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Airenti G., 2004. The development of the speaker's meaning. In: C. Florn Serrano, C. Inchaurralde Besga, M.A.Ruiz Moneva, eds., Applied Linguistics Perspectives: Language Learning and specialized Discourse, Anubar, Zaragoza, 1-27
The development of the speaker's meaning
Gabriella Airenti
Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Universit di Torino, Via Po 14, 10123 Torino, Italy
Abstract
Pragmatics is a very diversified field where merely descriptive approaches stand side by
side with attempts of theoretical conceptualization and formalization. What is generally
ignored in this debate is that, since communication is a fundamental human capacity,
cognitive plausibility must be a condition to make a theory acceptable. Moreover, as all
human capacities develop from the birth on, the results of developmental studies have
to be taken into account in the theoretical work. In particular, developmental studies can
be useful to clarify three classical questions of the debate in pragmatics: the relationship
between language and communication, the very definition of communication, and the
relationship between communication and action. In the paper I analyze these subjects
and I propose an attempt to see communicative ability in its development.
Key words:
communication, development, theory of mind
1. Introduction
Pragmatics is a very diversified field where merely descriptive approaches stand side by
side with attempts of theoretical conceptualization and formalization. What is generally
ignored in this debate is that, since communication is a fundamental human capacity,
cognitive plausibility must be a condition to make a theory acceptable. Moreover, as all
human capacities develop from the birth on, the results of developmental studies have
to be taken into account in the theoretical work. Some developmental psychologists
have tried to use concepts coming from pragmatics to better understand language
acquisition. However, findings of developmental psychology have not influenced
pragmatic theories. In my view this procedure has led to the acceptance of incorrect
assumptions. In particular, developmental studies can be useful to clarify three classical
questions of the debate in pragmatics: the relationship between language and
communication, the very definition of communication, and the relationship between
communication and action. In the following I shall analyze these subjects and I shall
propose an attempt to see communicative ability in its development.
2
2. Language and communication
In daily life situations we commonly find a communicative use of language. The
analysis of particular cases where language is not used to communicate but simply as
the expression of thought, or where pathology allows us to discover the possibility of
mastering grammar when normal cognitive or communicative capacities are lacking has
been used to confirm the theoretical autonomy of grammar pleaded by Chomsky in all
his work (Blank, Gessner and Esposito 1979; Bellugi, Marks, Bihrle and Sabo 1988;
Udwin and Yule 1991; Smith, Tsimpli and Ouhalla 1993). Actually, a number of cases
have been studied where the opposite situation occurs: a grammatical impairment does
not affect communicative capacities (Curtiss 1977). Moreover, infants are involved in
interactions for at least a year before the first rudiments of language appear. Finally,
adults communicate also by nonlinguistic means. Thus it is reasonable to pose the
question: does a communicative capacity exist which develops independently of
language and of other cognitive capacities? And in case of affirmative answer to the
first question, how is this capacity structured?
This formulation of the problem is not accepted by the supporters of universal
grammar nor by scholars working on pragmatics. This is the conclusion that can be
derived from the debate between Chomsky and Searle. Searle (1972) considers that the
separation between language and communication is the major defect of Chomsky's
theory in that it means to separate language from its main goal. Chomsky (1975) objects
that language is the expression of thought. Language can be used appropriately without
any goal of inducing an auditory, that can also be absent, to hold a given belief or to do
a given action. Communication for Chomsky is only one function of language and not
an essential one. Chomsky's remarks are very important from the psychological point of
view in that they allow for the definition of a communicative function supported by
cognitive structures separated from the ones responsible for language. Actually, there is
no reason to assume that the cognitive faculties underlying communication are the same
containing the rules of grammar. However, here is also the point where Chomsky has to
be abandoned. In fact, to maintain the primacy of grammar Chomsky and his followers
completely understate the role of communication. I would agree that the linguistic
structure has no intrinsic communicative function. At the same time, one has to
recognize that in real life language is mostly used to communicate. In fact, the very
pathological cases where grammar is managed in the absence of pragmatic abilities
show that deprived of these abilities, language is perceived as heavily defective, a kind
of non mastered tool (Curtiss 1989).
In pragmatics we find the symmetrical position. Primacy of pragmatics is derived
from the consideration that language is prevalently used to communicate: this fact is
3
taken as the demonstration that the communicative function cannot be separated by the
language structure. In particular, for speech act theorists speech acts, or to be more
accurate, illocutionary acts, are primitive acts where the conventional aspect deriving
from language and the cognitive aspect expressed by communicative intentions conflate
in a single phenomenon (Austin 1962; Searle 1969).
In the light of developmental data this debate can be seen differently. The main
discovery made by cognitive psychologists studying infants is that before language
acquisition children have a long history of interactions with others (Schaffer 1977;
Bullowa 1979). The main question is if these initial interactions are instances of
communicative behavior with two active partners, or if the appearance of
communication is due to the attitude of the caregiver playing her role of attributing
meanings to the infant. All the students who have focused on the interaction between
infants and their caregivers (the mothers in the majority of cases) stress the fact that a
very special interaction establishes whose features are particularly interesting: the
participants develop a kind of proto-conversation where, in contexts which are typical
of their relationship, the two partners alternate in the exchange of some simple gestures
and sounds. The conventions of these exchanges are shared by the partners. The
features which most researchers single out are the alternation and the form of dialogue.
These features often lead to interpret first interactions as games or rituals, where the
partners behave according to a stable frame which constitutes the basis for little
variations. Trevarthen (1977) has stressed the main characteristic of first interactions
defining them as interactions without object, a kind of implementation of
intersubjectivity per se.
The turning point toward different kinds of interactions is in general situated around
the ninth month when there is an important improvement in child's motor abilities. The
autonomy acquired by children in this period causes a break in the preceding form of
communication. A new form of interaction appears where communication includes the
external world as its proper object (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). This is the phase
where the transition between preverbal and verbal communication is situated. This
conclusion is opposed by those developmental psychologists concerned to use the
concept of communication as it has been defined by Grice (Gelman 1983; Shatz 1983).
As the basic requirements for communication, i.e. intentional action and the possibility
to model others' mental states, appear rather late in the development -in particular the
second feature appears when language is already an elaborated tool- these authors
conclude that no continuity has to be found between first interactions, which are not
communicative, and successive linguistic communication. In this view communication
is the result of the coupling of different abilities which is realized only in an advanced
phase of language acquisition.
4
However, from the cognitive point of view, the fact that infants have structured
interactions before language acquisition necessarily means that they have an ability to
do so. Be the manifestation of this ability real communication or not, it is reasonable
to consider that this capacity has to be involved in successive communication.
Otherwise we should assume that there is a complete break between first interactions
and successive instances of communication. It seems, on the contrary, that at least
alternation, repetition, and slight variations on the basis of an established routine are
features of first interactions that persist in communicative exchanges.
Etnomethodologists who have studied conversation consider that turn-taking rules are
the basic element of dialogue (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). So if we cannot
prove that the first exchanges are instances of complete communication, and indeed we
have good reasons to think that they are not, we must admit that they show elements of
what will be later communicative behavior. These considerations added to the fact that
even in the adult age actions can substitute for speech acts lead to the conclusion that
communicative intentions and their linguistic expressions can be cognitively separated.
Other considerations can be done on the role of speech acts. In the studies on
language development some researchers maintain that the acquisition of language
derives from the use of some prototypical speech acts done by children before language
appears (Bruner 1975; Bates, Camaioni and Volterra 1976). These researches rely on
the finding that a child is able to make a request, to take the main example, before being
able to formulate it in a linguistic fashion. In these studies a fundamental role is given
to the adult. It is the adult that through a long process of modeling leads the infant from
the first cries manifesting an undifferentiated discontent to express her intentions in the
form of speech acts (Bruner 1983a,b). This position has the merit of showing that
language appears in a situation where a practice of interactions has already been
established. But many questions remain unsolved. No detailed analysis is attempted of
the relationship between the basic elements of communicative intention, which babies
already possess in a very precocious phase, and the development of conversation
abilities which result from a process of learning where the actual interaction with adults
is fundamental. Moreover, the interpretation of speech acts, and in particular of indirect
speech acts, is a problem even for theoretical pragmatics. Therefore, it seems doubtful
that this concept, at least as it is defined by philosophers of language, can be used to
clarify language acquisition. In fact, the introduction of the concept of speech act in
developmental studies has played an interesting role. Developmental psychologists have
found this concept useful to show that communicative intentions are present before
speech and to establish a continuity between nonverbal and verbal communication. At
the same time the linguistic connotations of this theory have in a way hidden the fact
that there is more to first interactions than the sheer acquisition of what later will be
5
conventionalized in speech acts. Besides, the necessity to explain conventionalization
has pushed toward the attribution of a preponderant role to adults. It is the adult who
leads the child to express her intentions in the appropriate way, i.e. by the appropriate
verbal speech act. In fact, from a cognitive point of view, the most interesting point is
to analyze the capacity of newborns to participate in interactions in an active way. The
adults teaching would be ineffective without the infants predisposition to respond.
Another very interesting point which is not discussed by these authors is the
interpretation of indirect speech acts. Data coming from the studies on children's
interpretation of indirect speech show that indirect speech acts do not present special
difficulties for children who have just acquired language (Shatz 1978). What constitutes
the main difficulty for speech act theory is not perceived as such by children who
currently react to indirect requests like to imperatives. This is another demonstration of
the possibility to separate the communicative intention, which is correctly interpreted,
from its linguistic form. Clearly, an adult and a child do not have the same
interpretation of indirect speech acts. An adult does understand the real illocutionary
force of the speech act but can also derive from the specific indirect which has been
used, for instance, for a request, its degrees of kindness, strength, constrain, etc. The
young child does not understand all the hints that the specific linguistic form can
provide, but nevertheless understands its real force. This means, in my view, that the
interpretation of the speech act is done on the basis of the available interactions. The
typical adult/child interaction is one where the adult proposes something for the child to
do and the child complies. Thus any situation of this kind is interpreted by the child as
an imperative. On the contrary, the adult knows that the reference to an action to be
done by herself can be part of different kinds of interactions and uses all the linguistic
and extra linguistic indicators to choose the proper one.
Developmental psychologists have discovered and described first interactions. Some
of them have then chosen speech acts as the suitable theoretical tool to link their
findings with pragmatics, i.e. linguistic studies. In fact, from the cognitive point of
view, this choice has consequences which deserve consideration. Since speech acts are
a merely linguistic device, the attention is focused on the linguistic aspect of
interactions. The point is to explain the acquisition of verbal communication. In this
perspective the function of first interactions is simply to prepare young children to
language use. I think that the opposite path should be followed. The cognitive analysis
of interactions occurring before the appearance of language should be used to explore
the part of adult communicative interactions which is not depending on language. The
very existence of this aspect shows that language and communication do not coincide. I
would argue that this explains why speech acts are not a good model of communication
and have the flaws which have been suggested by many authors. In fact both
6
Chomskyan theories denying the communicative function of language, and pragmatic
theories, which link language and communication in an indissoluble way, paradoxically
lead to the same understatement of nonlinguistic bases for communication. This has
resulted in an unsatisfactory description of that cognitive ability which allows humans
to perform communicative interactions whether linguistic or not.
3. Cooperative action and communication
In speech act theory the communicative function is included in linguistic expressions.
Other authors in pragmatics consider instead communication as a form of cooperative
rational action (Grice 1975,1978; Sperber and Wilson 1986a). Here the accent is put on
the inferences allowing for the interpretation of communicative acts. In Airenti, Bara
and Colombetti (1993a) we have argued that in communication a clear distinction is to
be drawn between behavioral goals and conversational goals. Communication is the
way humans have to share with others, at least in part, their private mental states using
conventional rules of conversation. Behavioral goals when communicated are presented
openly and can be negotiated. Rules of conversation are the modality normally used to
this aim. This means that the goal of maintaining conversational cooperation is a
permanent one, while behavioral cooperation has to be established each time and is not
necessarily achieved. This is the case, for instance when we politely refuse a proposal
we are not interested in. Let us consider a Gricean example which has been commented
also by Sperber and Wilson (1986b):
At a tea party:
A: Mrs. X is an old bag
a moment of appalled silence
B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it?
Grice's interpretation is that B's utterance evidently violates the maxim of relevance and
that this intended violation leads to the interpretation that A's utterance has to be
ignored as inappropriate to the situation, a social gaffe. This could implicate - writes
Levinson (1983) - for instance that one of the lady's relations is nearby. The analysis of
Sperber and Wilson is that no violation has been done. The principle of relevance,
which is by definition valid, plus the fact that A's utterance has been ignored lead to the
correct interpretation: B communicates that A's utterance is a blunder. The
interpretation I suggest is different. With his/her utterance A intends to share with B a
content of his/her mind, namely a judgment about Mrs. X. With his/her answer B
communicates his/her refusal to share the judgment. The modality utilized by B is
adequate to keep the conversation as correct as it can be in a situation like that, and it is
interesting to note that to this aim the author of the example feels the necessity to insert
before the answer a silence, i.e. a marker of dispreferred second. So conversational
7
cooperation is maintained while behavioral one is not. If we consider the exchange from
the point of view of conversation all we can say is about a very limited part of A's real
or pretended beliefs that s/he has decided to share with B. From this point of view A's
private reasons to present his/her belief about Mrs. X (s/he could not hide it anymore,
s/he wants to provoke B, s/he thought that B shared these feelings, etc.) or B's reasons
to refuse (one of Mrs.X relations is nearby, s/he suspects A to test him/her, s/he really
likes Mrs. X, etc.) are not interesting. On the contrary, these reasons are fundamental if
we choose to see the exchange from the behavioral point of view. In fact, for A to
understand the pragmatic meaning of B's utterance, B's private reasons are interesting.
If, due to B's utterance, A acknowledges the presence of one of Mrs. X's relations
nearby s/he will consider the whole episode as a regrettable accident. Unless s/he had
pretended not to see Mrs. X's relation and in fact s/he had maneuvered to instigate B to
say things which can disgrace him/her with Mrs. X. If A thinks to be in a powerful
position with respect to B, his/her utterance could be a test of B's allegiance, and B's
answer can be seen as a refusal to comply. We can imagine several more scenarios
involving different partners' beliefs. The point I want to focus on here is that a
pragmatic interpretation cannot be derived by general laws of action. In fact what is
involved is what the partners want to do with each other and the conventional modality
they use to do it. In Airenti, Bara and Colombetti (ibid.) we have argued that the
knowledge used by the agents to interpret the behavioral aspects of communication
comes in structures we have called behavior games. Behavior games are given as
shared. Understanding the speaker's meaning of an utterance is to recover the link of a
conventional linguistic expression with a shared behavior game. In this interpretation
we maintain that communication is a kind of action. The point is that communication
has its specific rules which are not the same that the agents use in cooperative action.
Let us see now the problem from a developmental point of view. The analysis of the
development from birth to the end of the second year, when we can say that the
fundamental structure of language is acquired, shows a characteristic bifurcation.
Language use begins rather late and the acquisition is very fast. On the contrary, the
attempts of interaction start soon after birth and have a slow evolution in which
subsequent child's acquisitions, like motor abilities and language itself, enter as tools
capable to enhance the child's possibilities. As we have seen, the role of adults in the
first interactions has often been stressed. The caregiver attributes a meaning to all the
facial movements, minimal gestures, gazes, smiles, sounds of the baby, often repeating
and interpreting them. This is certainly true. But what is also interesting from a
cognitive point of view is that the child already in a very precocious phase can
participate to these interactions in an active way. The partners establish then a series of
routines well-known to both the participants. It is easy to show that we cannot consider
8
such a situation as communication in the Gricean sense. But at the same time one
should note that two features are already present which lead us to perceive first
interactions as a kind of dialogue: namely the alternation and sharedness of exchanges.
Furthermore, these interactions appear well before the child becomes able to carry out
an action in an autonomous way. The cognitive study of first interactions shows that the
predisposition to sharedness is the very aspect that humans possess from the beginning,
and from which more complex successive relationships are constructed. It can be noted
that according to Premack and Premack (1994) who have studied infants after
chimpanzees, the intention to share experience is what makes the difference between
the two species. It has been shown that the child tries to get the other's attention on
objects not only to make requests but also simply to share her excitement (Premack
1990), and no comparable behavior has been reported in chimpanzees. On the same
line, Butterworth (1991) proposes that agreement on the objects of shared experience be
considered a protocommunicative prerequisite for comprehension. Thus if we focus on
development we are not allowed to consider communication as derived from action.
The child has from the beginning the capacity of sharing experience with others. This
allows for the construction of the first interactive routines, behavior games in my
terminology. A typical example of routine is the game of imitation. Some authors have
attributed a great importance to imitation as a means for the baby to acquire knowledge
of the other. In particular Melzoff and Moore (1977) have shown that imitation is a
primary phenomenon starting immediately after birth. Newborns can and in fact do
imitate tongue and lips protrusion. The authors use these data to formulate a theory
where imitation, seen as an innate capacity, has the main function in the development of
child's ability to acknowledge the similarity of the other (Melzoff and Moore 1993).
What is interesting from our point of view is that this capacity is exploited both by the
child and the mother to construct typical exchanges. We know that the caregivers
frequently propose the game of imitation imitating themselves the child. In fact if we
analyze imitation episodes in their context, we see that this is a way to exhibit
interaction without requiring to refer to any external object. With the development the
acquired capacities are included in the imitation sequences: manual movements
between six and eight months, manipulation of toys between eight and ten months
(Pawlby 1977). If we come back to the beautiful definition by Trevarthen of infants'
interactions as "communication without object", we find on one side the baby who
initially has only her predisposition to interact and on the other side the mother who
proposes games which are rapidly acquired and become the background on which the
baby constructs her relationship with the others. According again to Trevarthen, when
motor abilities develop at about nine months, interactions dramatically change
including in the relationships the external world and in particular objects which can be
9
manipulated, showed, asked for, etc. Thus, we can conclude that the phase when speech
acts are formulated even in a nonverbal way is not the first stage of the development but
the point where motor abilities, i.e. the possibility of performing intentional actions,
meet with the already established capacity of participating in interactive games with
others.
4. Modeling the other and learning to participate in conversations
A three-year-old child has acquired the capacity of speaking with a sufficiently rich
vocabulary and following grammatical rules. But still her way of participating in
communicative interactions is very different from the adults' one. Child's
communication at this age differs in two ways from adult's one. First, the child is not
able to detect and repair certain errors, to produce and understand ironic and deceptive
utterances, to distinguish between deception and joke. Secondly, the child is unaware of
the strategies which are normally considered typical of polite conversation. These two
kinds of problems are very distant from each other but they rejoin in one point. They
both are due to the lack of representational capacities of the child, still to be developed
at this age. According to recent studies on the theory of mind the young child is not able
to model higher order mental states, i.e. mental states on mental states (Perner and
Wimmer 1985). Many experiments have been done and the results have been included
by Perner (1991) in a general framework. Children do not acquire the concept of
representation until they are four years of age. This acquisition allows them to
understand that different individuals may entertain different representations of the same
object. Already in Perner (1988) it was noted that this fact could be seen as a difficulty
if we adopt for communication Grice's theory of nonnatural meaning (Grice 1957)
where second-order beliefs are part of the definition. In fact also the beginning of the
solution was offered by Perner. Normal communication is based on the transparence of
intentions and beliefs. This enables young children to communicate. On the contrary,
the development of higher-order mental states is necessary to understand errors and
nonliteral uses of language. Actually, Gricean theory needs revisions both for formal
reasons and in order to make it satisfactory from the cognitive point of view. In Airenti,
Bara and Colombetti (1993a) we made a formal proposal which is in the line of
Perner's intuition. Starting from Strawson (1964) Gricean definition of nonnatural
meaning has been integrated and developed by several authors introducing more levels
to rule out cases of noncommunicative transfer of information. This poses two more
problems. On one side these are logical solutions with no psychological reality in that it
is implausible also for an adult mind that the very fact of performing a communicative
act implies a large number of calculations. Besides, it can be shown that no definition
including a finite number of nested intentions is acceptable. For any nth-order intention
10
there is always the possibility that the intention n+1 is not verified making the
interactive situation not fully overt. Our proposal has been to define the intention to
communicate as a mental state S such that an actor entertaining S intends that the whole
S is mutually recognized by the actor herself and her partner. This solution is
compatible with the requirement to define a degree 0 of communication. My hypothesis
is that this primitive mental state is part of infants cognitive endowment. It corresponds
to a situation of complete sharedness which is the only possibility for a young child.
When the concept of representation is developed, the acquisition that sharedness is not
always verified allows for the production and comprehension of more complex
communicative acts where sharedness is not verified in some point. Failure, irony,
deception are very different cases of this kind whose peculiarities have been analyzed in
Airenti, Bara and Colombetti (1993b).
As we have seen at the beginning of this section, the other aspect where the
communication of a young child differs from an adult's one is the management of
conversation. Here a distinction has to be done between the organization of turn-taking
and other strategies. In fact, as we have already seen, the respect of alternation seems to
be the first feature of interactions that an infant acquires. For the other features of
conversation we seem to have the opposite situation: children look highly incompetent.
As Forster (1990) has noted, conversation skills are submitted to an explicit learning. A
child who, as we have seen in Section 2, is perfectly able to understand an indirect
speech act will not spontaneously use polite indirect forms unless taught to do so. In
this we can see a link with the theory of mind again. In fact the great majority of
conversation strategies are aimed at the mutual respect of face (Brown, Levinson 1987).
This is the reason why, for instance, it is not suitable to introduce a topic according to
the partners' goals abruptly but each topic has to be preceded by greetings and other
polite formulas which start the interaction and that have to be repeated before the
interaction can be interrupted (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). This is also the reason for
the frequent choice of indirect formulas, the so-called indirect speech acts, the pre-
sequences, the markers used to introduce dispreferred seconds, the hierarchy of
preferences in repair, the important set of phenomena studied by the analysts of
conversation (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1988). The rule of
mutually preserving face prescribes that the partners have a possibility of an honorable
retreat at the conversation level, we could say, when their behavioral goals do not
match. As said before conversational cooperation has to be achieved even when
behavioral one is not. Brown and Levinson stress that preserving face is a universal
phenomenon which constrains but does not determine the way it is performed in
different cultures. What links conversational rules to the problem of representation is
the fact that only the possibility to represent others' mental states makes it possible to
11
understand rules whose motivation is social and which are realized in a purely
conventional way. Only when able to form an accurate model of the other the child will
understand that an indirect request can be more effective than a direct one, that in some
way language can affect others' feelings, that nobody likes refusals, etc. The possibility
to deal with these facts in an effective way is the result of a long process of learning
done by trial and error and with the constant assistance of the adults.
In conclusion, the problem of what communication is is twofold. We have to define
the minimal requirements for communication, and the definition we provide has to give
account of the fact that infants are able to participate in communicative interactions
very soon. There is no reason to assume that these basic principles change in adult life
and in fact they guide an important part of normal behavior. But adults have one more
capacity: they can model the others' minds. This means that communication can
become a much more complex phenomenon where the conversation artifices are used
both to convey and to interpret pragmatic meanings, adequate to the represented mental
states.
5. The development of the speaker's meaning
In this section I shall propose to place the features of communication which have been
discussed in the preceding part in a new framework. Actually, when we take the
developmental point of view a number of pragmatic problems can be viewed in a
different perspective: instead of an heterogeneous collection of phenomena we have a
set of cognitive capacities which develop in time allowing for communicative
exchanges of increasing elaboration.
If we follow the first months of an infant the main feature which strikes us is her
ability to share experience with other humans. This can be seen in the almost immediate
synchronization that is achieved in the first common activities with the mother, feeding
in particular. As the infant acquires a new ability (sounds emission, smile, etc.) she
performs it toward the caregiver, the ability becomes an element of the interaction. This
is true, as we have seen, also when no specific necessity is present. At this stage of
development it seems difficult to see any possible derivation of this intention to share
from more primitive mental states. Such a precocious ability can be explained only by
postulating the existence of a primitive mental state. In Airenti, Bara and Colombetti
(1993a) we have called it intentional communication and have given a formal definition
of it. In a non formal way we can say that infants have the predisposition to share
experience with others. Initially, this ability is exercised using the poor elements the
baby has at her disposal: simple gestures, smile, vocalizations. But these poor tools are
inserted in a frame of alternation which constructs interactions. These interactions
become part of the experience of the child and constitute the basis for new interactions.
12
In theoretical terms, these interactions become part of the knowledge of the child in the
form of games, i.e. structures describing stereotyped interactions. The relationship
between the baby and the caregiver at the beginning is rather asymmetrical. It will be
the caregiver who will propose games which can be played by them or who will qualify
a gesture of the infant as communicative inserting it in a game. But the child manifests
the capacity of participating in the games, implicitly understanding their rules: turn-
taking, repetition, possible slight variations on the basis of an established routine which
attributes meaning to single actions. I make the hypothesis that the capacity of
interpreting others' communicative behavior on the basis of a game is innate, and that it
constitutes with communicative intention human endowment for communication. If we
define communication as manifesting the intention to share a behavior game -where
understanding a communicative act means interpreting it within the frame of a behavior
game- first interactions become cognitively interesting for two reasons. They can
explain how the most simple examples of communication work and how the basis for
pragmatic interpretation is constructed.
To clarify this point of view, let us see an example. In (Airenti, Bara and Colombetti
1993a) we have presented a number of rules for understanding the speaker's meaning.
The rules are the formal way to express how a partner understands the speaker's
meaning, where the speaker's meaning is expressed in terms of the relations of actions,
linguistic or not, and mental states with games. These rules have been thought of as the
complete set of possibilities an adult has to understand the speaker's meaning. My
hypothesis is that these rules are progressively acquired by children. I shall not discuss
here all the rules. I just want to show as at least one of them can apply also to infants.
Let us examine the following rule:
In the shared belief space, playing a move of a valid game counts by default as
communicating the intention to play the game with the partner.
This rule can be paraphrased in this way. If a partner acknowledges that an actor is
overtly playing a move of a typical game of theirs, he will interpret this act as the
intention to play the game. For example, if John and Susan normally eat biscuits when
watching a movie together, the fact that after dinner Susan goes and fetches biscuits,
will be interpreted by John as the proposal to play the 'movie game' - and he will react
looking for a movie, or discussing a possible choice if he agrees with the proposal while
he will explain that he is tired, he has work to do, he prefers to do something else, etc. if
he doesn't. If we analyze first interactions we can see that also babies behave according
to this rule. When mothers do some activity with their babies, at feeding and changing
time for instance, or when mothers shift infants position, they are involved in
interactions where the mothers have a complex repertoire of actions and babies respond
with gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions, etc. Already when the baby is
13
two/three months old each pair develops typical modalities of interactions, games: the
mother tickles the infant who smiles. The mother questions the infant who coos. So
also in this case the baby identifies the other's action as connected to, part of a game. In
fact observations of this kind have been done on eight-day-old babies (Chappel and
Sanders 1979). Finally, evidence in favor of an actual engagement of the infant in the
communicative games comes from studies, made in laboratory on ten-week-old
children, aimed at studying the effects of perturbations of normal interactions (Tronick,
Als and Adamson 1979). The mothers were instructed to slow down their rhythm with
the babies or to interrupt exchanges remaining still-faced, or to show only their profile
to the babies. In all these situations the infants adjusted their reactions appropriately to
the actions of their partner. For instance, when the mother interrupted a communicative
exchange with the baby and froze her expression, the baby tried all her repertoire of
facial expressions and limb movements in an attempt to restore normal interaction. As
stressed by the authors of these studies, the previous results show that the infants do not
exhibit a rigid pattern of behavior into which the mothers fit themselves. On the
contrary, babies are aware of the communicative situation and react accordingly. A
major point distinguishing these interactions from adult ones is asymmetry. It is up to
the caregiver to propose games which do not exceed the infants' capacities.
When the abilities of the baby augment, and in particular motor abilities manifest,
the real change is that the baby makes the world enter in her interactions and can
propose games invented by herself: for instance she throws away an object expecting
the mother to pick it up and give it back to her. What makes playing games in these
situations different from the situations where adults are involved is again asymmetry.
Conditions of validity of games are in general dictated by adults. The amusing game of
throwing objects, for instance, cannot be done with breakable or heavy objects, it has to
be stopped at lunch time, etc.
In this phase we can say that at least two other rules for understanding the speaker's
meaning are active.
In the shared belief space, if the actor communicates that she intends to perform a
move of a valid game, then by default she communicates that she intends to play the
game with the partner.
In the shared belief space, if the actor communicates that she intends to induce the
partner perform a move of a valid game, then by default she communicates that she
intends to play the game with the partner.
In fact, if the caregiver says: "I am looking for the pail and the spade" or "Go, Tom, and
fetch your pail and your spade", in both cases the child will understand that the
caregiver is proposing to play the game to go out to a sand-pit.
14
The maturation of language in a sense is not a revolution, in that it does not change
the fundamental structures of communication. All the same it offers a lot of new
possibilities on the side of content. Games that can be played using only nonverbal
items are limited in number. Moreover language speeds up the acquisition of new
games and particularly their transmission. In fact what is characteristic of first
interactions is that few people are involved. To construct games just performing actions
requires a very intimate acquaintance. When two persons know each other very well a
simple gesture performed by one can be understood by the other as the proposal of
playing a certain game but the same gesture for a foreigner will be completely
meaningless. In the first interactions this is the only actual possibility. Language allows
for naming games and proposing them to a much larger set of persons.
Up to this point what the child can do is a restricted set of operations. The richness is
given by the number of games that can grow rapidly, but the procedure remains simple
as simple is the model of the other which the child uses: people are influenced by
communicative acts as doors are influenced by pressure. A very young child in case of
failure just cries, both if a door does not open and when the mother does not give a
desired object (Harding and Golinkoff 1979). Starting with the second year the child
will try to repair the failure but again the strategies will not be different in the two
cases: repetition of the act, repetition with some change, etc. (Golinkoff 1983). What
makes communication possible for a child who is not able to deal with higher order
mental states and to conceive the fact that different persons can hold different
representations of situations and of others' mental states, is the attribution of sharedness.
The ability to perform more refined communicative acts is due to the comprehension
that sharedness is not always verified. But sharedness is still the assumption that is used
in trivial exchanges even in adult life and which makes them not problematic. The
derivation from sharedness of nested mental states is the way to cope with particularly
critical situations as for instance when we need to know if someone wants to deceive us.
The ability to produce realistic models of others is also a prerequisite to use the whole
set of conversation rules.
Conclusions
My paper has started with the premise that no theory of language use can be done which
is based only on adults communication. In fact communicating is a human activity and
as such develops from birth to adult life. Taking into account development enlightens
phenomena which are otherwise rather opaque. Interactions evolve before language is
acquired and this fact has to be explained. Two possibilities are left. Either first
interactions are communicative, and in this case we have to admit that communication
develops separately from language, or we reserve the term communication for
15
linguistic interactions and we consider that in the first period of life children interact
with others in a way which is not communicative, but in this case we have to explain
what these interactions are. The reason to deny that first interactions are communicative
derives from Gricean definition of communication. It involves higher order mental
states which we are not allowed to attribute to infants. On the other hand, it seems
sound to attribute to babies the capacity to deal with sharedness. A theory thus can be
conceived where there is a continuity from first interactions to adults' ones. A theory
where the starting point is the reciprocal attribution of sharedness, and the evolution is
based on the successively developed ability to treat with higher order mental states.
This explains both that communication is possible very soon and that first interactions
are limited. Moreover, it explains the trivial character of an important part of adults'
interactions (Airenti 2001).
Intentional communication is a mental state and cannot be derived. Saying that
communication is a form of action is a theoretical definition which is very useful in
order to understand the social value of language but there is no demonstration that the
intention to communicate is linked with the mental structures underlying action (Airenti
1999). When a child indicates something to an adult in order to take possession of it,
we say that she is doing a speech act. In fact this is not correct because what is specific
of speech acts is their conventional form. What the child is doing in reality is to express
a communicative intention regarding a given object. Something more can be said at
this point on indirect speech acts. From the developmental point of view this concept
looses its content. In fact, we have already seen that as regards comprehension children
do not perceive any difference between indirect and direct forms. They understand the
nonconventional form which is behind. As regards production, some forms are learned
late (Gordon and Ervin-Tripp 1984). An explicit and repeated teaching is necessary to
have a child acquire forms like: "Would you please give me..." or "I would like to
have..." , etc. At the same time some indirect forms are among the first acquired speech
acts: think of expressions like "I want chocolate". All these facts show that this concept
is cognitively implausible.
The speaker's meaning is the interpretation of a communicative act against the
background of what the agents share about the relational context, the behavior game. In
my view games are fit to explain both first nonverbal interactions as they are described
in developmental literature and the mix of nonverbal and verbal interactions used in
adult communication. The concept of behavior game seems useful to clarify the role to
be attributed to cognitive and social aspects in communication. Communication is the
product of individual minds who have at their disposal specific structures to represent
interactions. This is the constraint on the set of all possible inferences that a
communicative act in principle could admit. This constraint is active also in production
16
leading to exclude what is not part of the available games or of their admitted
extensions. The fact that this is the content of an individual mind explains the
possibility of errors.
Conversation rules are the socially admitted way to exchange communicative
intentions. They repose on two basic facts regarding interactions: the alternation and the
preservation of face. The first aspect is one of the infants' first acquisitions and
according to the necessities of the dialogical structure it will be specialized in turn-
taking organization rules. The second aspect develops when the children have the
possibility to represent themselves and to represent the others as individuals with
possibly different representations. This is the minimal requirement for a child to
understand that private intentions involving others have to be negotiated and that
conversation strategies have a function in this process. The management of the
techniques of conversation is the result of some years of learning. The slowness of the
process is explained by the fact that even if the motivation is universal the
implementation of conversation strategies is strictly conventional and culturally
determined.
Acknowledgements
The research reported in this paper has been supported by the MURST (Italian Ministry
for University and Scientific and Technological Research) for the year 1998.
I thank Carlo Severi and Maurizio Tirassa for their helpful comments on the
manuscript.
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