On the Genesis of the Child’s Concepts and Lexical Meaningsстатья из журнала
Аннотация: The article shows that the primary cognitive units of infants, thanks to which they begin to understand individual fragments of the visible world, are integral situations (‘a boy is eating porridge’, ‘Mother is reading a book’, etc.), since they satisfy the initial children’s needs and desires. In the process of child’s development, these situations are divided into specific participants (BOY, PORRIDGE, SPOON, PLATE) and relationships (‘plate – porridge’, ‘porridge portion – spoon’, ‘spoon – boy’s mouth’). The separated participants, i.e., the functional parts of situations, become the first children’s concepts. Later, in the same way (by dividing new situations into participants), more special and complex concepts are formed: ‘motor’, ‘carburetor’, ‘trombone’, etc. As a result, the article concludes that human concepts are not innate, as J. Fodor and early Chomsky believe, or are combinations of the simplest innate concepts, according to A. Wierzbicka, I. Mel’čuk and S. Pinker. All concepts rather arise as products of the decomposition of holistic situations that the child has previously learned.Simultaneously with the formation of concepts, a thematic classification arises in children: when sorting triads of objects (dog-cat-bone; plate-cup-spoon), the child combines into one group objects that jointly participate in a typical situation (e.g., the dog and the bone, the plate and the spoon), rather than objects that perform similar functions in the situation: the dog and the cat or the plate and the cup (taxonomic classification). It is shown that the source of the thematic classification is not encyclopedic knowledge, as it is commonly believed (G. Murphy, E. Markman), but the primary integral situations and the binary relations arising from their decomposition.In the final part of the article, the role of language in the formation of children’s classifications is analyzed, the genesis of metaphorical and metonymic meanings is discussed, and refined definitions of these meanings are given.
Год издания: 2021
Авторы: Alexey Koshelev
Источник: Journal of Psycholinguistic
Ключевые слова: Language, Metaphor, and Cognition, Child and Animal Learning Development, Language, Communication, and Linguistic Studies
Открытый доступ: gold
Выпуск: 2
Страницы: 156–170