1

Airenti G., 2004. The development of the speaker's meaning. In: C. Florn Serrano, C. Inchaurralde Besga, M.A.Ruiz Moneva, eds., Applied Linguistics Perspectives: Language Learning and specialized Discourse, Anubar, Zaragoza, 1-27

The development of the speaker's meaning

Gabriella Airenti

Centro di Scienza Cognitiva, Universit di Torino, Via Po 14, 10123 Torino, Italy

Abstract

Pragmatics is a very diversified field where merely descriptive approaches stand side by

side with attempts of theoretical conceptualization and formalization. What is generally

ignored in this debate is that, since communication is a fundamental human capacity,

cognitive plausibility must be a condition to make a theory acceptable. Moreover, as all

human capacities develop from the birth on, the results of developmental studies have

to be taken into account in the theoretical work. In particular, developmental studies can

be useful to clarify three classical questions of the debate in pragmatics: the relationship

between language and communication, the very definition of communication, and the

relationship between communication and action. In the paper I analyze these subjects

and I propose an attempt to see communicative ability in its development.

Key words:

communication, development, theory of mind

1. Introduction

Pragmatics is a very diversified field where merely descriptive approaches stand side by

side with attempts of theoretical conceptualization and formalization. What is generally

ignored in this debate is that, since communication is a fundamental human capacity,

cognitive plausibility must be a condition to make a theory acceptable. Moreover, as all

human capacities develop from the birth on, the results of developmental studies have

to be taken into account in the theoretical work. Some developmental psychologists

have tried to use concepts coming from pragmatics to better understand language

acquisition. However, findings of developmental psychology have not influenced

pragmatic theories. In my view this procedure has led to the acceptance of incorrect

assumptions. In particular, developmental studies can be useful to clarify three classical

questions of the debate in pragmatics: the relationship between language and

communication, the very definition of communication, and the relationship between

communication and action. In the following I shall analyze these subjects and I shall

propose an attempt to see communicative ability in its development.

2

2. Language and communication

In daily life situations we commonly find a communicative use of language. The

analysis of particular cases where language is not used to communicate but simply as

the expression of thought, or where pathology allows us to discover the possibility of

mastering grammar when normal cognitive or communicative capacities are lacking has

been used to confirm the theoretical autonomy of grammar pleaded by Chomsky in all

his work (Blank, Gessner and Esposito 1979; Bellugi, Marks, Bihrle and Sabo 1988;

Udwin and Yule 1991; Smith, Tsimpli and Ouhalla 1993). Actually, a number of cases

have been studied where the opposite situation occurs: a grammatical impairment does

not affect communicative capacities (Curtiss 1977). Moreover, infants are involved in

interactions for at least a year before the first rudiments of language appear. Finally,

adults communicate also by nonlinguistic means. Thus it is reasonable to pose the

question: does a communicative capacity exist which develops independently of

language and of other cognitive capacities? And in case of affirmative answer to the

first question, how is this capacity structured?

This formulation of the problem is not accepted by the supporters of universal

grammar nor by scholars working on pragmatics. This is the conclusion that can be

derived from the debate between Chomsky and Searle. Searle (1972) considers that the

separation between language and communication is the major defect of Chomsky's

theory in that it means to separate language from its main goal. Chomsky (1975) objects

that language is the expression of thought. Language can be used appropriately without

any goal of inducing an auditory, that can also be absent, to hold a given belief or to do

a given action. Communication for Chomsky is only one function of language and not

an essential one. Chomsky's remarks are very important from the psychological point of

view in that they allow for the definition of a communicative function supported by

cognitive structures separated from the ones responsible for language. Actually, there is

no reason to assume that the cognitive faculties underlying communication are the same

containing the rules of grammar. However, here is also the point where Chomsky has to

be abandoned. In fact, to maintain the primacy of grammar Chomsky and his followers

completely understate the role of communication. I would agree that the linguistic

structure has no intrinsic communicative function. At the same time, one has to

recognize that in real life language is mostly used to communicate. In fact, the very

pathological cases where grammar is managed in the absence of pragmatic abilities

show that deprived of these abilities, language is perceived as heavily defective, a kind

of non mastered tool (Curtiss 1989).

In pragmatics we find the symmetrical position. Primacy of pragmatics is derived

from the consideration that language is prevalently used to communicate: this fact is

3

taken as the demonstration that the communicative function cannot be separated by the

language structure. In particular, for speech act theorists speech acts, or to be more

accurate, illocutionary acts, are primitive acts where the conventional aspect deriving

from language and the cognitive aspect expressed by communicative intentions conflate

in a single phenomenon (Austin 1962; Searle 1969).

In the light of developmental data this debate can be seen differently. The main

discovery made by cognitive psychologists studying infants is that before language

acquisition children have a long history of interactions with others (Schaffer 1977;

Bullowa 1979). The main question is if these initial interactions are instances of

communicative behavior with two active partners, or if the appearance of

communication is due to the attitude of the caregiver playing her role of attributing

meanings to the infant. All the students who have focused on the interaction between

infants and their caregivers (the mothers in the majority of cases) stress the fact that a

very special interaction establishes whose features are particularly interesting: the

participants develop a kind of proto-conversation where, in contexts which are typical

of their relationship, the two partners alternate in the exchange of some simple gestures

and sounds. The conventions of these exchanges are shared by the partners. The

features which most researchers single out are the alternation and the form of dialogue.

These features often lead to interpret first interactions as games or rituals, where the

partners behave according to a stable frame which constitutes the basis for little

variations. Trevarthen (1977) has stressed the main characteristic of first interactions

defining them as interactions without object, a kind of implementation of

intersubjectivity per se.

The turning point toward different kinds of interactions is in general situated around

the ninth month when there is an important improvement in child's motor abilities. The

autonomy acquired by children in this period causes a break in the preceding form of

communication. A new form of interaction appears where communication includes the

external world as its proper object (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). This is the phase

where the transition between preverbal and verbal communication is situated. This

conclusion is opposed by those developmental psychologists concerned to use the

concept of communication as it has been defined by Grice (Gelman 1983; Shatz 1983).

As the basic requirements for communication, i.e. intentional action and the possibility

to model others' mental states, appear rather late in the development -in particular the

second feature appears when language is already an elaborated tool- these authors

conclude that no continuity has to be found between first interactions, which are not

communicative, and successive linguistic communication. In this view communication

is the result of the coupling of different abilities which is realized only in an advanced

phase of language acquisition.

4

However, from the cognitive point of view, the fact that infants have structured

interactions before language acquisition necessarily means that they have an ability to

do so. Be the manifestation of this ability real communication or not, it is reasonable

to consider that this capacity has to be involved in successive communication.

Otherwise we should assume that there is a complete break between first interactions

and successive instances of communication. It seems, on the contrary, that at least

alternation, repetition, and slight variations on the basis of an established routine are

features of first interactions that persist in communicative exchanges.

Etnomethodologists who have studied conversation consider that turn-taking rules are

the basic element of dialogue (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974). So if we cannot

prove that the first exchanges are instances of complete communication, and indeed we

have good reasons to think that they are not, we must admit that they show elements of

what will be later communicative behavior. These considerations added to the fact that

even in the adult age actions can substitute for speech acts lead to the conclusion that

communicative intentions and their linguistic expressions can be cognitively separated.

Other considerations can be done on the role of speech acts. In the studies on

language development some researchers maintain that the acquisition of language

derives from the use of some prototypical speech acts done by children before language

appears (Bruner 1975; Bates, Camaioni and Volterra 1976). These researches rely on

the finding that a child is able to make a request, to take the main example, before being

able to formulate it in a linguistic fashion. In these studies a fundamental role is given

to the adult. It is the adult that through a long process of modeling leads the infant from

the first cries manifesting an undifferentiated discontent to express her intentions in the

form of speech acts (Bruner 1983a,b). This position has the merit of showing that

language appears in a situation where a practice of interactions has already been

established. But many questions remain unsolved. No detailed analysis is attempted of

the relationship between the basic elements of communicative intention, which babies

already possess in a very precocious phase, and the development of conversation

abilities which result from a process of learning where the actual interaction with adults

is fundamental. Moreover, the interpretation of speech acts, and in particular of indirect

speech acts, is a problem even for theoretical pragmatics. Therefore, it seems doubtful

that this concept, at least as it is defined by philosophers of language, can be used to

clarify language acquisition. In fact, the introduction of the concept of speech act in

developmental studies has played an interesting role. Developmental psychologists have

found this concept useful to show that communicative intentions are present before

speech and to establish a continuity between nonverbal and verbal communication. At

the same time the linguistic connotations of this theory have in a way hidden the fact

that there is more to first interactions than the sheer acquisition of what later will be

5

conventionalized in speech acts. Besides, the necessity to explain conventionalization

has pushed toward the attribution of a preponderant role to adults. It is the adult who

leads the child to express her intentions in the appropriate way, i.e. by the appropriate

verbal speech act. In fact, from a cognitive point of view, the most interesting point is

to analyze the capacity of newborns to participate in interactions in an active way. The

adults teaching would be ineffective without the infants predisposition to respond.

Another very interesting point which is not discussed by these authors is the

interpretation of indirect speech acts. Data coming from the studies on children's

interpretation of indirect speech show that indirect speech acts do not present special

difficulties for children who have just acquired language (Shatz 1978). What constitutes

the main difficulty for speech act theory is not perceived as such by children who

currently react to indirect requests like to imperatives. This is another demonstration of

the possibility to separate the communicative intention, which is correctly interpreted,

from its linguistic form. Clearly, an adult and a child do not have the same

interpretation of indirect speech acts. An adult does understand the real illocutionary

force of the speech act but can also derive from the specific indirect which has been

used, for instance, for a request, its degrees of kindness, strength, constrain, etc. The

young child does not understand all the hints that the specific linguistic form can

provide, but nevertheless understands its real force. This means, in my view, that the

interpretation of the speech act is done on the basis of the available interactions. The

typical adult/child interaction is one where the adult proposes something for the child to

do and the child complies. Thus any situation of this kind is interpreted by the child as

an imperative. On the contrary, the adult knows that the reference to an action to be

done by herself can be part of different kinds of interactions and uses all the linguistic

and extra linguistic indicators to choose the proper one.

Developmental psychologists have discovered and described first interactions. Some

of them have then chosen speech acts as the suitable theoretical tool to link their

findings with pragmatics, i.e. linguistic studies. In fact, from the cognitive point of

view, this choice has consequences which deserve consideration. Since speech acts are

a merely linguistic device, the attention is focused on the linguistic aspect of

interactions. The point is to explain the acquisition of verbal communication. In this

perspective the function of first interactions is simply to prepare young children to

language use. I think that the opposite path should be followed. The cognitive analysis

of interactions occurring before the appearance of language should be used to explore

the part of adult communicative interactions which is not depending on language. The

very existence of this aspect shows that language and communication do not coincide. I

would argue that this explains why speech acts are not a good model of communication

and have the flaws which have been suggested by many authors. In fact both

6

Chomskyan theories denying the communicative function of language, and pragmatic

theories, which link language and communication in an indissoluble way, paradoxically

lead to the same understatement of nonlinguistic bases for communication. This has

resulted in an unsatisfactory description of that cognitive ability which allows humans

to perform communicative interactions whether linguistic or not.

3. Cooperative action and communication

In speech act theory the communicative function is included in linguistic expressions.

Other authors in pragmatics consider instead communication as a form of cooperative

rational action (Grice 1975,1978; Sperber and Wilson 1986a). Here the accent is put on

the inferences allowing for the interpretation of communicative acts. In Airenti, Bara

and Colombetti (1993a) we have argued that in communication a clear distinction is to

be drawn between behavioral goals and conversational goals. Communication is the

way humans have to share with others, at least in part, their private mental states using

conventional rules of conversation. Behavioral goals when communicated are presented

openly and can be negotiated. Rules of conversation are the modality normally used to

this aim. This means that the goal of maintaining conversational cooperation is a

permanent one, while behavioral cooperation has to be established each time and is not

necessarily achieved. This is the case, for instance when we politely refuse a proposal

we are not interested in. Let us consider a Gricean example which has been commented

also by Sperber and Wilson (1986b):

At a tea party:

A: Mrs. X is an old bag

a moment of appalled silence

B: The weather has been quite delightful this summer, hasn't it?

Grice's interpretation is that B's utterance evidently violates the maxim of relevance and

that this intended violation leads to the interpretation that A's utterance has to be

ignored as inappropriate to the situation, a social gaffe. This could implicate - writes

Levinson (1983) - for instance that one of the lady's relations is nearby. The analysis of

Sperber and Wilson is that no violation has been done. The principle of relevance,

which is by definition valid, plus the fact that A's utterance has been ignored lead to the

correct interpretation: B communicates that A's utterance is a blunder. The

interpretation I suggest is different. With his/her utterance A intends to share with B a

content of his/her mind, namely a judgment about Mrs. X. With his/her answer B

communicates his/her refusal to share the judgment. The modality utilized by B is

adequate to keep the conversation as correct as it can be in a situation like that, and it is

interesting to note that to this aim the author of the example feels the necessity to insert

before the answer a silence, i.e. a marker of dispreferred second. So conversational

7

cooperation is maintained while behavioral one is not. If we consider the exchange from

the point of view of conversation all we can say is about a very limited part of A's real

or pretended beliefs that s/he has decided to share with B. From this point of view A's

private reasons to present his/her belief about Mrs. X (s/he could not hide it anymore,

s/he wants to provoke B, s/he thought that B shared these feelings, etc.) or B's reasons

to refuse (one of Mrs.X relations is nearby, s/he suspects A to test him/her, s/he really

likes Mrs. X, etc.) are not interesting. On the contrary, these reasons are fundamental if

we choose to see the exchange from the behavioral point of view. In fact, for A to

understand the pragmatic meaning of B's utterance, B's private reasons are interesting.

If, due to B's utterance, A acknowledges the presence of one of Mrs. X's relations

nearby s/he will consider the whole episode as a regrettable accident. Unless s/he had

pretended not to see Mrs. X's relation and in fact s/he had maneuvered to instigate B to

say things which can disgrace him/her with Mrs. X. If A thinks to be in a powerful

position with respect to B, his/her utterance could be a test of B's allegiance, and B's

answer can be seen as a refusal to comply. We can imagine several more scenarios

involving different partners' beliefs. The point I want to focus on here is that a

pragmatic interpretation cannot be derived by general laws of action. In fact what is

involved is what the partners want to do with each other and the conventional modality

they use to do it. In Airenti, Bara and Colombetti (ibid.) we have argued that the

knowledge used by the agents to interpret the behavioral aspects of communication

comes in structures we have called behavior games. Behavior games are given as

shared. Understanding the speaker's meaning of an utterance is to recover the link of a

conventional linguistic expression with a shared behavior game. In this interpretation

we maintain that communication is a kind of action. The point is that communication

has its specific rules which are not the same that the agents use in cooperative action.

Let us see now the problem from a developmental point of view. The analysis of the

development from birth to the end of the second year, when we can say that the

fundamental structure of language is acquired, shows a characteristic bifurcation.

Language use begins rather late and the acquisition is very fast. On the contrary, the

attempts of interaction start soon after birth and have a slow evolution in which

subsequent child's acquisitions, like motor abilities and language itself, enter as tools

capable to enhance the child's possibilities. As we have seen, the role of adults in the

first interactions has often been stressed. The caregiver attributes a meaning to all the

facial movements, minimal gestures, gazes, smiles, sounds of the baby, often repeating

and interpreting them. This is certainly true. But what is also interesting from a

cognitive point of view is that the child already in a very precocious phase can

participate to these interactions in an active way. The partners establish then a series of

routines well-known to both the participants. It is easy to show that we cannot consider

8

such a situation as communication in the Gricean sense. But at the same time one

should note that two features are already present which lead us to perceive first

interactions as a kind of dialogue: namely the alternation and sharedness of exchanges.

Furthermore, these interactions appear well before the child becomes able to carry out

an action in an autonomous way. The cognitive study of first interactions shows that the

predisposition to sharedness is the very aspect that humans possess from the beginning,

and from which more complex successive relationships are constructed. It can be noted

that according to Premack and Premack (1994) who have studied infants after

chimpanzees, the intention to share experience is what makes the difference between

the two species. It has been shown that the child tries to get the other's attention on

objects not only to make requests but also simply to share her excitement (Premack

1990), and no comparable behavior has been reported in chimpanzees. On the same

line, Butterworth (1991) proposes that agreement on the objects of shared experience be

considered a protocommunicative prerequisite for comprehension. Thus if we focus on

development we are not allowed to consider communication as derived from action.

The child has from the beginning the capacity of sharing experience with others. This

allows for the construction of the first interactive routines, behavior games in my

terminology. A typical example of routine is the game of imitation. Some authors have

attributed a great importance to imitation as a means for the baby to acquire knowledge

of the other. In particular Melzoff and Moore (1977) have shown that imitation is a

primary phenomenon starting immediately after birth. Newborns can and in fact do

imitate tongue and lips protrusion. The authors use these data to formulate a theory

where imitation, seen as an innate capacity, has the main function in the development of

child's ability to acknowledge the similarity of the other (Melzoff and Moore 1993).

What is interesting from our point of view is that this capacity is exploited both by the

child and the mother to construct typical exchanges. We know that the caregivers

frequently propose the game of imitation imitating themselves the child. In fact if we

analyze imitation episodes in their context, we see that this is a way to exhibit

interaction without requiring to refer to any external object. With the development the

acquired capacities are included in the imitation sequences: manual movements

between six and eight months, manipulation of toys between eight and ten months

(Pawlby 1977). If we come back to the beautiful definition by Trevarthen of infants'

interactions as "communication without object", we find on one side the baby who

initially has only her predisposition to interact and on the other side the mother who

proposes games which are rapidly acquired and become the background on which the

baby constructs her relationship with the others. According again to Trevarthen, when

motor abilities develop at about nine months, interactions dramatically change

including in the relationships the external world and in particular objects which can be

9

manipulated, showed, asked for, etc. Thus, we can conclude that the phase when speech

acts are formulated even in a nonverbal way is not the first stage of the development but

the point where motor abilities, i.e. the possibility of performing intentional actions,

meet with the already established capacity of participating in interactive games with

others.

4. Modeling the other and learning to participate in conversations

A three-year-old child has acquired the capacity of speaking with a sufficiently rich

vocabulary and following grammatical rules. But still her way of participating in

communicative interactions is very different from the adults' one. Child's

communication at this age differs in two ways from adult's one. First, the child is not

able to detect and repair certain errors, to produce and understand ironic and deceptive

utterances, to distinguish between deception and joke. Secondly, the child is unaware of

the strategies which are normally considered typical of polite conversation. These two

kinds of problems are very distant from each other but they rejoin in one point. They

both are due to the lack of representational capacities of the child, still to be developed

at this age. According to recent studies on the theory of mind the young child is not able

to model higher order mental states, i.e. mental states on mental states (Perner and

Wimmer 1985). Many experiments have been done and the results have been included

by Perner (1991) in a general framework. Children do not acquire the concept of

representation until they are four years of age. This acquisition allows them to

understand that different individuals may entertain different representations of the same

object. Already in Perner (1988) it was noted that this fact could be seen as a difficulty

if we adopt for communication Grice's theory of nonnatural meaning (Grice 1957)

where second-order beliefs are part of the definition. In fact also the beginning of the

solution was offered by Perner. Normal communication is based on the transparence of

intentions and beliefs. This enables young children to communicate. On the contrary,

the development of higher-order mental states is necessary to understand errors and

nonliteral uses of language. Actually, Gricean theory needs revisions both for formal

reasons and in order to make it satisfactory from the cognitive point of view. In Airenti,

Bara and Colombetti (1993a) we made a formal proposal which is in the line of

Perner's intuition. Starting from Strawson (1964) Gricean definition of nonnatural

meaning has been integrated and developed by several authors introducing more levels

to rule out cases of noncommunicative transfer of information. This poses two more

problems. On one side these are logical solutions with no psychological reality in that it

is implausible also for an adult mind that the very fact of performing a communicative

act implies a large number of calculations. Besides, it can be shown that no definition

including a finite number of nested intentions is acceptable. For any nth-order intention

10

there is always the possibility that the intention n+1 is not verified making the

interactive situation not fully overt. Our proposal has been to define the intention to

communicate as a mental state S such that an actor entertaining S intends that the whole

S is mutually recognized by the actor herself and her partner. This solution is

compatible with the requirement to define a degree 0 of communication. My hypothesis

is that this primitive mental state is part of infants cognitive endowment. It corresponds

to a situation of complete sharedness which is the only possibility for a young child.

When the concept of representation is developed, the acquisition that sharedness is not

always verified allows for the production and comprehension of more complex

communicative acts where sharedness is not verified in some point. Failure, irony,

deception are very different cases of this kind whose peculiarities have been analyzed in

Airenti, Bara and Colombetti (1993b).

As we have seen at the beginning of this section, the other aspect where the

communication of a young child differs from an adult's one is the management of

conversation. Here a distinction has to be done between the organization of turn-taking

and other strategies. In fact, as we have already seen, the respect of alternation seems to

be the first feature of interactions that an infant acquires. For the other features of

conversation we seem to have the opposite situation: children look highly incompetent.

As Forster (1990) has noted, conversation skills are submitted to an explicit learning. A

child who, as we have seen in Section 2, is perfectly able to understand an indirect

speech act will not spontaneously use polite indirect forms unless taught to do so. In

this we can see a link with the theory of mind again. In fact the great majority of

conversation strategies are aimed at the mutual respect of face (Brown, Levinson 1987).

This is the reason why, for instance, it is not suitable to introduce a topic according to

the partners' goals abruptly but each topic has to be preceded by greetings and other

polite formulas which start the interaction and that have to be repeated before the

interaction can be interrupted (Schegloff and Sacks 1973). This is also the reason for

the frequent choice of indirect formulas, the so-called indirect speech acts, the pre-

sequences, the markers used to introduce dispreferred seconds, the hierarchy of

preferences in repair, the important set of phenomena studied by the analysts of

conversation (Schegloff, Jefferson and Sacks 1977; Schegloff 1988). The rule of

mutually preserving face prescribes that the partners have a possibility of an honorable

retreat at the conversation level, we could say, when their behavioral goals do not

match. As said before conversational cooperation has to be achieved even when

behavioral one is not. Brown and Levinson stress that preserving face is a universal

phenomenon which constrains but does not determine the way it is performed in

different cultures. What links conversational rules to the problem of representation is

the fact that only the possibility to represent others' mental states makes it possible to

11

understand rules whose motivation is social and which are realized in a purely

conventional way. Only when able to form an accurate model of the other the child will

understand that an indirect request can be more effective than a direct one, that in some

way language can affect others' feelings, that nobody likes refusals, etc. The possibility

to deal with these facts in an effective way is the result of a long process of learning

done by trial and error and with the constant assistance of the adults.

In conclusion, the problem of what communication is is twofold. We have to define

the minimal requirements for communication, and the definition we provide has to give

account of the fact that infants are able to participate in communicative interactions

very soon. There is no reason to assume that these basic principles change in adult life

and in fact they guide an important part of normal behavior. But adults have one more

capacity: they can model the others' minds. This means that communication can

become a much more complex phenomenon where the conversation artifices are used

both to convey and to interpret pragmatic meanings, adequate to the represented mental

states.

5. The development of the speaker's meaning

In this section I shall propose to place the features of communication which have been

discussed in the preceding part in a new framework. Actually, when we take the

developmental point of view a number of pragmatic problems can be viewed in a

different perspective: instead of an heterogeneous collection of phenomena we have a

set of cognitive capacities which develop in time allowing for communicative

exchanges of increasing elaboration.

If we follow the first months of an infant the main feature which strikes us is her

ability to share experience with other humans. This can be seen in the almost immediate

synchronization that is achieved in the first common activities with the mother, feeding

in particular. As the infant acquires a new ability (sounds emission, smile, etc.) she

performs it toward the caregiver, the ability becomes an element of the interaction. This

is true, as we have seen, also when no specific necessity is present. At this stage of

development it seems difficult to see any possible derivation of this intention to share

from more primitive mental states. Such a precocious ability can be explained only by

postulating the existence of a primitive mental state. In Airenti, Bara and Colombetti

(1993a) we have called it intentional communication and have given a formal definition

of it. In a non formal way we can say that infants have the predisposition to share

experience with others. Initially, this ability is exercised using the poor elements the

baby has at her disposal: simple gestures, smile, vocalizations. But these poor tools are

inserted in a frame of alternation which constructs interactions. These interactions

become part of the experience of the child and constitute the basis for new interactions.

12

In theoretical terms, these interactions become part of the knowledge of the child in the

form of games, i.e. structures describing stereotyped interactions. The relationship

between the baby and the caregiver at the beginning is rather asymmetrical. It will be

the caregiver who will propose games which can be played by them or who will qualify

a gesture of the infant as communicative inserting it in a game. But the child manifests

the capacity of participating in the games, implicitly understanding their rules: turn-

taking, repetition, possible slight variations on the basis of an established routine which

attributes meaning to single actions. I make the hypothesis that the capacity of

interpreting others' communicative behavior on the basis of a game is innate, and that it

constitutes with communicative intention human endowment for communication. If we

define communication as manifesting the intention to share a behavior game -where

understanding a communicative act means interpreting it within the frame of a behavior

game- first interactions become cognitively interesting for two reasons. They can

explain how the most simple examples of communication work and how the basis for

pragmatic interpretation is constructed.

To clarify this point of view, let us see an example. In (Airenti, Bara and Colombetti

1993a) we have presented a number of rules for understanding the speaker's meaning.

The rules are the formal way to express how a partner understands the speaker's

meaning, where the speaker's meaning is expressed in terms of the relations of actions,

linguistic or not, and mental states with games. These rules have been thought of as the

complete set of possibilities an adult has to understand the speaker's meaning. My

hypothesis is that these rules are progressively acquired by children. I shall not discuss

here all the rules. I just want to show as at least one of them can apply also to infants.

Let us examine the following rule:

In the shared belief space, playing a move of a valid game counts by default as

communicating the intention to play the game with the partner.

This rule can be paraphrased in this way. If a partner acknowledges that an actor is

overtly playing a move of a typical game of theirs, he will interpret this act as the

intention to play the game. For example, if John and Susan normally eat biscuits when

watching a movie together, the fact that after dinner Susan goes and fetches biscuits,

will be interpreted by John as the proposal to play the 'movie game' - and he will react

looking for a movie, or discussing a possible choice if he agrees with the proposal while

he will explain that he is tired, he has work to do, he prefers to do something else, etc. if

he doesn't. If we analyze first interactions we can see that also babies behave according

to this rule. When mothers do some activity with their babies, at feeding and changing

time for instance, or when mothers shift infants position, they are involved in

interactions where the mothers have a complex repertoire of actions and babies respond

with gestures, sounds, smiles, facial expressions, etc. Already when the baby is

13

two/three months old each pair develops typical modalities of interactions, games: the

mother tickles the infant who smiles. The mother questions the infant who coos. So

also in this case the baby identifies the other's action as connected to, part of a game. In

fact observations of this kind have been done on eight-day-old babies (Chappel and

Sanders 1979). Finally, evidence in favor of an actual engagement of the infant in the

communicative games comes from studies, made in laboratory on ten-week-old

children, aimed at studying the effects of perturbations of normal interactions (Tronick,

Als and Adamson 1979). The mothers were instructed to slow down their rhythm with

the babies or to interrupt exchanges remaining still-faced, or to show only their profile

to the babies. In all these situations the infants adjusted their reactions appropriately to

the actions of their partner. For instance, when the mother interrupted a communicative

exchange with the baby and froze her expression, the baby tried all her repertoire of

facial expressions and limb movements in an attempt to restore normal interaction. As

stressed by the authors of these studies, the previous results show that the infants do not

exhibit a rigid pattern of behavior into which the mothers fit themselves. On the

contrary, babies are aware of the communicative situation and react accordingly. A

major point distinguishing these interactions from adult ones is asymmetry. It is up to

the caregiver to propose games which do not exceed the infants' capacities.

When the abilities of the baby augment, and in particular motor abilities manifest,

the real change is that the baby makes the world enter in her interactions and can

propose games invented by herself: for instance she throws away an object expecting

the mother to pick it up and give it back to her. What makes playing games in these

situations different from the situations where adults are involved is again asymmetry.

Conditions of validity of games are in general dictated by adults. The amusing game of

throwing objects, for instance, cannot be done with breakable or heavy objects, it has to

be stopped at lunch time, etc.

In this phase we can say that at least two other rules for understanding the speaker's

meaning are active.

In the shared belief space, if the actor communicates that she intends to perform a

move of a valid game, then by default she communicates that she intends to play the

game with the partner.

In the shared belief space, if the actor communicates that she intends to induce the

partner perform a move of a valid game, then by default she communicates that she

intends to play the game with the partner.

In fact, if the caregiver says: "I am looking for the pail and the spade" or "Go, Tom, and

fetch your pail and your spade", in both cases the child will understand that the

caregiver is proposing to play the game to go out to a sand-pit.

14

The maturation of language in a sense is not a revolution, in that it does not change

the fundamental structures of communication. All the same it offers a lot of new

possibilities on the side of content. Games that can be played using only nonverbal

items are limited in number. Moreover language speeds up the acquisition of new

games and particularly their transmission. In fact what is characteristic of first

interactions is that few people are involved. To construct games just performing actions

requires a very intimate acquaintance. When two persons know each other very well a

simple gesture performed by one can be understood by the other as the proposal of

playing a certain game but the same gesture for a foreigner will be completely

meaningless. In the first interactions this is the only actual possibility. Language allows

for naming games and proposing them to a much larger set of persons.

Up to this point what the child can do is a restricted set of operations. The richness is

given by the number of games that can grow rapidly, but the procedure remains simple

as simple is the model of the other which the child uses: people are influenced by

communicative acts as doors are influenced by pressure. A very young child in case of

failure just cries, both if a door does not open and when the mother does not give a

desired object (Harding and Golinkoff 1979). Starting with the second year the child

will try to repair the failure but again the strategies will not be different in the two

cases: repetition of the act, repetition with some change, etc. (Golinkoff 1983). What

makes communication possible for a child who is not able to deal with higher order

mental states and to conceive the fact that different persons can hold different

representations of situations and of others' mental states, is the attribution of sharedness.

The ability to perform more refined communicative acts is due to the comprehension

that sharedness is not always verified. But sharedness is still the assumption that is used

in trivial exchanges even in adult life and which makes them not problematic. The

derivation from sharedness of nested mental states is the way to cope with particularly

critical situations as for instance when we need to know if someone wants to deceive us.

The ability to produce realistic models of others is also a prerequisite to use the whole

set of conversation rules.

Conclusions

My paper has started with the premise that no theory of language use can be done which

is based only on adults communication. In fact communicating is a human activity and

as such develops from birth to adult life. Taking into account development enlightens

phenomena which are otherwise rather opaque. Interactions evolve before language is

acquired and this fact has to be explained. Two possibilities are left. Either first

interactions are communicative, and in this case we have to admit that communication

develops separately from language, or we reserve the term communication for

15

linguistic interactions and we consider that in the first period of life children interact

with others in a way which is not communicative, but in this case we have to explain

what these interactions are. The reason to deny that first interactions are communicative

derives from Gricean definition of communication. It involves higher order mental

states which we are not allowed to attribute to infants. On the other hand, it seems

sound to attribute to babies the capacity to deal with sharedness. A theory thus can be

conceived where there is a continuity from first interactions to adults' ones. A theory

where the starting point is the reciprocal attribution of sharedness, and the evolution is

based on the successively developed ability to treat with higher order mental states.

This explains both that communication is possible very soon and that first interactions

are limited. Moreover, it explains the trivial character of an important part of adults'

interactions (Airenti 2001).

Intentional communication is a mental state and cannot be derived. Saying that

communication is a form of action is a theoretical definition which is very useful in

order to understand the social value of language but there is no demonstration that the

intention to communicate is linked with the mental structures underlying action (Airenti

1999). When a child indicates something to an adult in order to take possession of it,

we say that she is doing a speech act. In fact this is not correct because what is specific

of speech acts is their conventional form. What the child is doing in reality is to express

a communicative intention regarding a given object. Something more can be said at

this point on indirect speech acts. From the developmental point of view this concept

looses its content. In fact, we have already seen that as regards comprehension children

do not perceive any difference between indirect and direct forms. They understand the

nonconventional form which is behind. As regards production, some forms are learned

late (Gordon and Ervin-Tripp 1984). An explicit and repeated teaching is necessary to

have a child acquire forms like: "Would you please give me..." or "I would like to

have..." , etc. At the same time some indirect forms are among the first acquired speech

acts: think of expressions like "I want chocolate". All these facts show that this concept

is cognitively implausible.

The speaker's meaning is the interpretation of a communicative act against the

background of what the agents share about the relational context, the behavior game. In

my view games are fit to explain both first nonverbal interactions as they are described

in developmental literature and the mix of nonverbal and verbal interactions used in

adult communication. The concept of behavior game seems useful to clarify the role to

be attributed to cognitive and social aspects in communication. Communication is the

product of individual minds who have at their disposal specific structures to represent

interactions. This is the constraint on the set of all possible inferences that a

communicative act in principle could admit. This constraint is active also in production

16

leading to exclude what is not part of the available games or of their admitted

extensions. The fact that this is the content of an individual mind explains the

possibility of errors.

Conversation rules are the socially admitted way to exchange communicative

intentions. They repose on two basic facts regarding interactions: the alternation and the

preservation of face. The first aspect is one of the infants' first acquisitions and

according to the necessities of the dialogical structure it will be specialized in turn-

taking organization rules. The second aspect develops when the children have the

possibility to represent themselves and to represent the others as individuals with

possibly different representations. This is the minimal requirement for a child to

understand that private intentions involving others have to be negotiated and that

conversation strategies have a function in this process. The management of the

techniques of conversation is the result of some years of learning. The slowness of the

process is explained by the fact that even if the motivation is universal the

implementation of conversation strategies is strictly conventional and culturally

determined.

Acknowledgements

The research reported in this paper has been supported by the MURST (Italian Ministry

for University and Scientific and Technological Research) for the year 1998.

I thank Carlo Severi and Maurizio Tirassa for their helpful comments on the

manuscript.

References

AIRENTI, GABRIELLA. 1999. Rational action and communication: differences in development.

Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science, Siena: 219-223

---. 2001. Le rle des reprsentations dans le dveloppement de la capacit communicative. Intellectica

1, 32: 155-183

AIRENTI, GABRIELLA, BRUNO G. BARA and MARCO COLOMBETTI. 1993a. Conversation and

behavior games in the pragmatics of dialogue. Cognitive Science 17: 197-256

---. 1993b. Failures, exploitations and deceits in communication. Journal of Pragmatics 20, 4: 303-

326

AUSTIN, JOHN L. 1962. How to do things with words. Oxford: Oxford University Press

BATES, ELIZABETH, LUIGIA CAMAIONI and VIRGINIA VOLTERRA. 1976. Sensorimotor

performatives. In Elizabeth Bates. (ed.). Language and context. New York: Academic Press: 49-71.

BELLUGI, URSULA, SHELLY MARKS, AMY M. BIHRLE and HELENE SABO. 1988. Dissociation

between language and cognitive functions in Williams Syndrome. In Dorothy Bishop and Kay

17

Mogford. (eds.). Language development in exceptional circumstances. London: Churchill

Livingstone: 177-189

BLANK, MARION, MYRON GESSNER and ANITA ESPOSITO. 1979. Language without

communication: a case study. Journal of Child Language 6: 329-352

BROWN, PENELOPE and STEPHEN C. LEVINSON. 1987. Politeness. Some universals in language

usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

BRUNER, JEROME S. 1975. The ontogenesis of speech acts. Journal of child language 2: 1-19

---. 1983a. Child's talk: learning to use language. New York: Norton

---. 1983b. The acquisition of pragmatic commitments. In: Roberta M. Golinkoff. (ed.). The transition

from prelinguistic to linguistic communication, Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlsbaum: 27-42

BULLOWA, MARGARET. (ed.). 1979. Before speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

BUTTERWORTH, GEORGE. 1991. The ontogeny and phylogeny of joint visual attention. In Andrew

Whiten. (ed.). Natural theories of mind. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 223-232

CHAPPELL, P. F. and LOUIS W. SANDER. 1979. Mutual regulation of the neonatal-maternal

interactive process: context for the origins of communication. In Margaret Bullowa. (ed.). Before

speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 89-109

CHOMSKY, NOAM. 1975. Reflections on language. New York: Pantheon Books

CURTISS, SUSAN. 1977. Genie: A psycholinguistic study of a modern-day "wild child", New York:

Academic Press

---. 1989. The independence and task-specificity of language. In Marc H. Bornstein and Jerome S.

Bruner. (eds.). Interaction in human development. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum: 105-137

FOSTER, SUSAN H. 1990. The communicative competence of young children. London: Longman

GELMAN, ROCHEL. 1983. Reconsidering the transition from prelinguistic to linguistic

communication. In Roberta M.Golinkoff. (ed.). The transition from prelinguistic to linguistic

communication. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlsbaum: 275-279

GOLINKOFF, ROBERTA M., 1983. The preverbal negotiation of failed messages: insights into the

transition period. In Roberta M. Golinkoff. (ed.). The transition from prelinguistic to linguistic

communication. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlsbaum: 57-78

GORDON, D. and SUSAN ERVIN-TRIPP. 1984. The structure of children's requests. In Richard L.

Schiefelbusch and Joanne Pickar. (eds.). The acquisition of communicative competence, Baltimore:

University Park Press: 295-322

GRICE, H. PAUL. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 67: 377-388

---. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. (eds.). Syntax and semantics 3:

speech acts. New York: Academic Press: 41-58

---. 1978. Further notes on logic and conversation. In Peter Cole. (ed.). Syntax and semantics 9:

Pragmatics. New York: Academic Press: 113-128

HARDING, CAROL G. and ROBERTA M. GOLINKOFF. 1979. The origins of intentional

vocalizations in prelinguistic infants. Child Development 50: 13-40

18

LEVINSON, STEPHEN C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

MELZOFF, ANDREW N. and M.KEITH MOORE. 1977. Imitation of facial and manual gestures by

human neonates. Science 198: 75-78

---. 1993. Why faces are special to infants. On connecting the attraction of faces and infants' ability for

imitation and cross-modal processing. In Bndicte de Boysson-Bardies, Scania de Schonen, Peter

Jusczyk, Peter MacNeilage and John Morton. (eds.). Developmental neurocognition: speech and face

processing in the first year of life. Dordrecht: Kluwer

PAWLBY, SUSAN J. 1977. Imitative interaction. In: H.Rudolph Schaffer. (ed.). Studies in mother-

infant interaction, London: Academic Press: 203-224

PERNER, JOSEF. 1988. Higher-order beliefs and intentions in children's understanding of social

interaction. In Janet W. Astington, Paul L.Harris and David R.Olson. (eds.). Developing theories of

mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 271-294

---. 1991. Understanding the representational mind. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press/Bradford

PERNER, JOSEF and HEINZ WIMMER. 1985. "John thinks that Mary thinks that ...": attribution of

second-order beliefs by 5- to 10-year old children Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 39:

437-471

PREMACK, DAVID. 1990. Words: what are they, and do animals have them?. Cognition 37: 197-212

PREMACK, DAVID and ANN JAMES PREMACK. 1994. Why animals have neither culture nor

history. In Tim Ingold. (ed.). Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology. London: Routledge,

SACKS, HARVEY, EMMANUEL A. SCHEGLOFF and GAIL JEFFERSON. 1974. A simplest

systematics for the organization of turn-taking in conversation. Language 50: 696-735

SCHAFFER, H.RUDOLPH. (ed.). 1977. Studies in Mother-Infant Interaction. London: Academic Press.

SCHEGLOFF, EMMANUEL A.. 1988. Presequences and indirection: applying speech act theory to

ordinary conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 12, 1: 55-62

SCHEGLOFF, EMMANUEL A., GAIL JEFFERSON and HARVEY SACKS. 1977. The preference for

self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language 53: 361-382

SCHEGLOFF, EMMANUEL A. and HARVEY SACKS. 1973. Opening up closings. Semiotica 7:

289-327

SEARLE, JOHN R. 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

---. 1972. Chomsky's revolution in linguistics. New York Review of Books June 2

SHATZ, MARILYN. 1978. Children's comprehension of their mother's question-directives. Journal of

Child Language 5: 39-46

---. 1983. On transition, continuity and coupling: an alternative approach to communicative

development. In Roberta M.Golinkoff. (ed.). The transition from prelinguistic to linguistic

communication. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlsbaum: 43-55

SMITH, NEIL V., IANTHI-MARIA TSIMPLI and JAMAL OUHALLA. 1993. Learning the

impossible: the acquisition of possible and impossible languages by a polyglot savant. Lingua 91:

279-347

19

SPERBER, DAN and DEIRDRE WILSON. 1986a. Relevance. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University

Press

---. 1986b. Inference and implicature. In Charles Travis. (ed.). Meaning and interpretation. Oxford:

Blackwell: 45-75

STRAWSON, PETER F. 1964. Intention and convention in speech acts. Philosophical Review 73: 439-

460.

TREVARTHEN, COLWYN. 1977. Descriptive analyses of infant communicative behaviour. In

H.Rudolph Schaffer. (ed.). Studies in mother-infant interaction. London: Academic Press: 227-270

TREVARTHEN, COLWYN and PENELOPE HUBLEY. 1978. Secondary intersubjectivity: confidence,

confiding and acts of meaning in the first year. In Andrew Lock. (ed.). Action, gesture, and symbol:

the emergence of language. London: Academic Press: 183-229

TRONICK, EDWARD, HEIDELISE ALS and LAUREN ADAMSON. 1979. Structure of early face-to-

face communicative interactions. In Margaret Bullowa. (ed.). Before speech. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press: 349-372

UDWIN, ORLEE and WILLIAM YULE. 1991. A cognitive and behavioural phenotype in Williams

Syndrome. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology 2: 232-244