Figure 1.1 was made by a 3-year-old boy. Sitting on his father’s lap he talked about the drawing as he was doing it. ‘Do you want to watch me? I’ll make a car…got two wheels…and two wheels at the back…and two wheels here…that’s a funny wheel.’ When he had finished, he said ‘This is a car.’
This was the first time that the 3-year-old had named a drawing, and it was this which initially proved both interesting and puzzling to me. How was this a car? Of course he had provided me with the key to an understanding of this drawing, through his commentary—‘I’ll make a car…got two wheels…’ For him a car, clearly, was first and foremost defined by the criterial characteristic of having wheels. His representation of the car focused on that aspect of the object to be represented, and he had the means available to him, for representing these features of car, namely wheels, or ‘wheelness’.
Wheels may in any case be plausible as a defining feature of cars for many 3-year-old children. From a physical point of view their gaze is likely to fall on wheels as they walk up to a car; and the wheel’s action—on a toy car as on a real car—is perhaps the most prominent feature; and so on. So a 3-year-old’s interest in cars may plausibly be condensed into and expressed as an Figure 1.1 This is a car’
interest in wheels. They in turn are plausibly represented by circles, both by their physical visual appearance, and by a mimetic, gestural representation—the circular motion of the hand in making the circle gesturally repeating the action of the wheel in going ‘round and round’.
I assume that all of us act precisely in this fashion in making signs. Signs arise out of our interest at a given moment, when we represent those features of the object which we regard as defining of that object at that moment (that is, wheels as defining of car). This interest is always complex and has physiological, psychological, emotional, cultural and social origins. It gets its focus from factors in the environment in which the sign is being made. We never represent ‘the whole object’ but only ever certain criterial aspects. Even in highly realistic adult representations only certain selected aspects are represented—never ‘the whole thing’.
Signs are metaphors in many ways. In the car example there are two steps: (a) ‘a car is (most like) wheels’; and (b) ‘wheels are (most like) circles’. These structures are established by analogy. Hence the result is a (double) metaphor: circles are ((like) wheels; wheels are (defining of)) a car. Signs are the result of metaphoric processes in which analogy is the principle by which they are formed. Analogy is a process of comparison, or classification: x is like y (in criterial ways). Metaphors are classificatory statements, whether as ‘My love is like the ocean’ or as ‘Selling tobacco is like drug-peddling’; as such they are crucial in cultural, social and cognitive ways. My metaphor about tobacco defines me as belonging to a certain social group; my metaphor about love gives you insight into my ways of thinking in my emotional life. Relations of power between makers of metaphors determine which metaphors will carry the day and pass into culture as ‘natural’, neutral expressions. Children are, on the one hand, less constricted by culture and by its already existing metaphoric arrangements, but on the other hand, they are usually in a position of lesser power, so that their metaphors are less likely to carry the day.
In this conception, signs are motivated relations of form and meaning, or to use semiotic terminology, of signifiers and signifieds. Makers of signs use those forms for the expression of their meaning which best suggest or carry the meaning, and they do so in any medium in which they make signs. When a child treats a cardboard box as a pirate ship that is the making of a sign, in which the material form (the box) is an apt medium for the expression of the meaning ‘pirate ship’, because what the child
regards as the defining aspects of ‘pirate ship’ at that moment—its vessel-like qualities, ‘containment’, ‘mobility’, and so on, are sufficiently well expressed in the form (and the material) of the box.
Language is no exception to this; linguistic forms are also used in a motivated manner in the representation and communication of meaning. For a child in the pre-school years, there is both more and less freedom of expression. More, because they have not yet learned to confine their meaning-making to the culturally and socially facilitated materials, forms and media. And to the extent that they are unaware of conventions surrounding the making of signs, they are freer in that respect. They have less freedom because they do not have the rich cultural semiotic (meaning- making) resources available for their making of signs. So for instance, when a child, labouring to climb a steep slope, said This is a heavy hill’, he is constrained by not having the word steep as an available semiotic resource. The same is the case with the semiotic resources of syntax, and of textual form. But using heavy to express ‘this takes a lot of effort, it is hard work’ is a motivated conjunction of an existing form (the word heavy) and meaning (‘this is hard work’).
As children are drawn into culture, ‘what is to hand’, becomes more and more that which the culture values and therefore makes readily available. The child’s active, transformative practice remains, but it is more and more applied to materials which are already culturally formed. In this way children become the agents of their own cultural and social making.
The child’s transformative, productive stance towards the making of signs is at the same time a transformation of the sign- maker’s identity, their subjectivity. Certain of the child’s sign- making practices are noticed by adults around them; and some of these (i.e. language, drawing, building) are valued, at least for a while. Many are not noticed, and not valued, or are relegated to the category of ‘play’, for instance. Those which are valued become subject to the regulatory intervention of culture and of society. Of these, the child’s encounter with language and literacy receive most attention from adults, and these are therefore most subjected to regulation, in the process of the child’s being drawn into culture. The adult’s own overwhelming focus on language and literacy makes it difficult for us to see children’s meaning-making principles. Those of their practices which we call ‘play’ we do not consider as a part of communication, and therefore not worthy of real investigation. And for those of their practices that we do focus on, and in relation to their learning of language and literacy in
particular, we already have our fully developed even if inappropriate or even quite incorrect theories. No wonder that the child’s own semiotic disposition is not recognized in most institutional settings. Worse, the folk-theoretical notions which most adults (including teachers, academics, and professionals in the health and welfare field) bring to these questions are positively at odds with the child’s disposition. Notions of language as a relatively stable system, of signs as arbitrary and stable conjunctions of meaning and form, can lead to pedagogies and to curricula which are fundamentally mismatched with the potential, ability and dispositions of the child learners.
SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF SPEECH AND