认知功能语言学Cognitive-Functional Linguistics.pptVIP

June 19, 2006 RT/CFL/I Cognitive-Functional Linguistics– Some Basic Tenets I Rolf Theil Bergen, June 19, 2006 – More juice! Nothing could seem less remarkable than a one-year-old child requesting More juice! But the remarkable fact is that even this baby utterance differs from the communica-tive activities of other animal species in a number of fundamental ways. – Doggie gone! Nothing could seem less remarkable than a one-year-old child commenting Doggie gone! But the remarkable fact is that no other animals make disinterested comments to one another about missing dogs. The most astounding fact From an ethological perspective, perhaps the most astounding fact is that about 80 percent of all Homo sapiens cannot understand these simple utterances at all. Whereas the individuals of all nonhuman species can communicate effectively with all of their con-specifics, human beings can communicate effec-tively only with other persons who have grown up in their same linguistic community. Language learning Whatever may be the reasons for this unique, indeed bizarre, situation, one immediate outcome is that, unlike most other animal species, human beings cannot be born with any specific set of communicative behaviors. Yound children must learn the set of linguistic conventions used by those around them, which for any given language consists of tens of thousands, or perhaps even hundred of thousands, of indi-vidual words, expressions, and constructions. Flexibility The human species is biologically prepared for this prodigious task in ways that individuals of other species are not. But this preparation cannot be too specific, as human children must be flexible enough to learn not only all of the different words and conventio-nal expressions but also all of the different types of abstract constructional patterns that these languages have grammaticized historically. Many years It thus takes many years of daily interaction with mature language users for children to attain a