Naming Games and Beyond: Referencing in Children's Verbal Play
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Abstract
Children are, among other things, little thinking machines. Childhood is a period of intense mental activity wherein the child’s innate cognitive capacities work upon the raw data of sensory experience, guided by interpretive codes drawn from the ambient culture, to fashion serviceable portraits of reality capturing the possibilities of the moment but always evolving through time. With only a small stretch of the imagination, we can picture young children as mad-cap scientists, boldly trying out theories, testing hypotheses, and adjusting their notions as to what is going on as new data arrives. It is a conspicuous fact that a considerable portion of this mental work is accomplished in settings of pleasurable social intercourse, frequently through the framework of play, and it is this dimension of the child’s mental development that I want to address in this paper. Specifically, I want to highlight a thread of children’s verbal play that pursues the linguistic theme of referencing, that is, the naming, describing, and evoking of objects, and follow this thread progressively from an initial moment, when the interlocutors are adult care-takers or older siblings, to a subsequent moment when the child becomes empowered as the agent of play and the interlocutors are its juvenile playmates. Culling material from research I have done with children’s verbal play and verbal art over the years, I will describe and analyze the transformation of “the naming game” and “the animal voices game” of late infancy to “the riddling game” of the primary school years.
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