Dsa Zsuzsnna, SAAPIC 1, Petru Maior 2014 University of Targu-Mures

The Acquisition of Social Structure: Towards a Developmental Sociology of Language and Meaning

How members of a society or culture make sense of, or assign sense to, their environment over time is central to the persistent problem of how social order is possible.1 Social order, as mentioned by the author, is one of the persistent problems of todays life, since it keeps the world, the societies we live in and various cultural groups away from chaos. This is done through language, through the communication of thoughts and feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written symbols2. Language is acquired by every child starting with the eighteenth month and can serve as blueprints of behaviour3 or society they are part of. At the beginning children only imitate adults, they do what others do, thus acquiring a sense of belonging to a certain society. According to Katz (1966, pp.110-12) the modern linguistic theory (language theory) consists of three subtheories such as phonological theory, syntactic theory and semantic theory. The phonological theory deals with the speech sounds of the childs language, the syntactic theory applies when the child starts to put the sounds into structures and the semantic theory starts when the child interprets sentences as meaningful messages.
1

Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, p.42, The

Free press, NY
2

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/language

Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, p.44, The Free press, NY

Dsa Zsuzsnna, SAAPIC 1, Petru Maior 2014 University of Targu-Mures

At this point the child makes the connection between language and meaning, he learns that, for example, if the oven is hot and mother says do not touch it means that if you touch it you will get burned. In Katzs view the phonological and semantical component are purely interpretive, they relate the abstract formal structures to a scheme of pronunciation and conceptualization. Thus pointing out an important fact about languages, namely that sounds and meaning are interconnected. Meaning is a matter of how members of a society or culture acquire a sense of social structure to interpret everyday life. A childs vocabulary is filtered by his interpretive procedures when hes exposed to, and imitation of, adult speech and triggered by auto-stimulation or the perception of the environment. Every member of a society has to develop the competence or the skill to assign meaning to their environment so that they can understand each other. e.g. Eve lunch.4 How does a mother decide what her child is trying to say? How can she decide upon the most appropriate meaning of the childs utterance? Taking grammar into consideration this could be expanded to Eve had lunch, Eve is having lunch, Eve had lunch, Eves lunch and so on. But what if the child utters this at noon when she is at the table with a plate of food in front of her and she is all busy? How does this acquire a meaning? Certainly, in these circumstances Eve lunch means Eve is having lunch. Later when the plate is placed in the sink and the child is getting off the chair the same utterance can have different meaning: Eve had lunch. Thus, every utterance, every sound can get a different meaning according to the circumstances it is mentioned in.
4

Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, p.57, The Free press, NY

Dsa Zsuzsnna, SAAPIC 1, Petru Maior 2014 University of Targu-Mures

The acquisition of interpretive procedures is parallel with the acquisition of language, with the childs interpretive procedures gradually replaced with the adults interpretive procedure, thus facilitating the learning of lexical items and the development of simple denotative meanings. When examining utterances of certain members of a society or culture it is important to mention that everyone relies on what (s)he knows and that a world is built into the message. The occasion of the utterance, the biography of the hearer-speaker and the social relationships embody a world view which is determined by the self. To sum up, the author emphasizes throughout the chapter the interpretive procedures which later develop into a whole social order and how a child becomes oriented to both generic and actual cultural recognition and use of normal forms in his environment. The constant status of interpretive procedure, for example, allows a normal child to acquire language in a family of deaf parents and the interpretive procedures allow deaf persons to acquire a sense of social structure that is nonverbal, thus developing a sense of meaning and self.

Dsa Zsuzsnna, SAAPIC 1, Petru Maior 2014 University of Targu-Mures

Bibliography:

Cicourel, Aaron, Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, The Free Press, New York

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/language

Dsa Zsuzsnna, SAAPIC 1, Petru Maior 2014 University of Targu-Mures

Hand-out

How members of a society or culture make sense of, or assign sense to, their environment over time is central to the persistent problem of how social order is possible. Question: How does this excerpt connect with language, meaning and self? Language theory:
Phonological theory Syntactic theory Semantic theory What can you tell me about the phonological theory? What can you tell me about syntactic theory? What can you tell me about semantic theory?

Questions:

Interpretive procedures: Eve lunch How would you interpret the phrase give above? What made you interpret it like it?