The Faces of Language

What is language? What aspects of this universal communicative system are distinctively human and distinctively significant for socio-emotional development? Four characteristics are most important.

The first is that language is a system of categorization.

Word meaning, grammatical rules, all linguist structures function as categories at can be used to go “beyond the information given”.

Categories provides us a basis for acting in the future on the basis of the past even though the past never repeats itself exactly.

The challenge for child learner of language is to perform a leap of induction for each word, a leap from a few examples (a few dogs, a few shades of green, etc) to a general concept, and to do this 6000 times by the age of 6.

A second distinctive quality of language is displacement; we are not limited to the here-and- now, but can talk about persons, objects and events not present. In this way language unites past, present and future.

A third essential property of language is productivity or creativity.

The overwhelming majority of utterances we produce and hear are novel. When we encounter new situations, or have new meanings to convey we can construct new sentences with reasonable hope that we will be understood by our listeners.

Finally, language has both a public and a private face. That is, language has an interpersonal function – as an instrument of social interaction - and intrapersonal function – as an instrument of cognitive functioning without any distinct formal marking to distinguish them.

This view of language has a long intellectual heritage, but in psychology today is most associated with the name to the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky whose rediscovery by English-speaking psychologists in the 1960s transformed cognitive and developmental psychology.
The Faces of Language