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 still had some kindergarten to do. Nowadays 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.

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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.

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 word reference for space 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 error.

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”. 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.

If we are not the humorous Mark Twain, 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

We may consider the ■aktionsart and verb ■“semelfactive” theories with a poem by Emily Dickinson. Do we tell “activity”, “accomplishment”, “achievement” or “state”? 

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.

The matter of conveying the same meaning, naturally, remains.
For the Aspect, feel welcome to read,
■Grammatical Aspects or cognitive variables?

Larry Selinker and Susan M. Gass presented ideas similar to Zeno Vendler, in their
■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 a different grammar 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.

Life and experience will tell, children certainly can learn the regular past morphology, and the so called “linguistic interference” or “transfer” is a matter of language routines or habits, rather than types of minds or intellects. A simple example may come with a speech sound.

English and Polish are not related. The Polish speech sound [sh] as in shop is more fronted than English, and it is easy to perceive the difference. If we pronounced the Polish word szop, a raccoon, with [sh] as in English for shop, a speaker of Polish could easily tell it.

More, he or she would be able to imitate the sound and use it for their saying the word shop in English. Their speech sound quality [sh] for Polish would not change at all. Vowels and non-vowels can be practiced in this way, as effectively as for a speaker of English being unable readily to tell if a word was pronounced by a foreigner.

The matter is clearly in the habit, which is a good thing, because people mostly like to learn “those sounds” with a grammar of preference, and it is nice to have a way.

As in a poem we may conclude, the brain can embrace the idea, if there is a manner.

Feel welcome to my Travel in Grammar, part 4 is to have speech sounds,
■travelingrammar.com.