phrases Мама блёдо нисить (Мама блюдо несет), Папа дим исить (Папа дым ищет – after the
wife asked Откуда дым идет?), etc. which also have
S-O-P structure. The child does not use the S-P-O structure, the main sentence
model for the languages with transitive verbs, but reproduces the modification
of this model because it was worked out by constant repetition of the first
phrase. Probably, at this moment in Zhenya’s system of knowledge there is no
S-P-O structure at all, there is a concrete word order Мама ниска цитать which serves
as a model in which it is possible to replace the words.
The general conclusion of the study is:
the language system of knowledge, the thesaurus, is formed as the process of
constant repetition of the same words and word orders after the adults. The
capacity to express one’s own thoughts and ideas results from every day
articulation exercises. It seems disappointing that somebody else’s language
structures overwhelm children’s potential to speak about the word in its pure
forms but this is the only way to achieve understanding and successful
communication.
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