The Acquisition of Social Structure

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The Acquisition of Social Structure:

Towards a Developmental Sociology of

Language and Meaning

How members of a society or culture make sense of, or assign sense to, their

environment over time is central to the persistent problem of how social order is

possible.1

Social order, as mentioned by the author, is one of the persistent problems of todays life,

since it keeps the world, the societies we live in and various cultural groups away from

chaos. This is done through language, through the communication of thoughts and

feelings through a system of arbitrary signals, such as voice sounds, gestures, or written

symbols2. Language is acquired by every child starting with the eighteenth month and

can serve as blueprints of behaviour3or society they are part of.

At the beginning children only imitate adults, they do what others do, thus acquiring a

sense of belonging to a certain society.

According to Katz (1966, pp.110-12) the modern linguistic theory (language

theory) consists of three subtheories such as phonological theory, syntactic theory and

semantic theory.

The phonological theory deals with the speech sounds of the childs language, the

syntactic theory applies when the child starts to put the sounds into structures and the

semantic theory starts when the child interprets sentences as meaningful messages.

1Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction,p.42, The

Free press, NY

2http://www.thefreedictionary.com/language

3Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction,p.44, The

Free press, NY
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/languagehttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/languagehttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/languagehttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/language


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At this point the child makes the connection between language and meaning, he learns

that, for example, if the oven is hot and mother says do not touch it means that if you

touch it you will get burned.

In Katzs view the phonological and semantical component are purely interpretive, they

relate the abstract formal structures to a scheme of pronunciation and conceptualization.

Thus pointing out an important fact about languages, namely that sounds and meaning are

interconnected.

Meaning is a matter of how members of a society or culture acquire a sense of

social structure to interpret everyday life. A childs vocabulary is filtered by his

interpretive procedures when hes exposed to, and imitation of, adult speech andtriggered by auto-stimulation or the perception of the environment.

Every member of a society has to develop the competence or the skill to assign meaning

to their environment so that they can understand each other.

e.g. Eve lunch.4

How does a mother decide what her child is trying to say? How can she decide upon the

most appropriate meaning of the childs utterance?

Taking grammar into consideration this could be expanded to Eve had lunch, Eve is

having lunch, Eve had lunch, Eves lunch and so on.

But what if the child utters this at noon when she is at the table with a plate of food in

front of her and she is all busy? How does this acquire a meaning?

Certainly, in these circumstances Eve lunch means Eve is having lunch.

Later when the plate is placed in the sink and the child is getting off the chair the same

utterance can have different meaning: Eve had lunch. Thus, every utterance, every

sound can get a different meaning according to the circumstances it is mentioned in.

4Cicourel: Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, p.57, The

Free press, NY


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The acquisition of interpretive procedures is parallel with the acquisition of

language, with the childs interpretive procedures gradually replaced with the adults

interpretive procedure, thus facilitating the learning of lexical items and the development

of simple denotative meanings.

When examining utterances of certain members of a society or culture it is important to

mention that everyone relies on what (s)he knows and that a world is built into the

message. The occasion of the utterance, the biography of the hearer-speaker and the

social relationships embody a world view which is determined by the self.

To sum up, the author emphasizes throughout the chapter the interpretive

procedures which later develop into a whole social order and how a child becomesoriented to both generic and actual cultural recognition and use of normal forms in his

environment. The constant status of interpretive procedure, for example, allows a normal

child to acquire language in a family of deaf parents and the interpretive procedures allow

deaf persons to acquire a sense of social structure that is nonverbal, thus developing a

sense of meaning and self.


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Bibliography:

Cicourel, Aaron, Cognitive Sociology. Language and Meaning in Social Interaction, The Free

Press, New York

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/language
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/languagehttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/languagehttp://www.thefreedictionary.com/language


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Hand-out

How members of a society or culture make sense of, or assign sense to, their

environment over time is central to the persistent problem of how social order is

possible.

Question: How does this excerpt connect with language, meaning and self?

Language theory:

Phonological theory

Syntactic theory

Semantic theory

Questions: What can you tell me about the phonological theory?

What can you tell me about syntactic theory?

What can you tell me about semantic theory?

Interpretive procedures:

Eve lunch

How would you interpret the phrase give above?

What made you interpret it like it?

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The Acquisition of Social Structure