Acquiring Pragmatics by Zufferey Sandrine

Author:Zufferey, Sandrine
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317602880
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

6.1.2 Do young children produce metaphors?

From a very early age, children’s linguistic productions include non-literal uses of words that resemble metaphors. For example, Winner, McCarthy, Kleinman, and Gardner (1979) reported the case of an 18-month-old child who called a toy car a snake while twisting it up his mother’s arm. Similarly, Winner (1988) reported the case of a child who used the expression ‘fire engine in my tummy’ in order to refer to his stomach ache. Another example given by Winner (1988) is a child saying ‘I am an N’ while running up and down the stairs. Such examples suggest that children may have the ability to use words in a non-literal manner from an early age. However, it has often been pointed out in the literature that these early usages do not necessarily represent genuine cases of metaphors. An alternative explanation is that these productions represent cases of overextensions rather than metaphors. Indeed, young children often tend to use words with a broader denotation than adults, for example, by calling all round objects a ball (e.g. Bloom, 2000; Clark, 1973, 2003). The difference between metaphors and overextensions is that children who overextend words do not know the real name for an object. For this reason, overextensions stop as soon as children learn the appropriate word.

Winner (1979) studied the speech productions of one child between the age of 2;3 and 4;10 using corpus data, applying systematic criteria to exclude anomalies and overextensions in order to identify genuine productions of metaphors. Non-literal uses of words were categorized as over-extensions according to the following criteria: (1) the word was used for a set of similar referents and (2) there was no evidence that the child knew the correct label or literal name for the object. Non-literal uses of words were labeled as metaphors under the following conditions: (1) either prior or after the non-literal use of a word, the child renamed the object with its literal name; and (2) the object was transformed through a pretend gesture and named according to this gesture, for example, if the child put a banana on his ear like a telephone and then uttered the word ‘phone’.

During the 112 hours of recording from the corpus, the child studied by Winner produced 185 non-literal uses of words satisfying her criteria for metaphors. All of them corresponded to cases of renaming of familiar objects with other nouns. These metaphors were either part of the child’s symbolic play or instances of sensory metaphors arising from perceived physical similarity, mostly related to the object shape. For example, the child named a pencil a ‘big needle’ and the letter J ‘a cane’. Winner noted a developmental pattern going from more metaphors related to pretense at the age of two to a majority of sensory metaphors at the age of four. In order to test the generalization of these findings, Winner et al. (1979) studied longitudinal speech samples from two other children. Their results indicate that symbolic play metaphors declined with age in one of the children but not the other.

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