Ben,
Er, you seem to be confirming my point. Tomasello from Wiki is an early child
development psychologist. I want a model that keeps going to show the stages of
language acquistion from say 7-13, on through teens, and into the twenties -
that shows at what stages we understand progressively general and abstract
concepts like, say, government, philosophy, relationships, etc etc. - and why
different, corresponding texts are only understandable at different ages.
There is nothing like this because there is no true *embedded* cognitive
science that looks at how long it takes to build up a picture of the world, and
how language is embedded in our knowledge of the world. [The only thing that
comes at all close to it, that I know, is Margaret Donaldson's work, if I
remember right].
Re rhetorical structure theory - many thanks for the intro - & it looks
interesting. But again this is not an embedded approach:
"RST is intended to describe texts, rather than the processes of creating or
reading and understanding them"
For example, to understand sentences they quote like
"He tends to be viewed now as a biologist, but in his 5 years on the Beagle
his main work was geology, and he saw himself as a geologist. His work
contributed significantly to the field."
requires a considerable amount of underlying knowledge about Darwin's life,
and an extraordinary ability to handle timelines - and place events/sentences
in time.
I can confidently bet that no one is attempting this type of text/structural
analysis because no one, as I said, is taking an embedded approach to language.
[Embedded is to embodied in the analysis of language use and thought as
environment is to nature in the analysis of behaviour generally].
Ben,
Cognitive linguistics also lacks a true deveopmental model of language
acquisition that goes beyond the first few years of life, and can embrace all
those several - and, I'm quite sure, absolutely necessary - stages of mastering
language and building a world picture.
Tomassello's theory of language acquisition specifically embraces the
phenomena you describe. What don't you like about it?
ben
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