Presentations on Tomasello's "Constructing a language"

This past week we had our group presentations on Tomasello's book, which I have talked about in previous posts. Unfortunately, I didn't understand much of what the other groups presented, but it might be a good idea to sum up what I have learnt so far.

Most of the book deals with the acquisition of language from an ontogenic point of view, that is, following in time the development of each individual. Tomasello gathers evidence that shows that we begin understanding the global meaning of a whole utterance, even though we can't understand the specific meanings of its components (we understand what the whole sentence means way before we can even identify the words that form it). At the same time, we begin communicating global and sometimes complex or abstract meanings through very simple utterances, sometimes composed of just one word (holophrase). We manage to do all that thanks to our innate ability to read the intention of others; therefore, at a very young age we are able to read the intention hidden in words we don't fully understand, and we also make use of  the same ability in others in order to communicate our thoughts with very few words. So, it seems that when it comes to learning a language, we go from global to concrete, in a way.

And now comes the paradox of language, because we could expect generativists to be right when they claim we have a universal grammar "pre-installed" from the moment we are born (before that, actually), which would allow us to acquire language applying global rules to create concrete utterances. But Tomasello presents evidence of the contrary in his book, as it seems we construct language from concrete to abstract, from particular cases to general rules. So, in his view, grammar would be a by-product of language, and not the other way around, as generativists claimed. The usage-based approach of language acquisition holds that what is innate in humans is a set of abilities or skills, such as intention reading, (functionally based) analysis that leads to pattern finding and symbolisation.

As the last group of my classmates pointed out, Tomasello places grammar in ontogeny and cultural history rather than phylogeny, that is, in the development of individuals and societies, rather than the biological evolution of our species.