Conventionality and contrast in language and language acquisition

Abstract

Conventionality and contrast provide the pragmatic basis of language use for adults. These principles play a vital role in the process of acquiring a first language as children learn how to interact using language. Conventionality and Contrast in Language and Language Acquisition Eve V. ClarkConventions associated with complex activities are vital to their smooth working. In much everyday behavior, people do many things in predictable ways, including dressing, eating, shaking hands, driving, talking, and so on. They observe conventions: agreements that hold for their group or community on how to act. These help streamline the interactions they apply to. Imagine driving along a road with no agreement about which side to drive compared to everyone driving on the left. The convention "drive on the left" allows drivers to avoid collisions. Prominent among activities that depend on conventions is our use of language.In this chapter, I review some reasons that speakers depend on conventionality and its corollary, contrast. I begin by defining convention, following Lewis (1969), and then consider the role of convention in language and its relation to accessibility, which depends on frequency. Both conventionality and contrast have consequences for language use. I then turn to evidence that children observe these pragmatic principles from the start and argue that they are basic to the process of acquisition. In learning conventions for language use, children rely on experts-speakers who form the speech community. This places a premium on interaction in the acquisition of a language. 11 2 A convention for doing X is generally described as the usual way of doing X. This has been defined more formally by Lewis (1969, p. 42):A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P, • Everyone conforms to R; • Everyone expects everyone else to conform to R; • Everyone prefers to conform to R on condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniform conformity to R is a coordination equilibrium in S.

Children's (and Adults') Production Adjustments to Generic and Particular Listener Needs

“…A less studied possibility is that children's difficulty may lie with pragmatic decisions about “what is worth talking about” from the perspective of a listener, which may go beyond considerations of the listener's unique knowledge. These decisions rely on a variety of factors such as the need to comment on things that are unexpected (Greenfield, ), to use locutions that are conventional (Clark, ), to deviate from conventional choice of words to mark a less stereotypical status quo (Levinson, ), and to keep utterances short to reduce production costs for the speaker and processing costs for the listener (Zipf, ). Such pragmatic decisions interact dynamically with speakers' non‐linguistic conceptualization of the message they want to convey and affect the way speakers package information into specific syntactic units (Levelt, ; Papafragou & Grigoroglou, ).…”

Young children create partner-specific referential pacts with peers.

“…Cultural conventions such as the words of a natural language are common ground for all the members of the relevant speech community (E.V. Clark, 1993Clark, , 2007. More locally, however, interlocutors create more ad hoc conventions within interaction for referring to, for example, the cushion instead of (equally felicitously) the pillow.…”

Matters of accuracy and conventionality: Prior accuracy guides children's evaluations of others' actions.

“…may provide useful information about what kinds of things are appropriate to do or say. Thus, although an accurate source may be trustworthy for doing or saying the correct or "right" thing, a conventional source may be equally trustworthy for doing or saying the accepted or preferred thing (Clark, 2007; see Kalish & Sabbagh, 2007).…”