Larry Selinker’s interlanguage

Larry Selinker developed his theory of ■interlanguage or “third language”, in 1972. A “latent psychological structure” becomes woken in the brain, when a human learns a second language, said Mr. Selinker.

We learn a ■second language, if we have spoken a few words of another tongue before. My Polish was far from proficient, when I began learning American. I remember the cognitive moment when pears made quite some difference against gruszki.

■→This text is also available in Polish.

I was about 5 years old, and still had some kindergarten to do. Nowadays many more people get to begin learning another language early, but let us reason without pointing at anyone in particular. We can imagine Eduardo.

Eduardo was born in America, in an immigrant Hispanic family. He spoke mostly Spanish before he went to school. His parents spoke Spanish, and his friends in the town area he lived were all Hispanic. However, Eduardo has always had a good awareness of American English in his environment, also via the media.

Eduardo becomes 20. He is doing an IT degree. He takes elliptic integrals easy, but he would need a dictionary to translate math from English to Spanish — he has learned math and spoken about it in English.

Mr. Selinker would say Spanish is Eduardo’s first tongue.

Love yet has not come Spanish-first. Eduardo’s girlfriend is an American, and American English is her only language. She is a real treasure and a natural for a good conversation. When Eduardo tells his sweetheart he loves her, he says it in English, and he means it.

Mr. Selinker would say Eduardo must be holding on to another, third or interlanguage, which is only in Eduardo’s head.

Insight from experience

Regardless of origin and gender, people have primary languages, rather than first or second.

My primary language for linguistics is American English. I need a dictionary to translate my own works to Polish, though I was born and grew up in Poland; both my parents spoke Polish, and I went to Polish schools. Only my study of English was not in Polish.

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Let us now imagine Ai-li. Her grandparents were Chinese. She has always been for languages. She learned American along with Chinese, before she went to school. About ten years old, she started learning German and French.

Ai-li is graduating from university now. She is writing a thesis about spatial reference in German and French — her two “second languages”, or her “third-second languages”? Should American count as the second, German and French would make the third or fourth, but she has worked with all her languages, for some 14 years now.

Insight from experience

The primary language is not anyhow a fixed option. A multilingual speaker will prioritize the relevant tongue, dependent on the environment and context.

A primary language may become “the learner”. Learning German began to work better for me when I started referring to American English rather than Polish. Matters were the same when I learned French, so it is not about language groups or “families”.

It is owing to latent psychological structures in the brain that second language learners show simplification, circumlocution, and over-generalization, stated Mr. Selinker.

Human brains yet do not make “latent” or “psychological” synapses that could be “activated” with words of foreign tongues. Latencies may occur with injury, but trauma is not supportive of brain language structures, and likewise, brain language structures do not support trauma; they rework and eliminate trauma healing unlike skin, because without a scar: it is brain healthy absolute ruthlessness.

The brain wouldn’t care to “choke”: apart from a small amount in the blood vessels, there are no fibroblasts in the brain; scars come from fibroblasts that give collagen to repair an area, and that area becomes later more prone to contract, says ■Wikipedia.

To include ■the blood-brain barrier in the picture, blood vessels belong with the cardiovascular, and the great gray matter with the cerebral structuring — in truth, by nature, there are no fibroblasts in the brain, the neocortex does not make scar tissue — but still, this does not mean one had to be brain injured to learn another language, only it would not show.

Please compare ■visual evoked potentials over Wikipedia.

Selinker noted that in a given situation, the utterances produced by a learner are different from those native speakers would produce, had they attempted to convey the same meaning, expands ■Wikipedia.

Mark Twain remains a famous figure for speaking American “since his birth”, that is, natively already in his cradle. His ■Speeches show a sense of humor.
And if I sell to the reader this volume of nonsense, and he, instead of seasoning his graver reading with a chapter of it now and then, when his mind demands such relaxation, unwisely overdoses himself with several chapters of it at a single sitting, he will deserve to be nauseated, and he will have nobody to blame but himself.

It is impossible to imagine Mark Twain saying, you are not speaking as I do, therefore you are wrong. More, to put up a linguistic requirement, we have to be able to provide guidance, and how exactly do we “convey the same meaning”?

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Notes for Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Poems
Life | Love | Nature | Time and Eternity

To consider an ■aktionsart, that is, lexical aspect and verbs ■“semelfactive”, there may be a poem by Emily Dickinson.

The brain is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.
Emily Dickinson, ■The Brain is Wider than the Sky.

Do we tell the “semelfactive” apart from “aktionsart” here, and thus convey the same meaning? Feel also welcome to read:
■Grammatical Aspects or cognitive variables?

Let us also consider a book by Larry Selinker and Susan M. Gass, ■Second Language Acquisition: An Introductory Course.
Imperfective morphology emerges with durative and/or stative verbs (i.e. activities and states), then gradually spreads to achievement/accomplishment and punctual verbs.

The book gives examples.
(7-33) She dancing (activity);
(7-34) And then a man coming… (accomplishment);
(7-35) Well, I was knowing that (state);
(7-36) Other boys were shouting ‘watch out’! (achievement).

I cannot really think about a place in the USA — countryside, town, or metropolis? — where people would believe that accomplishment needs to be grammatically different from achievement. Resources show “punctual verbs” mostly for ■Japanese or ■Singlish.

The book says the participants were children aged 8 years, French and Dutch.
The French learners were overall less proficient than the Dutch learners and never reached the stage where they could use the regular past morphology productively; the book adds, the study lasted three years.

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Resource for Emily Dickinson’s poetry

Poems
Life | Love | Nature | Time and Eternity

We may conclude with a piece of experience to show that the language faculty always is one — brain, language, and cognition.

People who learned one language and another — and gained proficiency in both — would likely have an accent in a third tongue of choice that does not resemble the first as much as it complies with the “second” tongue.

When I was at university, the German teacher remarked we people had American accents in our German: it was a Polish university in Poland, and we students were all Polish citizens, but the pattern was we people had American sounds in our German rather than Polish. Usually, people from Poland speak German with Polish accents.

I believed her, I perceived the sounding. There is a way to get around it, which I implemented to get her credit. I devised the way myself. We choose the language of reference. If in our English we tend to have a Polish accent, the reference will be Polish; if we have an American accent in our German, the language of reference is American English.

The brain sure has good and strong habits for a language, to transfer its features to another. Good habits are flexible and they can work more than one way.

To think about English and Polish words, we can say szopa in Polish with [sh] as in the English word shop, etc. Our regular way to say the word szopa is not going to change. The way to say the word shop should acquire the English speech sound quality [sh], with just a little exercise. Vowels and non-vowels can be practiced in this way.

Human brain language faculty is one. There are no natural speech sounds outside this language capacity. The thing is in learning: see ■the role of feedback.

Feel welcome to the Travel in Grammar, ■travelingrammar.com.

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