Symbolic and Non-symbolic Acts

Children begin to communicate more or less from birth. A newborn child can already ‘pay attention’: when his mother talks to him, he listens. Within three or four weeks he is contributing his own share of the ‘discussion’, responding with animated movements of his body – his arms and legs, and also his tongue and his lips.

This bodily activity is not yet language. Colwyn Trevarthen (1979), who was one of the first to study these processes, calls the tongue and lip movements ‘pre-speech’, because the baby seems to be rehearsing the muscular activity that will be used to produce speech later on; just as with his arms he performs a sequence of reaching out, grasping, and pulling towards him that is like taking hold of an object - ‘pre-reaching’, in Trevarthen’s terms. He is preparing himself, so to speak, for the two basic skills he will first have to master – using tools, and talking. In the first, he will be using his limbs, and extensions of his limbs, to control his environment directly, and to orient and manoeuvre himself within it. With the second, speech, he will be using other muscular movements and postures, those of articulation – also to control his environment; but in this case to control it indirectly, by acting on others so that they will control it for him. For this he has to learn to act symbolically.

Let us make this distinction clear, the distinction between symbolic and non-symbolic acts. If I am hungry, and want to eat an apple, I can act directly on the apple by going and getting it myself – moving to where it is in reach, reaching out, and then grabbing it. But – provided there are other human beings around – I can get hold of it in another way, by acting not directly but symbolically. I can say to a sympathetic member of my family “Fetch me an apple”.

This is a symbolic act, an act of meaning. It has to be addressed to someone – not necessarily some particular person, maybe just to the world at large; but unless there is a receiver it will not work. Acts of meaning are by their nature social acts, and all symbolic systems are social systems. Of course, once a system of symbols has come into being, it can be played with, fought with, turned into an art form; it can be used to address oneself, a deity, or even animals or inanimate objects. But these are secondary, derivative uses; the symbols could never have evolved to serve these functions, because they depend on values the symbols have already acquired in use.

Somewhere around the middle of the first year of life, the child lays the foundations for these two modes of action, the direct and the symbolic. He learns to reach out, grasp, and pull things towards him, and he learns the complementary action of hitting things to knock them away: ‘I want’, ‘I don’t want’. This, typically, starts around 4-5 months. Not long afterwards, he begins to explore the alternative, symbolic mode – getting others to achieve the effect for him.

But there is a problem with symbolic acts. A symbol has to be understood. If I start speaking Chinese to you, that is a perfectly good act of meaning; but if you do not understand Chinese, the only message you will get is that I am talking – you will have no idea what I am talking about. Even if what I am saying is the Chinese equivalent of ‘bring me an apple’ (ná pínguŏ lái gĕi wŏ), it is unlikely that the apple will arrive.

So how does a human infant go about creating a set of symbols, such that those around him will understand? It used to be assumed that he went straight into the mother tongue, copying the words as well as he could and eventually learning to combine them. Later on, in his second year, that is what he does; but a great deal has already happened before he starts on the mother tongue. Before he takes over the language of others, he starts by creating one for himself – by himself in interaction with the small group of others who learn it along with him.

At 7-8 months, he is ready to act symbolically. But he cannot start straightaway on the mother tongue: not only because he could not yet control its sounds, though this is true too, but more importantly because he could not yet control its forms and its meanings. Adult languages are organised around a grammar (more accurately, a lexico-grammar, a code consisting of words-in-structure), which has the function of translating the meanings into the sounds; but an eight-month-old can have no idea of what a word is, since it is something that involves a particular kind of abstraction. So he has to create a symbolic system of his own, one that does not contain either vocabulary or grammar but consists of a little set of SIGNS. These signs are made by voice, or gesture, or some combination of the two.

There have been very few studies of the first step, the initial symbolic acts of meaning by which an infant starts to ‘mean’; so it is impossible to give a general account of how this happens. Instead, we shall start with the story of how it happened with one particular child – a boy whose name, for present purposes, is Nigel. Here is a brief account of how Nigel created his first language.

One day at eight months old, Nigel was sitting on his mother’s knee. She was writing. As she paused, with the pen held lightly in her fingers, Nigel reached out for it. He closed his fist firmly around it, looked at her face for a moment, and then, after another moment, let go. He had not tried to pull it towards him.

His mother said “You want the pen, do you? All right – you can hold it, for a little while”.

This was an act of meaning; and it had worked. His mother had understood. Nigel was, of course, quite capable of grabbing the pen and pulling it towards him; that was his normal way of getting something. But on this occasion, he had not taken it; he had asked for it. He had created a symbol, by the use of his hand – it was gestural, not vocal; and he had waited for the response. There was a clear distinction between the two kinds of act: the direct, non-symbolic action on the object itself, and the indirect, symbolic action ‘on’ (i.e. directed towards) the object but through (mediated by) the person addressed.

Nigel had solved the basic problem, that of creating a symbol that could be understood; and he had solved it iconically – that is, by creating a symbol that bore a natural resemblance to its meaning. The gesture of grasping an object firmly and holding on to it for a measurable time before letting go is a very reasonable way of encoding the meaning ‘I want that thing’, ‘let me hold it’, ‘give it to me’. And his mother’s response showed him she had understood. (She had acted entirely spontaneously, not at all becoming conscious of the fact that both Nigel and she had performed something entirely new.)

Nigel was encouraged by his success and created two more symbols within the same week, both of them also iconic. I was entertaining him by throwing his toy cat up in the air, and catching it as it came down. When I stopped, he leant forward and touched it: neither grasping it nor pushing it away, but keeping his fingers pressed against it for a measurable time.

‘You want me to throw it up again?’ Every time I stopped, he repeated the gesture, until I got tired and refused. But it was clear that I had got the message; and Nigel himself made it clear, by the satisfaction he showed at being understood.

A day or two later, his mother offered him his woolly dog to play with. He touched it with just one finger, very lightly and for the briefest instant, then took his hand away. She offered it to him again; he repeated the gesture. It meant ‘No, I don’t want it; take it away’. She understood, said ‘Don’t you want it?’, and put it down. Again, it was a symbolic gesture; he could push objects away if he didn’t want them, but this was quite distinct. He was ‘saying’ ‘I don’t want it’, and his mother was responding to the symbol.

These were not, in fact, the very first symbols Nigel had created; these had appeared two weeks earlier, at shortly before the age of eight months. They were vocal, not gestural; and each consisted of a single vowel, the same vowel [oe] (like the French word oeufs) but with a slight difference in tone. One, on a low, breathy tone, meant ‘yes it’s me, and here we are together’.

The other was also [oe], but on a higher, falling tone, and without the breathy, sighing quality of the first. It meant ‘That’s interesting— what’s happening?’, and was used when Nigel’s attention was caught by some commotion, like a flock of birds taking off from the ground or a bus revving up its engine. This was addressed mainly to himself; but often someone responded, saying what the commotion was all about.

So at eight months Nigel had a language. It consisted of five signs, which were frequently repeated when the occasion arose; and those around him, the small group that made up his immediate family, understood them and gave a reply. They replied, of course, in their own language, not in his; Nigel would no doubt have been insulted to have his own signs served back to him, but it never occurred to anyone to try. What mattered was that he could now converse: he could initiate a conversation and be understood. From that moment, his route into language was open.

For its relevance to linguistic evolution, we need to interpret this little system, and then to follow Nigel through one stage further.

The ability to mean is important to Nigel because it is functional. He is creating a language for a purpose, to do something with it. If we watch him at eight months and notice the environments in which he is using these signs (the context of situation, in linguistic terminology), we will be aware of two kinds of motive that lead him to communicate. One is a pragmatic one: he wants to be given something, or he wants something to be done for him; and for these purposes he used the iconic gestures of grasping and touching. The other is a more thoughtful mode; either he is expressing curiosity about what is going on around him, or he is just ‘being together’, expressing his awareness that he is one person, his mother is another, and that they are sharing an experience. These he expresses by sound, his first true speech sounds. Having established his ability to mean, and gained recognition as a conversation partner, at 9½-10 months, he set about creating a rich protolanguage that would serve him until he was ready to start on English. At 10½ months, he had a range of twelve distinct signs; by 12 months, this had increased to 20; by 13½ months, to 27; by 15 months, to 31; and by 16½ months, to 50. By this time, however, he is beginning the transition into the mother tongue and his language is no longer of the strictly ‘proto’ kind.

If we look at the period of roughly six months that constitutes, with Nigel, the period of the true protolanguage – say 9½ -15½ months of age – we find a very clear pattern of functional development, which we can interpret in terms of these same two motifs. Let us exemplify from right in the middle of this six-month period, when Nigel is just over one year of age and just about beginning to walk. On the one hand, he has a range of pragmatic signs including the following:

Note:... indicates that the sound was repeated, normally three or four times over.

On the other hand, he had a range of signs in the interactional and personal areas, including:

Apart from some instances of the last, which he also used in the special sense of playing a game of pretending to go to sleep, curling up on the floor in a little ball and closing his eyes tight, these all expressed some form of the relationship between himself and his environment: either interaction with another person, or pleasure, curiosity, disgust etc. in the outside world (or, in the last case, withdrawal from it). In one or two critical cases, the two components are combined: a fundamental theme in the protolanguage is that of ‘let’s look at this together’, typically a greeting or calling to attention of the other person with an invitation to share an experience. It turns out that this sharing of experience by attending to some object that both can focus on – Nigel and his mother looking at a picture together, for example – is an important step towards the child’s conception of a name, and hence towards the development of language in the adult sense.

What is the primary function of signs such as these? If those of the first group represent language in a ‘doing’ function — that which we refer to as pragmatic – then the signs of the second group have more of a ‘thinking’ function: Nigel is using his ability to create meanings as a way of projecting himself on to the environment, expressing his concern with it – what’s in it for him, so to speak – and so beginning systematically to explore it. In my own work I have referred to this as the mathetic function, meaning ‘for learning with’.

Nigel’s protolanguage, from its earliest origins, displays these two symbolic modes: to put it in other terms, it is at once both a means of action and a means of reflection. Parallel studies that have been carried out with other children suggest that this twofold functional orientation is a general feature of children’s language construction; see, in particular, Clare Painter’s book Learning the Mother Tongue. We shall not pursue the story further here. But it is important to point out, as we move away from the developmental perspective, that this complementarity of action and reflection persists way beyond the protolinguistic stage. In the first place, it serves as the central strategy by which children move out of their protolanguage and make the transition to the language (or languages) of their cultural environment. And finally, it is also the fundamental organising principle that lies behind the whole of adult language. Every human language is a potential for meaning in these two ways: it is a resource for doing with, and it is a resource for thinking with. This is the most important single fact about human language, and a motif to which we shall return in our study of speech and writing.

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