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C h a P t e r 3 ................................... develoPmental PersPeCtives In chapter 2, I discussed I-you connectedness from sociolinguistic and phenomenological perspectives. I focused especially on (inter)personal deixis, that is, the ways in which meaning is contextualized by the spatial and temporal context of utterance, which coinvolves the reversible speaker and addressee roles. Deixis in general and personal pronouns in particular are therefore inescapably rooted in an existential context. In this chapter, I propose to continue examining interpersonal pronouns in context, but to focus the discussion on developmental aspects and interrogate the emergence of linguistic symbols for speaker and addressee from presymbolic patterns of interpersonal interaction. This developmental story will enable me to expand the validity of primary I-you connectedness beyond the domain of verbalized interaction to the earliest stages of human life. At the same time, the developmental story will enable me to meet the challenge raised by Castañeda and other philosophers of subjectivity by showing that self-reference does indeed precede the mastery of the pronoun “I,” but, in contrast to the philosophy enclosed in the epistemically construed first-person perspective, that selfreference is a relational feature, which coinvolves first- and second-personal perspectives and roles from the start. Consider how cognitively complex personal pronoun acquisition is. Importantly , the child must understand that even though she uses “I” (and cognate possessive forms “my,” “mine,” “me”) for self-reference, others address her with “you” (as well as “your” and “yours”). The child must, in other words, understand how the “I” and “you” pronouns (and their cognates) interrelate in the conversational context in order to be credited with full acquisition of speech roles. In the words of Benveniste, the child must acquire I-you reversibility in order to master either of the first- and second-person pronouns fully. Merleau-Ponty brings this important point into relief in the following passage (“Child Relations with Others” [2000, p. 150]): 90 Between You and i The ‘I’ arises when the child understands that every ‘you’ that is addressed to him is for him an ‘I’; that is, that there must be a consciousness of the reciprocity of points of view in order that the word ‘I’ may be used. . . . The pronoun ‘I’ has its full meaning only when the child uses it not as an individual sign to designate his own person —a sign that would be assigned once for all to himself and to nobody else—but when he understands that each person is an ‘I’ for himself and a ‘you’ for others. It is when he understands that even though others call him ‘you’ he can nonetheless say ‘I,’ that the pronoun is acquired in all its significance. In order for it to have been a real acquisition, he must have grasped the relations between the different pronouns and the passage from one of their designata to the others. In other cases the sound ‘I’ is used mechanically. . . but it is not used in its fullest linguistic and grammatical meaning. As discussed in this chapter, the road to the mastery of personal pronouns in their fullest linguistic and grammatical meaning may be a long and winding one. The fact that the pronoun designating self and other issues from the child’s mouth need not alone testify to what I would like to call a conversational competence in the domain of personal pronoun use, that is, the ability to use personal pronouns as markers for speaker and addressee roles and points of view. Needless to say, the challenge faced by the child is not limited to the linguistic coding of persons but extends to phonological and syntactical abilities necessary for the mastery of language in general. At the same time, the acquisition of personal pronouns in their “fullest linguistic and grammatical meaning” depends upon a series of cognitive prerequisites, such as the consciousness of the difference and the reciprocal interrelation between one’s own and the interlocutor’s points of view. As argued below, presymbolic practices of infancy and childhood such as face-to-face interactions (for instance, imitation of facial gestures) and joint attending to the perceptual environment (for instance, looking and pointing at a common object of interest) provide a fertile ground for the mastery of spatial and personal points of view, which are subsequently taken up in the linguistic marking of speaker and hearer perspectives. However, the perspectival configuration of spatial environment alone does not suffice. Consider that if the child is to grasp personal...

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