Chap 5 The Absence of Absolute Reference



Chapter 45: The Absence of Absolute Reference

How do words and things connect? As we pointed out in chapter 3, it seems totally obvious to many people, even inevitable, that the connection could not be anything more than a "point and shoot" verbal camera. We "point and name" and that is all that it takes. This has been a common sense truth for centuries. Nonetheless, in philosophical and linguistic circles, it is a devilish challenge to state how we actually refer to objects, not to mention situations, feelings, and ideas. The rapid stream of language and inchoate demands of life force us, every moment, to combine old words in order to pick out new references.

Must a child learn “words” first? It is not so obvious. Suppose a child first recognizes commotion and activity. And he hears a parent saying “look there is singing, dancing, and eating”. The child might first learn “ing” as equal to activity and march into a busy room and shout “-ING”. No one reports such a result. If we want to build a good theory of acquisition, we need to not merely observe that this does not happen, but build a theory that explains why it does not happen. If a child has a rule that says “learn words in isolation before more complex structures” then the fact that no adult says “-ING” by itself would make it not a child’s first hypothesis. But now we have articulated a principle for how inflectons appear: learn words first, then learn affixes that alter their meaning. How do we know that “ing” is not a word? It never occurs by itself. But here is already a grammar-specific constraint “occur by itself = word.” Thus we have grammatical assumptions from the outset.

We will wander through the most obvious terms that orient reference: pronouns (it, that) pointer words (this, that) place words (here, there), identity (same) and non-existence (no hats). Each term has individual wrinkles that are part of the repertoire of reference. What is, step by step, the ladder of abstraction for reference in the acquisition process? It remains dim, the sequence hard to see. Our explorations are designed to extract the latent ambiguity in each of them. The ambiguities are slightly contrived, but they reflect ambiguities that arise every day, that silently confound children, that flummox foreigners, and that must be mastered to be full adult speakers..

The overarching idea is this: grammar is laden with abstraction. Yet children may be innately designed to grasp exactly the abstractness of reference (milk is good) before they see how specific reference works (this milk is good). But much remains to be puzzled out.

Truly New Words

Picking out the meaning of a new word in the first place is the hardest. Lila Gleitman (nn1) has developed a simple method to show what an enigma it can be: she just asks people to learn a new word in an action situation, which should be easier than understanding an emotion term (like embarrass). Suppose I say “John loves the bloothe” and it has a picture of him hitting a baseball with a bat. What does “bloothe” mean? It could mean “bat,” “ball,” “game,” “swing,” “sport,” “challenge.” If I use a verb, things become more obscure: "John bloothes it completely" and there is a picture of John cutting a tree with a saw, we don't know whether "blooth" means "remove,” "saw,” "cut,” "hate,” “enjoy” or what. How we use both circumstance and syntax to triangulate meanings remains a mystery. There is no reason to think that children are different from adults in their mental ability to refer. Yet each grammar marks its own routes to reference, so there is much to acquire.

Are Words Good Pointers? What’s the Point of Pointing?

Even adding gestures will not do the trick. The physical act of pointing itself can be mystifying. Young nursery school teachers sometimes point at something in the distance, like a tree, unaware that their charges are stubbornly looking at the teacher's finger, not the tree. (nn2) So pointing is itself an ambiguous gesture. Pointing words (deictics) like this, that, here, there, nearby seem exact but tolerate more ambiguity than pointing fingers. Still these pop up quickly in the language of children as if children already knew how those ambiguities work. We will try to see if they do.

Inevitable Subjectivity

Reference is always half subjective, half reality. Words inevitably include more meaning than just physical features. Suppose I say, "have you read that?" pointing at an object, using one of the words that seems designed to point at a specific object. But I do mean not literally that book, nor even one with the same print or the same size. If I read Moby Dick and you did too, you could answer "yes,” even though mine was paperback and yours hardback. (nn3) "Read that book" means the content of the book, not the physical paper and print. If I read it out loud mindlessly, like a parrot, then I would not have really read it either. To "read" means to read and to understand. And to understand is unavoidably linked to slightly different understandings because each person's experience is different. Thus we rapidly move from a definition of a book to a definition of book which includes parts of ourselves.

That's actually how we use the word "understand" too. We say things like "you can't really understand a storm until you have been in one in a ship on the ocean.” (nn4) This equates understanding with internal sensual experience, not intellectual awareness of, say, weather maps. This is a caricature of the results of a century of philosophical discussion about reference. Although those discussions are abstruse, to say the least, they contain an insight we must be aware of when we speak with children. Every object word is partly subjective, for adults as well as for children. No words give pure, absolute reference.

A three-year-old, even a two-year-old, visiting a friend, might easily say "oh I have that at my house" looking at a toy. This demonstrates that the child’s version of that involves reference to an abstraction, not an actual specific object. Were it otherwise every parent would have to explain "oh he means that he has a toy just like your toy, don't worry, that toy will not magically move from here to there." No such instruction is needed because the child grasps this abstraction immediately. We no more need to instruct a child about the abstract nature of words than we need to tell a child how to make a three-dimensional reality out of a two-dimensional retinal image. One could easily imagine an organism where referentiality is actual and not abstract. Perhaps salmon returning to their place of birth have a brain marking that refers to that place and nothing else. Humans do not happen to be such an organism.

How to Catch the Emergence of Reference

To see how children learn about reference, I think one should go right out and ask some pertinent questions of children. Here are some simple and obvious ones that can show that even the word this refers to an idea of an object and not an actual object.

|Exploration 5.1: thisness, hereness |

|Suppose we just try to follow in the steps of our example: |

| |

|Ask a child: "Does your friend have this book at her house?" |

| |

|in a situation where one knows that she does and see what the child says. She might say "well she has one like it,” or |

|she might just say "yes.” Or she might say, "that's silly, how could she, the book is right here.” |

Caption: Deictic pointers without fixed reference

Another probe of this would be to use pictures. A picture of a dog can be in two places, but the same particular picture cannot be in two places. (If you think it can, then you have seen just the ambiguity in language that we are trying to talk our way around, but cannot really escape.)

|Exploration 5.2: Doggedness |

|Look at these two pictures which have the same dog in two places. |

|Ask a child: “Can you see a cat next to this dog?” |

|[Pointing to Picture 1 but identical dog is in Picture 2] |

|Picture 1 of Picture 2 of |

|Dog Dog +Cat |

|Bird+Cat |

| |

|If they allow the abstract notion of a picture of a of dog to equal “this dog,” then they will notice that picture 2 |

|allows a “yes” answer. If they understand “this dog” to be only picture 1—then the child will answer “no.” |

Caption: Abstract reference for ordinary nouns

If this can mean only what is literally pointed to--then the Dog in picture (1) is clearly not next to a cat. It seems quite unlikely that the child will say “No it is right there all by itself,” pointing to the same Picture 1, but it is not impossible, particularly for a young child or perhaps an autistic one that may understand context differently. Use of this for two different objects might be seen as a confusing switch, much like the jumping back and forth between "I" and "you" that many children stumble over. An adult says "Are you hungry" and the child says "yes, you are hungry" accepting "you" as his name. Would the same child resolutely point to Picture 1?

|Exploration 5.3: Variable Hereness |

|The word here is subject to the same kind of variation. The exploration could not be simpler: |

|Say “put your finger here” while you touch your own nose. |

| |

|Will the child touch your nose or her own nose? |

Caption: Self-referential “here”

Would the autistic child only touch your nose? Both responses are right, but if the child touches her own nose, then she has construed “here” as an abstraction with a hidden capacity for variation. “Here” is not exclusively where the Speaker is, but it can cover the Hearer’s “here” too. (To be sure that the child does not just imitate the gesture, one could point with a finger to your nose, but say: “put a penny here” and see what happens.)

It means that there is something like an algebraic variable X hidden inside the word here that allows the listener to introduce a new context. This is not an odd wrinkle of language--perhaps the source of a family laugh—-but it is really the essence of grammar and to use any human grammar, a child must be comfortable with the variable nature of reference.

Abstract the-ness

Abstract reference is not rare. It is present constantly. The use of a introduces a conceptual set that is unbounded. “Have you got a pencil or a cigarette?” means any one we can imagine. Once introduced, a turns into the, but still may not pick out a unique object, as we can see here:

|Exploration 5.4: How a turns into the |

|Suppose someone says at dinner: “Everybody has a spoon.” |

|[Speaker points at his spoon.] |

|Picture: people and spoons around a table |

|“Can you pick up the spoon and put it in your mouth?” |

|Now “the spoon” in fact refers to a whole set of spoons. |

|Prediction: child will pick up his own spoon, not the speaker’s |

Caption: Non-specific the

Note also that “the spoon” is not any of the spoons on the table either: you cannot reach over and take your neighbor's. It must be linked back to the "a spoon" of the previous sentence, which was yours.

Extension:

Now for contrast one could try:

“Can you pick up THIS fork and put it in your mouth?”

Then we would expect exactly that the child would lean over and get your fork.

Pedagogically, perhaps situations, not explanations, are all one needs to get the right. Working as a United Nations volunteer with my family in Sarajevo, I was thrust into a Second Language English class where they were explaining English articles to eleven-year-olds—-since Serbo-Croatian has none. The teacher said “a marks an unspecified person place or thing.” Asked to teach on the spot, I just used all my acquisition experiments instead and said, look when something is new, put in “a,” and as soon as it is there, it will magically turn into “the” like this: “I have a hat. The hat is red.” Although they generally refused to do homework, I said “come back tomorrow with ten examples like this.” They did, seemed to understand it perfectly, and loved it, which indicated once again that children just need exposure to distinctive situations, not explanation, to learn grammar. At the right moment, it would be a good game for any child, especially for children who seem to have a language deficit.

We still need to ask: why does a turn into the? It is actually a profound mental transformation. A child must understand that "a" turns into "the" in most sentences, but that it fundamentally introduces a mental set. The conceptual move from choice to chosen is a move from a general perspective to a particular perspective. That is, an arbitrary member of a set “a” turns into a very specific “the” (though it is still not necessarily a single physical object). Language finesses a major mental shift with tiny words. A child may have the concepts, but he must connect them to the tiny indicator words too.

All this exposition is needed to give a partial, non-technical explanation of something that feels like common-sense. It is because, indeed, common-sense itself has abstract principles buried in it just like vision has principles of geometry buried in it, which are much more complex to explain in words than just opening your eyes.

Michael Maratsos (nn5) did some clever experiments demonstrating the contrast between definite and indefinite. First he had a child knock over one of a row of cups. Then he asked "what did he do" and the children would say "knocked over a cup,” indicating that they were aware that it was one of a set. Then he put more toys before the child:

“Here is a row of ducks”

[put in a row of ducks]

adult: "take a duck" [child chooses one]

a. “Now give me a duck”

b. “Now give me the duck”

Answer (a) naturally invites the child to select a new duck and give it to you. But (b), irritatingly, calls for the child to surrender exactly the duck he just acquired, even though a whole row of them are present. Maratsos found that children at 2 years 9 months readily understood (b), but this result has not been consistently replicated (some children choose a new duck for “the”). This method is easily explored with anything handy:

|Exploration 5.5: Set => Particular |

|“Here is a row of pennies. |

|take a penny, now give me the penny” |

|or “now give me a penny” |

| |

|Will he give you a new penny or his penny? |

|Caption: comprhending definite articles |

Caption: Comprehending definite articles: articles and sets

Getting the child to produce a definite article is the most persuasive evidence of his knowledge. It can be done fairly simply if one includes a contrast.

|Exploration 5.6: the production |

|Take a white pen and a black pen and say: |

|“Here’s a white pen and a black pen” |

|picture of white pen and a black pen |

|Then put one in your pocket and ask the question |

|“Which one did I put in my pocket?” |

| |

|One should get the answer “the black (or white) pen” not “a black pen” |

Caption: Producing definite articles

Or cover up the black pen on this page and ask “which pen did I cover up”? Note that the choice of wh-word can make a difference. Which one asks for a specific reference (the X), while what [“what did I put in my pocket?”] might ask for a type-answer (an X). The curious adult might try both, using a range of objects, and see if different articles emerge.

Extension 1: We can add something to see if the child knows when a is called for as well:

white pencil white pencil black pencil

Now cover up one of the white pencils and ask:

“which am I covering up?’

and see if you get “a white pencil” since there are two, and the would imply only

one.

Extension 2:

Here is another simple method to see if a child comprehends the a=>the shift with a single object instead of a set. This can be carried out with any two objects that differ in one feature:

Picture:

a big white pencil a small black pencil

“Look here’s a nice black pencil” [and touch that pencil]

Now physically touch the other pencil, the white pencil, and ask:

“Am I touching the pencil?”

We expect the child to say “no,” but suppose the child says “yes.” Parents and teachers are often quick to say “he’s not paying attention” or “he doesn’t get it” but we really do not know.

Often, there are more intriguing grammatical explanations lurking around. In fact there are languages where if one mentions one member of a set, then the others may be referred to with “the,” for instance the Salish languages spoken by Indians (native peoples) in British Columbia. (nn6) There is evidence that a number of five-year-old children do just that. If children manage the a=>the shift, it means that the child grasps that the conceptual space an object occupies has moved from member of a set = a to a specific item = the which both speaker and hearer conversationally agree upon.

Are Bare Nouns Specific or General?

Some languages—-like Chinese or Russian--have no articles at all, so they must accomplish this sort of reference differently. English-speaking children begin without articles as well. We do not really know for sure what the two-year-old means when she says “I want cookie.” Maybe she is speaking Chinese or Russian. Is “I want cookie” general, as in “I want cake” or is there a specific cookie that she wants as in “I want that cake.” Even if one had a choice of only one cookie or one cake, it means something different to say “I want cake” or “I want the cake.” So we really do not know what “I want cookie” means for a child. Because I think children have ready access to abstractions, I think they start with the abstract and general meaning and learn the markers for specific which may vary from grammar to grammar.

There is an important corollary here. Often parents try to “simplify” their language as a way to help children. But if parents drop articles then they deprive children of the experience they need to learn them. All the little words are, in a way, the essence of grammar and children need a wide variety of circumstances and exposure to clear uses of articles in order to grasp them, since each grammar does them a little differently. Let us see if we can contrast a bare noun with an article and noun.

|Exploration 5.7: Bare Nouns “I want cookie” |

|Here is Billy, Mary, and Freddy |

|“Look here Billy has a chocolate cake” |

|[Picture of chocolate cake.] |

|[picture of Freddy eating Billy’s cake and |

|picture of Mary eating a white cake ] |

|“who is eating that cake and who is eating cake?” |

| |

|or one might ask the questions separately: |

|“who is eating that cake?” => should go to Freddy |

|“who is eating cake” => should go to Freddy and Mary |

|[Add illustration] |

Caption: “the” refers to member of a set

If that were a mystery word, then the child would hear “who is eating cake and who is eating cake” or “who is eating zipf cake and who is eating cake” and the word “zipf” would give no clue. Contrastive situations of this kind might provide the child with a crucial experience in grasping how to mark the difference between a general and a specific noun.

Nonetheless, we may be lucky here if we can get a comprehensible answer at all, since children below three years who are typically in the non-article stage, or just resist artificial situations. Again success is the only real evidence. If children fail, then it may be something peculiarly difficult about our exploratory setup, not any inadequacy of the child’s grammar. The rule of thumb should be: failure reflects our mistake, not theirs. If any of our explorations seem to hit a dead end, then just try a variant in six months. The fact that we have exposed the child, in a gamelike atmosphere, to a sharp context that may be beyond his current grammar could help him make the next step, even if we cannot see it.

There are Five Kinds of There: How Can a Child See Which is Which?

Reference goes from word to thing, but it may also go back to earlier words via pronouns. Take this not too implausible conversation:

Parent: “Put your hat up in the closet of your room”

[Child does it and comes downstairs]

“and put your coat there too”

[Child throws coat on the floor. ]

Parent: “Hey, didn’t I tell you to put your coat up in your closet?”

Well, no, actually you said “there.” The parent could be unconscious of the grammar used---it disappears so quickly---and does not know that she used an ambiguous pronoun (there) instead of a real reference. The locative there, which might be confused with a contextual pointer, requires the hearer to reconstruct an entire link from the discourse: there = up in the closet in your room.

The child experiences at least five distinct uses of there which has been explored by Robin Schafer and me. (nn7)

|1. “There!” |Satisfaction [just tied shoes] |

|2. “there, there” |comforting the child |

|3. “There is an elephant.” |Presentational (or pointing) => linked to non-linguistic |

| |context |

|4. “There are no elephants.” |Existential |

|5. “(We went to the zoo.) An elephant was there.” |Locative discourse link => links to some earlier locative. |

How he finds his way through this maze engages the most sophisticated aspects of linguistic theory, and we shall just skim the surface.

An important step is to devise ways to engender experimental evidence that delineates the differences. Robin Schafer and I decided to put existential and locative there into competition by making both possible. We used a felt board and in a small corner we made a small box which we labeled a garden. We then asked the child to put a dog on the feltboard with the following two alternatives:

Add Illustration

“Here is a garden. Now look the garden has a watering can in it.

a) And a dog is there.

b) And there is a dog.

Adults put the dog in the tiny garden 90% of the time, while 2-year-olds were 50/50. Gradually the numbers increased to about 80% at age 5 years. This means that the 2-year-olds took (a) to be (b) as if there were empty and did not indicate a location. Something is not realized yet. It seems like the hardest thing to do is make a connection across sentences (there = garden).

The same experiment could be done informally.

|Exploration 5.8: Where’s there? |

|Put a circle mark on the corner of a page (with pennies and paperclips nearby) and say: |

|Look at this page. A circle is on the corner. |

|a) There is a penny too. |

|Can you show me? |

| |

|Now look at this plate. A bean is on the edge. |

|b) A paperclip is there too |

|Can you show me. |

|The prediction is that the child will more often put the penny anywhere on the page while the paperclip will go near the|

|bean. |

Caption: “There” as location or as subject

This little exploration might not work for a classic experimental reason: the child might just do the same thing twice. But that is why the order is important. The first sentence really does not require the penny to go in the corner (though it would not be wrong), while the second really asks for the paperclip to go on the edge.

A look at the naturalistic data shows that very young children produce pointing there, existential there, and locative discourse link there, seeming to be unbothered by our subtle distinctions.

1) Pointing (or Presentational) Examples from youngest ages

a. June 1;7 June looks at a picture of a baby in the book.

JUN: baby.

MOTher: uhhuh.

JUN: there.

b. Eve 1;9: [pointing]

EVE: that Eve nose.

COL: yeah.

EVE: that Mom nose right there.

c. April 2;1:

APR: put that over there

response: mother moves the toys

d. Adam 2;3

ADA: sit dere .

Four to eleven months after the first examples of pointing there, an average of eight months later, the first self–generated, unambiguous examples containing an existential there occur, as in (2).

(2) Early examples of existential there

a. Eve 1;11 staring out of window

EVE: Fraser # no more squirrels.

MOT: no more what?

EVE: there no squirrels.

EVE: no more squirrels.

b. Eve 2;2: mother dishes up tapioca

EVE: there be no more.

MOT: no # this is all.

c. Peter 2;3.24

PET: are there any girls in this book?

d. April 2;9

APR: there was an alligator.

MOT: an alligator # that's right # that was in the movie.

e. Naomi 2;9.9 [playing with PlayDoh]

MOT: look at the kangaroo.

MOT: want me to flatten it again?

NAO: there was a big kangaroo.

f. Naomi 2;11.13

NAO: there-'is not enough room.

(3) Locative discourse link

a. Eve 2;2

EVE: went to Colorado.

MOT: yes.

EVE: he working there.

MOT: he's working there # uhhuh.

b. Peter 2;7.13

PAT: I think you better go in the living room .

PET: who's eating there ?

c. Naomi 2;11

NAO: I sticked it on these wood.

NAO: stays on there.

d. Adam 3;0

MOT: tonight we'll get it (=A’s pail) out of the car .

ADA: why Daddy put it in (th)ere ?

e. Sarah: 3;6.30

SAR: what's in that piano there (pronounced ?ar]

SAR: I hear somethin(g) goin(g) on there .

This evidence suggests that somehow the child knows in advance that all these kinds of expression belong in a grammar so he is looking for them.

What experience would tell a child which is which? Most people say that children “figure it out” in time but of course we are trying to figure out how they figure it out. However there is another possibility---if the child has the idea of “existential” as a part of Universal Grammar, as a biological gift, then it just needs the right piece of evidence (or a few pieces) to find it. It cannot be that UG just says: existential first, locative last, because there are locative-first sentences like:

Over there is the hat.

It could well be just those sentences that have the flavor of contradiction to them that push child grammar forward. Suppose a child hears the sentence

There is a nice hat here

with a nice hat indeed right here in front of him. Now if the child took both “here” and “there” to be locatives, then a contradiction is present: it cannot be here and there at the same time. But the situation reveals unmistakably that the accurate locative is “here,” therefore “there” must be “empty” and it must be the existential the child is looking for. It is this kind of experience which I believe moves grammar forward at every step. Our explorations, which develop stark choices, might also create the moments where grammar advances, if the child is ready at that moment to advance.

Nevertheless, our experimental data still suggests that some more subtle features of grammar are still undergoing acquisition and that locative pronouns that reach across a discourse pose a problem for children. We turn now to more intricate puzzles that children must, eventually, solve.

Advancing Grammar and Tangled Reference

Grammar is endlessly dazzling. Words and context become entangled in ways that children may not master until the school years. (Actually, we often have the suspicion that connections are grasped much earlier, but it is not easy to demonstrate it concretely.)

What follows are more advanced challenges that one might explore with older children. We present them, as always, in part to provide thought-experiments that illustrate the endpoints of grammar. One is not a mature speaker of English without them. (And even these examples do not get nearly to the bottom of the intricacies that the study of reference has revealed.)

Is the Part-Whole Connection Innate?

We often use the with no prior a:

I went to a restaurant. The menu was terrible

No menu was mentioned. Do such sentences topple a child’s easy idea that every the refers to an already introduced thing? Adults know that the link is there if we invoke our knowledge of the world—of the fact that menus are found in restaurants, and are sort of a part of restaurants. So in an abstract way the the is justified by a known object.

Jill deVilliers developed an effective way to elicit this knowledge without pictures but just a story which can be found on the DELV test. (nn9)

A bird flew out of a cage. Something was left open.

What was it?

Here we expect and get “the door” from children as young as three and four. Occasionally children and adults say “a door” which means that we have not uncovered all the dimensions of part-whole relations. If the child says “the,” nonetheless, we know that they comprehend the part-whole relation.

|Exploration 5.9: Part-the and Mystery Part-the |

|Everyday actions may allow us to elicit a part/whole relation easily: |

|Scenario: [take a bottle] Then say: |

|“here is a bottle of coke” |

|[take off the cap and ask] |

|“What did I take off?” |

| |

|Most likely one will get “the top” or “the cap.” |

Caption: “The” as part-whole indicator

The part-whole relation, though it seems more complex, may be more basic in the acquisition process. But could a child conceivably make the connection if “menu” is not a familiar word? Maybe grammar becomes the signal of part/whole relations for new objects? Suppose the part/whole connection is so automatic that a child may establish it without the use of world knowledge, even where one word is a mystery. Take this situation:

Extension 1:

[Add Picture]

Picture: crocodile with an odd-shaped hatlike thing

“Here is a crocodile. The zaff is strange, isn’t it?

Many children will answer this question “yes” and point to the hatlike object.

A natural objection is that the child is just entranced by the salience of this strange object. This objection can be examined by asking a slightly different question:

Extension 2:

“Here is a crocodile. A zaff is strange, isn’t it?

Here we expect to get the question: “what’s a zaff?” at least sometimes. If this is true, then we see that there really is an abstract Part/whole relation induced by a a…the sequence even if the nouns are not known. Of course, children may respond with as much creativity as the objects they observe. Then we will just not have found out about their articles.

Some children show knowledge of the in part/whole contexts like these more readily than in contexts above where the same object is involved. (Here is a hat. What did I put on? “A hat”). This shows how the acquisition path may not simply go from simple to complex. Some complex notions—like the notion of person and perhaps the Part/Whole concept are already represented in the child’s mind and therefore easy to recognize and utilize. The child most likely runs the part/whole system backwards: adult a..the sequences tell the child to induce a part/whole relation and thereby learn about the world.

|Exploration 5.10: Cumulative that |

|Why do we have both the words it and that? In lots of situations they cover the same ground, but there is a dynamic |

|difference: |

|Scenario: [Spoon and paper are on a table] Illustrate [??] |

|“Put the spoon on a mat. |

|Now put it on the floor” |

|Here we expect the child to put the spoon on the floor. But if we follow the first sentence with: |

|b. Put the spoon on a mat. Now put that on the floor. |

| |

|Then we expect to find spoon+mat on the floor. In other words, that picks out the object created by cumulative actions. |

Captions: “That” as an extension of reference

Some people allow it to be ambiguous, but that requires this interpretation.

When does a child know this special property of that? We do not know. It is one of the sophisticated features of language that could lead to misunderstanding between parent and child or might be a domain where a child with a language deficiency who is inattentive to context might err.

“ Put some salt on the potatoes and then put that on the dinner table.”

Child: puts salt on the potatoes and then puts the salt on the table

The child could have understood:

“Put the salt on the potatoes and then put it on the table”

and he would have done just the right thing for him, although even for adults the latter may be ambiguous. Still the former is not: that = the accumulated reference, nothing less.

Suppose the parent then says:

Why did you do that? Didn’t I just tell you to put the potatoes on the table?

Well, no, you said put “that” on the table,” but again the parent’s memory system has already reconstructed that=salt+potatoes, and therefore no longer actually retains the information that the word “that” was used. An adult may not realize that they have not actually said what they think they have said.

The real test of grammar is when children understand meanings that go against context and commonsense, as in the next two explorations.

|Exploration 5.11: Can a Child Cope with Nonsense? |

|Say to the child: “Put the noodles in the sink and then put them on the table” |

|=> put noodles on the table |

|“Put the noodles in the sink and then put THAT on the table. |

|==> put the sink on the table |

| |

|Would the child laugh and say “I can’t put the sink on the table!” If she does, her grammar is solid as a rock. If they |

|just put the noodles on the table, then they will have rejected some parental nonsense in favor of their own |

|commonsense, (an ability they may need to use elsewhere). Even if the child just looks up and frowns for a moment, after|

|hearing “that,” we have an indication that that that seemed wrong. There is a very serious point here. |

Caption: “That” and nonsense

There is a very serious point here. Grammar is fundamentally autonomous. We really control grammar when it distorts or challenges the environment, like when we deftly handle jokes that spar with reality.

Large here/ Small here

Words like here can grab a large or a small perspective---or both at once. (nn10) Take the following discourse.

When we start to drive to Michigan from Massachusetts I like to sit here in back, but when we get near there I like to sit up there in front. I don’t know why I like to sit here here and there there.

sit [small here] [large here]

seat State

The order is actually quite strict syntactically: the large here is always on the outside. Think about this:

Here we keep our shoes here

or to make it clearer:

Imagine a visitor from Japan discussing etiquette:

There [Japan] we put our shoes here [near door]

Here [USA] you put your shoes there [on rack]

We could see if a child understands these multiple references with a question like this which orders here/there as origin and destination:

|Exploration 5.12: Can a Child’s Mind Point Four Ways at Once? |

|[Put a chair—or anything--- near a child and another one in a corner.] |

|Say: “See the chair next to you and the one in the corner Can you put the one there here and the one here there? |

| |

|We could even order the events so that origin and destination must be clearly understood by the child and he |

|counter-intuitively starts with the further chair: |

|“Can you first put one there here and then one here there?” |

|= put the one there [origin] here [destination]…. |

|Four deictics words have to be simultaneously coordinated. |

Caption: Complex situational reference

(These were designed with a 7- or 8-year-old in mind, but perhaps some 4- or 5-year-olds will understand such sentences as well. Because our unconscious grammar unpacks these sentences so efficiently, we hardly notice how complex the surface of language is. The child has had to utilize his Point of View from four different angles at once to fix the right geometry on the situation. We will return (in chapter 16) to the intriguing topic of how Point of View is built into grammar. Now we turn to Negation as we move increasingly up a ladder of abstraction in reference.

How to Talk about Nothing: "No, I am not a nothing boy"

One stunning aspect of language is the capacity we have to refer to things that do not exist with a huge array of negative terms: no, not, never, deny, without, except. Furthermore, negation varies extensively across languages, so, although the concept may be inborn, its expression in each grammar must be deciphered by the child. Book after book has have been written about how negation works in dozens of languages. Its intricacy is like fine lace work.

It is hard to overestimate the significance of the fact that the child does not know which language he is learning. She is always implicitly asking this question: which of an infinite set of ways of organizing negation happens to fit my grammar? It should be no wonder that children first tackle negation in English as if it were some other grammar, for instance a Negative Concord grammar (“he don’t have no shoes”). We return to a real discussion of Concord when we ask how a child copes with dialect, but now we will just nibble at the syntactic corners of negation.

Sometimes the child's first word is "no.” Parents are taken aback when a child marches out “no” constantly. Some parents associate it with the “terrible twos.” We need to get beneath the emotional force of the word, to see the cognitive achievements it reflects. The use of “no” itself goes through stages involving vastly different notions of rejection, denial, and non-existence. A famous example is "no soap,” noted by Ursula Bellugi, (nn11) which means first "I don't want the soap" (rejection); next it may mean "there is no soap" (non-existence); and finally a proposition "that is not soap" (denial). Each enacts a distinct attitude, a posture toward reality.

The thrust of simple adult remarks can be surprisingly cloudy. Suppose a child says “Let’s throw away my broken toys” and the parent replies "here is a no good toy,” is he referring to the location of the object (“a no good toy is right here”) or making a propositional judgment about it (“this toy is no good”)? It is hard to tell, but the logical actions which follow are quite different. If it is a judgment, the child would look at the toy carefully to see if it is right, but if it is necessarily true then the child might grab it and throw it in the garbage. If children react too quickly to a statement, perhaps they have not grasped the force of the statement.

Denial

We must grasp the notion of a proposition before we can deny it. A proposition is a statement about the world that implies that it could be otherwise. And it is all wrapped up in the little word is. Is is an assertion, not just an observation. If “is” were prompted by every observation, then we would spend our lives putting observations into sentences [“my foot is on the floor,” “the floor is brown,” “the floor meets the wall….”]. There must be a motive for speech. If we say “that toy is broken” we are making a judgment about a situation that might be unknown and might be useful. That is, we are adding a proposition about reality to our shared reality. The realm of propositions is much larger than the real world; it has an entire negative universe. Negation gives us the mirror-image of reality: an assertion of what isn’t, what can’t be observed, but can be imagined. These facts, though subtle, are just the beginning of what negation entails. It is not that obvious how one might probe this issue with a young child, but one might just try this:

|Exploration 5.13: Denial or Existence |

|Put an empty bowl in front of a child and say: |

| |

|a. look, is this soup? [“no”] Why? |

|or |

|b. look, is there soup? [“no”] Why? |

| |

|For (a) we should get the answer “it’s a bowl” and for (b) “the bowl is empty.” But for children to have this right, |

|they must grasp the deep difference between an identifying proposition (it’s a bowl) and noting a property (empty). |

Caption: The difference between propositions and properties

How Many Ways Can We Say "No"?

Although our focus has been negating nouns, some nouns come from verbs and lose their verbal character. This contrast shows where we have turned a verb into a noun:

a. John likes not dancing

b. John likes no dancing

In (a) the verb is negated (with not) and therefore a subject for the verb must be present and John is the natural choice, so John is the dancer, while in (b) dancing is a noun, which names an activity as if it were a thing and calls for no (as in “no hat”), so no particular subject is required. The implication is that John dislikes the activity itself no matter who is the subject. It may seem like a tiny difference, but every adult sees it, and you are not a competent speaker of English if you do not see it. This is actually one of the first experiments I ever undertook and at first I thought that children would only grasp this difference at eight or nine years. We undertook experiments with children from three to nine years to give us a good span. (nn12) Remarkably, the three-year-old children exhibited significant knowledge of the distinction and the experiment was the first to show that preschool children grasped the refined grammatical distinctions that linguistic theory identified. Most people presumed that a child began with a vague generalized “no” that covered everything and could not possibly be distinguished from “not.” Indeed, many children did not show it on examples like these, but there was always a subgroup who answered non-randomly and exhibited knowledge.

Here's how we attacked the distinction on one front that is easily imitated. We asked a 5-year-old to simply tell us a story about sentences like these.

|Exploration 5.14: No is not Not |

|Can you tell me a story about [choose (a) or (b)]: |

|a. Mom likes not singing |

|b. Mom likes no singing |

| |

|If you chose (a), then choose (d) for: |

|c. Dad likes not running |

|d. Dad likes no running |

|[other choices: cooking, swimming, rollerblading….] |

| |

|For (a) we got and expect stories like "her throat hurts so she does not want to sing,” while for (b) we got and expect|

|stories like: "the kids' noise bothers her.” For (c) we might get “he’s always tired” and for (d) “it’s not good to run |

|in the house.” |

Caption: Understanding “–ing” as both a noun and a verb

The difference all flows from one sound /t/, the difference between no and not. If children grasp the difference they show knowledge of the abstract concept of a noun and they know more than the mistaken grammar teacher who says that a noun “is a person, place, or a thing.” A noun can be anything if it has a noun-marker like the, no, or some.

What do we know so far about the acquisition of no? Well children can use rejection, existence, and denial at a fairly early age. They can also separate no from not fairly quickly.

Negation sometimes defines reference in a two-step process. First it can modify an adjective, as in “these toys are not little,” which then becomes pronominal:

These are not little toys.

The not can either modify the whole noun phrase (little toys) or just the adjective (not little):

not little [toys] or not [little toys]

So here is how we might find out what a child thinks:

|Exploration 5.15: Not Little is not Not and Little (nn13) |

|Scene: plates, big toys, and little toys |

|“Show me the ones that are not little toys” |

| |

|Try to keep your intonation even. Adding emphasis both complicates and articulates the structure. Will the child pick |

|out the plates or the big toys? |

Caption: Ambiguous negatives

Suppose the child takes both big toys and plates. That suggests they see both sides of the ambiguity—or they took the meaning differently. If they take big toys then not has applied to just little. Experience suggests the opposite: children will let each modifier modify the noun by itself (not toys) before the modifiers modify each other. We found this in related work on how not and all behave.

|Exploration 5.16: Not all is not all not |

|Set up: Three bowls: one all nickels, one all pennies, one half and half |

|“Show me the bowl where the coins are not all pennies” |

| |

|This question should lead to the choice: half pennies and half nickels. |

Caption: More ambiguity: negation and quantifiers

We have found that children often take this to be:

the coins are all not pennies => all nickels

They apply the word not to pennies instead of just to all.

But why? Why would not apply to something further away (pennies) instead of something immediately nearby (all)? We do not know for sure. One way to look at such results is that they reflect a resistance to a certain kind of structure. Here is a simple way to see it. Children will understand: “the toys are not little.” It is just the phrase “the not little toys” that they stumble over. So what is the structural difference? It seems that they can undertake Merge: toys => little toys, then take that object and Merge not into [not [ little toys]], building a larger tree one-by-one. What they avoid is to Merge an already complex element: [not little] onto [toys]. Here is what it looks like spatially:

A. toys B. toys

/ \ / \

not toys little toys

/ \ / \ \

little toys not little \

\ \

toys toys

Why should there be a bias against (B)? Maybe (A) is just a biologically more natural structure. Such a claim seems strange and improbable to some people. I imagine that if one approached a person in the Middle Ages and said that not God but two invisible strands of DNA in the structure of a Double Helix carried all of who we are, he would mentally rebel. But nowadays the structure of DNA feels like just another piece of knowledge. We should find a structural bias in grammar no more surprising than the particularity of strands of DNA.

Whatever biology ultimately says, the core claim here is: children can only see what reference the adult has in mind if they can build a complex structure to match it.

Groups and Individuals: All is not Every

We often refer to things in bunches. But grammar separates different kinds of bunches, though often it looks the same. If I say, “I ate all the raisins” or “I ate every raisin” it seems to mean the same thing. How do we pull out our sense that all can be Collective, but every must be “distributive”? (nn14)

|Exploration 5.17: Distributivity and Collectivity |

| |

| |

|Say: 1) Point to all the boxes. |

|2) Now point to every circle or point to each circle. |

|Prediction: for 1) one or two gestures |

|for 2) four or six gestures |

|(Note: It is important to make the objects small, so that one is tempted to do just one gesture for all, but forced to |

|small individual gestures for each.) Treating all like each is not wrong, but treating each like all means that the |

|“distributivity” property is not recognized. |

Caption: Collective and distributive quantifiers

Every and each are not quite the same either. Every prefers a distributive reading, but allows a collective reading, while each is adamantly distributive. One could eat a bunch of raisins in one gulp and say “I ate every raisin” but not “I ate each raisin.” So why not try it and ask “Did I eat each raisin?” and see if the child says “no, not really,” or then eat some grapes one by one and ask “Did I eat each grape?”

If a child grasps the difference, they are building a connection between a set of objects and a set of gestures. It is not just recognizing a set but manipulating that notion in a particular way. This exploration can easily be reproduced with sets of pennies and nickels, etc.

|Exploration 5.18: Some of Some |

|The principle of Recursion can also apply, in situations, to indefinites. Consider this situation: |

| |

|Context: “Take some chips from this bowl |

|and go sit near your mother in the |

|living room” |

|[child takes chips B from bowl of chips A] |

|Now give some to your mother. |

|Child gives "some" to mother: |

| |

| |

| |

|The child might do any of 3 things: go back and take more from the bowl (A) for the mother, give all of B (=”some”) to |

|the mother, or recompute and give part of B (=C) to the mother. Will the child take the whole "some" =B or recompute a |

|new "some" and give "some-of-some" = C to his mother? |

Caption: How quantifiers combine

The last response would be, one might say, situationally recursive, although each some is in a different sentence. Informal experiments by undergraduates suggests that older children (4-year-olds) can do this kind of recursion (give C =some-of-some). A question remains about whether children at the age of two do the same thing. The astute reader will realize that this question is related to the contextual interpretation questions we asked about cumulative that.

Double Negation

Like some, negation can explicitly interact with itself: "I can not not go" where one "no" cancels the other out. Do children have it? There are indications that children initially see all negation as in "agreement,” leading to one negative expression, as from the boy who said "No I am not a nothing boy,” where the negatives reinforce one negative assertion rather than canceling each other out. Reinforced negation is called negative concord and it is the system of negation found in most languages of the world, including African-American English. Children easily say:

I don’t want no hotdog.

Two negatives are used to express one negation (I don’t want a hotdog).

Can children understand double negation as anything but concord? Imagine the situation:

|Exploration 5.19: Negating Negation |

|Susan is sick just on the day of her friend Dan's birthday party.Dan really wants her to come. |

|Now (in separate situations) say: |

|a) "you can’t not go" her mother said |

|b) "you can not go" her mother said |

|What did her mother want her to do? |

|Prediction: go for (a); stay for (b) |

Caption: Combining negatives

One might also just start a conversation and see where it goes. Suppose one says:

You can’t not breathe. Is that true?

If the child says “yes, I always have to breathe” then she has the double negation. If the child says “yes, but not for very long” then she took the double negation as one and responded to the statement “you can not breathe.”

Exploratory work suggests that four- and five-year-old children do not allow one negation to cancel another: (a) is treated like (b). Is the concept of double-negation truly unavailable? Much more careful research is needed before we see the child’s trail of negation, but we take a few steps toward that goal when we discuss African-American English (in chapter 14).

What’s the Same?

In real situations our meaning---our references—can be starkly, poignantly, bone-chillingly evident, but still those meanings are not in language alone, but in how our minds—not our words—make the connection to the myriad sensations of circumstance. Nothing in grammar gives absolute reference. Really? Let us argue with ourselves a bit: can’t we create words or a construction that gives absolute reference?

How about being utterly explicit and saying “the same,” as in “they both like the same girl.” Now same seems to be getting just what we want, or does it? What do you think when someone says:

they are both wearing the same dress

Now again it is not literally the same: two dresses are involved. Suppose we add exactly, well nothing changes:

They are both wearing exactly the same dress.

Will literally do it? No:

He made literally the same mistake twice.

Each time we cannot really fix on a single object: two mistakes were made, not one.

What do children understand same to mean "literal same" or "same kind" or both? If we look at conversations that have been transcribed, a brief search is perplexing (though a more extensive one would be worthwhile). There are only about ten uses of "same" in the files from all of a nursery child called "Peter" in our database. We find exchanges like this between adult and child (which will give you a feel for how obscure real conversation between parent and child can be):

Adult: whose frisbee is it ?

*Peter: huh .

Adult: whose frisbee are you looking for ?

*Peter: the same [!!] frisbee .

*Peter: the same [!!] frisbee .

Adult: the same frisbee ?

Adult2: the same frisbee ?

*Peter: the same [!!] frisbee .

This is the first spontaneous use of same by Peter and one has the feeling that something is awry. At a later point, beyond three years, we find the adjectival use of same but the real acquisition of same seems not to be recorded.

Adult: I go where Daddy goes .

*Peter: where Daddy goes .

Adult : yeah # the same school as your daddy goes to .

*Peter: same school as my daddy goes to.

*Peter: a green .

*Adult1: mmhm .

*Adult2: is it the same as that ?

*Peter: uh # yep # and this one's same as that as that .

The data shows the obscurity of what children say. The crucial issues we are exploring are unanswerable from this data. Does same mean literally the object itself, or is it a member of a class?

Now we have a question that an inquiring adult might seek to answer with a simple exploration, much like early work of Piaget's. It is appropriate for children who are older, but one might try it even with a 3-year-old. The word same is ambiguous between literally the same and figuratively the same. Thus if I say " we both own the same car" it could mean that we have one car in common or that we each have the same type of car (objects in each question should be varied).

|Exploration 5.20: When is the same not the same? |

|Set-up: two children have one kind of car, and a third has a different car. |

|[picture of 3 cars as described] |

| |

|Question: “Do two people have the same car? |

|[If “yes,” then] Show me.” [one answer: Fred, Bill] |

| |

|Same = literally the same car => “no” (token) |

|Same = identical type of car => “yes” (type) |

Caption: Different types of “same.”

If "no,” then the children treat "same" as referring to a specific object, if "yes" then they have the type reading. Now let us test for the token, but we will put two people in one car since that is clearer than ownership.

Extension 1:

Set-up: two children are in one car, and another is in a third.

question: “Do some children have the same car?”

If “yes,” which ones?

If the child says “Fred and Mary” then the specific object reading is available, because they are both in literally the same car. If "Fred, Mary and Bill,” then the child would be enforcing the "type" reading (which seems intuitively very unlikely), and the literal same car would be unacceptable.

Now let us see what happens if a combination arises:

Extension 2:

Set-up: two children in one car, a third in an identical car, and a fourth in a different car.

question: “Which children are in the same car?”

If they point to just the children in one car (Fred and Mary), then it is the literal reading, if three children are pointed to, then the type reading is chosen. It seems for my grammar that: the literal reading takes precedence over the type reading, so that only the two children in one car would be chosen, but it would be interesting to see how children handle this ambiguity. If they understand "same" as adults do, then they can instantly invoke the abstract properties of words. Now if one receives ambiguous results—suppose the child grabs the toys and moves them around before you ask the question. The answer is simply to try a variety of situations with the same design (dogs in houses, hats on men, people on horses, etc.). Ordinary household props should do the trick.

Extension 3:

Take one big Fork and two identical little forks.(A and B are little)

Fork Fork (A) Fork (B)

a. Pick up a piece of bread with the big fork and a cracker with a little fork (A).

“Did I pick up both things with the same fork?” (No)

b. Then pick up a bean with Fork (A) and a banana with Fork (B)

“Did I pick up both things with the same fork (Yes or No)?”

The answers should be interesting.

We have peered at a gallery of referential terms: that, here, there, same, the, no? We don’t have a single word for “maybe here” or “looks like this,” although actually we almost do: “they are look-alikes.” It is just not clear what gets to be a single word to mark reference. All grammars cover this territory, but not always just the same way. Now we turn to the last bastion of seemingly pure reference: Proper Names.

John Smith and his Corpse: Even Proper Names Refer to Ideas

Skepticism about our view that there is no absolute pure reference dies hard. So let’s confront the ultimate “real thing”: Proper Names. Proper nouns really do seem to refer to a live, concrete, utterly particular object, like a person. But is that all they carry? One form of a person is a body which can be a corpse. Suppose I say: “The corpse of John Smith is in the gully.” Now what is John Smith as distinct from his body? If it were identical to his body then we could reverse those terms: “the John Smith of the corpse is in the gully.” Or even say: “the John Smith of John Smith is in the gully.” But those sentences are just nonsense. Or suppose I say: “John Smith is important to all of us.” Well, now, is John Smith just his live body, or is he in part an idea which we carry in our heads? Each of us has a slightly different idea and the sentence “John Smith is important to all of us” actually treats that collection of ideas as if the term John Smith refers to them all, something far more complex than his body alone. Our diverse ideas may in fact be somewhat contradictory (I think he is good-looking, and you think he is a slob).

So the term John Smith refers to something that is not clearly bounded by any physical reality. The reader may feel his mind reeling down a hopeless slope of abstraction. And perhaps it is. There is no easy answer to what it means to have a meaning or to refer to the world around us.

This melange of concrete reference, implications, subjective attitudes should add up to an immense challenge for a child: hundreds of very strange mental abstractions combine in reference to a single object, a human being. How does the child grasp them all? The fact that the child has so little difficulty, strongly suggests that many concepts come prepackaged, like the concepts person and another person. The notion "person" automatically includes a sense of an independent will, as well as a host of physical attributes, like height, smell, awkwardness. The concept "another person" implies both shared and distinct qualities, crucially a different mind (see below). Many other prepackaged concepts may be available to us, making their acquisition as words much, much easier.

We live in a world of pure ideas which happen, in ways we do not fully grasp, to partially correspond to "a" real world outside ourselves. The frog has an image of that world which is also correct but different from ours. Note that this is not an assertion that all views of the world are equally valid, nor is it an assertion that it is impossible to arrive at an abstract characterization of the world that is free from human bias. It seems to me it might be possible. That is the scientific hope, but it takes a mammoth mental effort to sift out our human biases in the scientific enterprise. Language itself never loses its human stamp, its oddities of perspective that come from the human species.

The Literary Connection: Did Renaissance Folks Have More Possible Worlds than We Do?

John Donne, religious poet, sought to deduce the truth about reality from the imaginary, much as religions seek to define reality by articles of faith about invisible divinities. His poems often started with an indefinite article "Catch a falling star" and ended with a definite one like "the world is glorious.” (nn15) Just like the word if creates a world at odds with ours, the indefinite article a conjures up a “set of possible objects” and is part of inventing a possible world---like one where you can catch a falling star. (The image still lives in a modern popular song “catch a falling star and put it in your pocket.”)

Renaissance poetry used five to ten times as many indefinite articles as modern poetry. The religious focus is other worldly and indefinite articles help deliver the many images of idealized things and other worlds that was endlessly the topic of religious discussion.

In modern poetry, it is no accident that T.S. Eliot wrote The Wasteland and not A Wasteland. Sometime in the 18th century preference for direct sensation over imagination took over poetry and with it came the inclination to refer to a shared observed reality rather than sharing the imagination of possible worlds. Shared reality licenses the definite article the. Following other dominating philosophies in modern life, modern poetry often underscores the view that the concrete has extra legitimacy and the truly imaginary is suspect. Intellectually, we readily prize the actual and express suspicion about possible worlds---perhaps to our detriment.

Nonetheless our ordinary language honors the imaginary in almost every conversation. We, child and adult, do the same as Donne in miniature, pursuing a constant interplay among a set of mental visions, of possible worlds, before we ultimately commit ourselves and beliefs to an object we see or an action we take. It is so swift one hardly notices.

Conclusions: Mental Tools Embedded in Grammar

What leaps out from the hubbub of grammatical detail we have waded through is a very strong claim about how minds work: no terms actually have absolute reference in a child's experience. This claim remains forever lively among philosophers. Why is this important? Having no absolute reference has a profound philosophical benefit on the flip side: it reflects freedom in our capacity to refer. It means that our environment does not control our thoughts, that language is an instrument which child and adult can use creatively to connect to ever shifting experiences, to design new experiences. This freedom is inherent in the grammar, not something which must be learned. One might ask: could it be otherwise? It could: bees have a communication system that lacks “freedom from the environment.” Their communication system is a fixed method to establish location, nothing else. They can say where honey is, but not that honey makes them happy. (nn16)

A number of new tools in the child’s range of puzzle-solvers have emerged here. They are features of Universal Grammar which enable the child to figure out language like a complex quadratic equation. Recogniton of one feature feeds recognition of another. Exactly how that happens is what the field of language acquisition struggles to understand. We are still in the early phase of getting stillshots of the principles involved and laying out the questions. Building a dynamic, sequential model remains on the horizon. We have a jumble of observations but no one knows how all these referential terms influence each other’s acquisition. Does learning how that works help learn the? We can, nonetheless, summarize the abstract principles that have been on display:

1. We have shown how children unconsciously manipulate a notion of variable (here can have a hidden variable because it may not be just one place). At a later point, we will suggest that this notion may underlie an important kind of communicative disorder.

2. We have seen how children build what we can call reference chains: they make direct connections of identity across a discourse (there = up in the corner of the closet of your room). They must build chains to previous sentences as well as to context.

3. We have seen how the grammar provides a method through the a=>the shift to move from general to particular.

4. We have suggested that the child may use apparent “contradiction” as a device to isolate abstract grammatical features (there = non-locative).

5. We have argued that a child controls grammar just when he understands sentences that disagree with context or reality. It is freedom from the control of our environment that marks linguistic knowledge.

6. We have extended the simple principles into “advanced” reference, showing that reference can build upon itself, compose new meanings from the same parts (here here, some of some, not not etc). Here we can see that we are deploying a mechanism to express ourselves.

Chapter 4: The Absence of Absolute Reference 1

Truly New Words 2

Are Words Good Pointers? What’s the Point of Pointing? 3

Inevitable Subjectivity 4

How to Catch the Emergence of Reference 6

Exploration 5.1: thisness, hereness Error! Bookmark not defined.

Exploration 5.2: Variable Hereness 8

Abstract the-ness 9

Exploration 5.3: How a turns into the 9

Exploration 5.4: Set => Particular 12

Exploration 5.5: the production 13

Are Bare Nouns Specific or General? 15

Exploration 5.6: Bare Nouns “I want cookie” 17

There are five kinds of there: How can a child see which is which? 18

Exploration 5.7: Where’s there? 21

Advancing Grammar and Tangled Reference 26

Is the Part-Whole Connection Innate? 27

Exploration 5.8: Part-the and Mystery Part-the 28

Exploration 5.9: Cumulative that 30

Exploration 5.10: Can a Child Cope with Nonsense? Error! Bookmark not defined.

Large here/ Small here 33

Exploration 5.11: Can a Child’s Mind Point Four Ways at Once? 34

How to Talk about Nothing: "No I am not a nothing boy" 35

Denial 37

Exploration 5.12: Denial or Existence 38

How many ways can we say "no" 38

Exploration 5.13: No is not Not 40

Exploration 5.14: Not Little is not Not and Little 42

Exploration 5.15: Not all is not all not 43

Groups and Individuals: All is not Every 45

Exploration 5.16: Distributivity and Collectivity 46

Exploration 5.17: Some of Some 47

Double Negation 48

Exploration 5.18: Negating Negation 49

What’s the same? 50

Exploration 5.19: When is the same not the same? 54

John Smith and his Corpse: Even Proper Names Refer to Ideas 56

The Literary Connection: Did Renaissance folks have more possible worlds than we do? 59

Conclusions: Mental Tools Embedded in Grammar 60

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Child =>

Mother

B

C

B

A

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