Ditte Boeg Thomsen
The languages of the world provide speakers with linguistic tools for explicating their own and others’ perspectives on things and events in the shape of a wide variety of specialized perspective-marking constructions coding the attention, belief and knowledge of human conceptualizers as well as alignment and divergence between these perspectives (Dixon 2006, Duijn & Verhagen 2018, Evans 2010, Evans, Bergqvist & San Rogue 2018a, b). Such perspective-marking grammar helps speakers coordinate their cognitive states and manage differences between them (Verhagen 2005), and within cognitive linguistics, the crosslinguistically central role of perspective marking in grammar is expected to reflect core human sociocognitive ability and motivation to coordinate with fellow human beings as attentional and mental beings (Verhagen 2005, Evans et al. 2018a). While drawing on insights from psychology (e.g. Tomasello et al. 2005), these cognitive linguistic studies do not investigate the hypothesized relationship with social cognition directly. To examine the nature of this language-cognition relationship, children’s acquisition of linguistic perspective marking offers a useful window, as it allows us to disentangle to which degree acquisition of perspective-marking grammar depends on prior sociocognitive skills and to which degree linguistic development affects these skills.
In this talk, I present a suite of studies targeting children’s acquisition of linguistic perspective marking and its relationship with sociocognitive development. Starting from corpus studies demonstrating typically developing children’s rich and nuanced spontaneous use of two different types of perspective-marking grammar (complement clauses and engagement particles) in peer group conversations (2-6 years), I turn to experimental studies directly examining the interplay between linguistic and sociocognitive development. Presenting evidence from longitudinal and training studies in both typical and atypical development, I show how children’s acquisition of perspective-marking grammar affects their sociocognitive development by supporting their abilities to represent and reason about mental states. The results further suggest a bidirectional relationship, with early sociocognitive skills also predicting later skills with linguistic perspective marking.
References
Dixon, R.M.W. 2006. Complement clauses and complementation strategies in typological perspective. In Explorations in Linguistic Typology: Complementation: A Cross-Linguistic Typology, ed. R.M.W Dixon & A.Y. Aikhenvald. Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press, UK.
Duijn, M. van & A. Verhagen. 2018. Beyond triadic communication: A three-dimensional conceptual space for modelling intersubjectivity. Pragmatics & Cognition 25,2: 384–416.
Evans, N. 2010. Your mind in mine: Social cognition in grammar. Ch. 4 in Dying words: Endangered languages and what they have to tell us, 69-80. Chicester/Malden/Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Evans, N., H. Bergqvist & L. San Rogue 2018a. The grammar of engagement I: framework and initial exemplification. Language and Cognition 10,1: 110-140.
Evans, N., H. Bergqvist & L. San Rogue 2018b. The grammar of engagement II: typology and diachrony. Language and Cognition 10,1: 141-170.
Tomasello, M., M. Carpenter, J. Call, T. Behne & H. Moll. 2005. Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28: 675-735.
Verhagen, A. 2005. Constructions of intersubjectivity: Discourse, syntax, and cognition. New York: Oxford University Press.