Social Dialectics and Language: Mother and Child Construct the Discourse

摘要

The child’s development of productive control over the adult language system is seen as an outcome of the dynamic social discourse of parent and child. Traditional approaches to child language are reviewed and a dialectical analysis is alternatively developed using concepts from information theory and a general systems approach. The dialogue of mother and child is treated as an open system. The central and mutually regulated activity is the construction of a digital system interfaced to the prior analogic communication of the mother-child dyad. A dialectical analysis stresses the contradictory aspect of all material phenomena. Contradiction in the discourse is identified at the level of symbolization, message, exchange and structure. Alternative linguistic methods are examined for their potentiality in the treatment of dialogue. Firthian and neo-Firthian theory, scale category grammars, and stratificational linguistics are briefly examined as alternatives and additions to the generative grammatical theory which has dominated developmental psycholinguistics to dat