Monday 1 February 2021

Ontogenesis: Generalising From Individual Names To Class Names

Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 73):
The ideation base is thus a resource both for construing experience and for construing its own construal of experience. It has the potential for expanding itself precisely because it includes a theory of how meanings are construed When children begin to make the transition from proto-language into language (that is, when they begin to develop the system of the mother tongue, typically early in the second year of life), these resources for self-construal are not yet in place. The first things that are construed by naming are individuals; there is as yet no potential for taxonomies of general classes. But children soon take the critical step of generalising across individuals (see e.g. Halliday, 1993a, on generalisation). From a lexicogrammatical point of view, this means that naming has been generalised from individual names ("proper nouns") to class names ("common nouns").


Blogger Comments:

Viewed through the lens of SFL Theory, the shift from naming individuals to naming classes is the shift from assigning token-value relations (identity) to assigning token-type relations (ascription: instantiation); see Halliday & Matthiessen (1999: 145).