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The linguistics encyclopedia 336
language will serve for the child, and the meanings are learnt during interaction with
other people.
Halliday’s study of Nigel’s language begins when Nigel is nine months old, a stage
which most researchers would describe as prelinguistic. Halliday (1975, p. 14), however,
takes a constant concomitance between sound and meaning, or expression and content, as
qualification for a child sound to be part of a language, provided that it can be shown that
this sound-expression pair ‘can be interpreted by reference to a set of prior established
functions’ (ibid., p. 15). While adult language is usually thought to have three levels—
sound, syntax, and meaning—the child language at this early stage is said by Halliday to
have no syntax level: each element of the language is a content-expression pair (ibid., p.
12). Furthermore, the expressions at this stage bear no necessary relation to the
expressions of the adult language, although there is continuity between child and adult
language in Halliday’s model, as we shall see below.
The prior established functions with reference to which the child’s early utterances are
interpreted are derived from Halliday’s functional theory of language (see
FUNCTIONAL GRAMMAR and FUNCTIONALIST LINGUISTICS) and from
considerations of Bernstein’s notion of critical socializing contexts (see LANGUAGE
AND EDUCATION). The functions, with ‘translations’, are (see Halliday, 1975, pp. 18–
21):
1 Instrumental; the I want function, by means of which the child satisfies its material
needs.
2 Regulatory; the do that function, by means of which the child regulates the behaviour
of others.
3 Interactional; the me and you function, by means of which the child interacts with
others.
4 Personal; the here I come function, by means of which the child expresses its own
uniqueness.
5 Heuristic; the tell me why function, through which the child learns about and explores
the environment.
6 Imaginative; the let’s pretend function, whereby the child creates an environment of its
own.
7 Informative; the I’ve got something to tell you function of language as a means of
conveying information. This function appears much later than the others, in Nigel’s
case at around twenty-two months of age.
Within each function there is a range of options in meaning at each particular stage of the
learning process, and this range increases within each function as the child’s language
develops. At nine months old, Nigel had only two expressions which had constant
meanings, one interactional, the other personal. But since there were no alternatives
within each function, these expressions did not constitute a linguistic system. The first
such system that Halliday accredits Nigel with derives from the time when he is 10½
months old, when he employs the first four functions listed above, with alternatives in
each. For instance, in the instrumental function Nigel has two options: a general demand,
/nã/, which Halliday glosses as meaning ‘give me that’ and a more specific demand, /bø/,
‘give me my toy bird’.