What is to be learned

The community as the focus of social cognition

William Labov

This paper is an effort to define the target of the language learner: asking, what are the data that the child pays attention to in the process of becoming a native speaker? In so doing, we will necessarily be engaged in the more general effort to define language itself. The general argument to be advanced here is that the human language learning capacity is outward bound, that is, aimed at the acquisition of the general pattern used in the speech community. The end result is a high degree of uniformity in both the categorical and variable aspects of language production, where individual variation is reduced below the level of linguistic significance.

Keywords: acquisition, social cognition, outward-bound, human language learning capacity, native speaker, individual variation, degree of uniformity

Published online: 18 December 2012
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.10.2.02lab

Cited by

Cited by 21 other publications

Baxter, Gareth & William Croft

2016. Modeling language change across the lifespan: Individual trajectories in community change. Language Variation and Change 28:2 ► pp. 129 ff.

Dodsworth, Robin & Mary Kohn

2021. 6. Supraregional Changes Are Uncorrelated. The Publication of the American Dialect Society 106:1 ► pp. 125 ff.

Fonteyn, Lauren & Andrea Nini

2020. Individuality in syntactic variation: An investigation of the seventeenth-century gerund alternation . Cognitive Linguistics 31:2 ► pp. 279 ff.

Habib, Rania

2014. Vowel variation and reverse acquisition in rural Syrian child and adolescent language. Language Variation and Change 26:1 ► pp. 45 ff.

HABIB, RANIA

2017. Parents and their children's variable language: Is it acquisition or more?. Journal of Child Language 44:3 ► pp. 628 ff.

Habib, Rania

2021. The use of the discourse markers yaʕni and ʔinnu: ‘I mean’ in Syrian Arabic. Journal of Pragmatics 178 ► pp. 245 ff.

Holmes-Elliott, Sophie

2021. Calibrate to innovate: Community age vectors and the real time incrementation of language change. Language in Society 50:3 ► pp. 441 ff.

Hwang, Young & Stuart Davis

2019. Pitch-Pattern Diffusion of Generational Tone Change in North Kyungsang Korean English Loanwords. Lanaguage Research 55:1 ► pp. 129 ff.

Johns, Michael A, Jorge R Valdés Kroff & Paola E Dussias

2019. Mixing things up: How blocking and mixing affect the processing of codemixed sentences. International Journal of Bilingualism 23:2 ► pp. 584 ff.

Labov, William

2014. The role of African Americans in Philadelphia sound change. Language Variation and Change 26:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Labov, William

2016. Afterword: Where are we now?. Journal of Sociolinguistics 20:4 ► pp. 581 ff.

MacKenzie, Laurel

2019. Perturbing the community grammar: Individual differences and community-level constraints on sociolinguistic variation. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4:1

Nardy, Aurélie, Jean-Pierre Chevrot & Stéphanie Barbu

2014. Sociolinguistic convergence and social interactions within a group of preschoolers: A longitudinal study. Language Variation and Change 26:3 ► pp. 273 ff.

Petré, Peter & Lynn Anthonissen

2020. Individuality in complex systems: A constructionist approach . Cognitive Linguistics 31:2 ► pp. 185 ff.

Satyanath, Shobha

2021. Genealogies of sociolinguistics in India. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25:5 ► pp. 762 ff.

Schleef, Erik

2021. Individual differences in intra-speaker variation: t-glottalling in England and Scotland. Linguistics Vanguard 7:s2

Stanford, James N. & Laurence A. Kenny

2013. Revisiting transmission and diffusion: An agent-based model of vowel chain shifts across large communities. Language Variation and Change 25:2 ► pp. 119 ff.

Stanford, James N. & Yanhong Pan

2013. The sociolinguistics of exogamy: Dialect acquisition in a Zhuang village. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17:5 ► pp. 573 ff.

Stanford, James N., Nathan A. Severance & Kenneth P. Baclawski

2014. Multiple vectors of unidirectional dialect change in eastern New England. Language Variation and Change 26:1 ► pp. 103 ff.

Tamminga, Meredith

2018. Modulation of the following segment effect on English coronal stop deletion by syntactic boundaries. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 3:1

Tamminga, Meredith, Laurel MacKenzie & David Embick

2016. The dynamics of variation in individuals. Linguistic Variation 16:2 ► pp. 300 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 17 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.