Language for reflection (on language)

Abstract In this chapter we consider metalinguistic commentary about language. Compared to the referential-communicative uses of language dealt with in the preceding chapters, metalinguistic activities involve reflecting on language and linguistic forms as objects in themselves. We describe the increasingly conscious access to linguistic form culminating in the ability to provide explicit verbal explanations of what one knows of language, followed by a review of the neural underpinnings of such tricky notions as consciousness, and neural correlates of metalinguistic access to different systems of language structure. We next trace the developmental route of metalinguistic awareness in different linguistic domains (phonology, morphology, lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics), as a move from early sensitivity to verbal input (children’s understanding of speech input and how they make self-repairs of their own output) via more mature reflective metalinguistic operations (judging whether a word exists in their language; if a given utterance is well-formed and if not, why this is so), on to giving verbal explanation for how and why a linguistic usage takes the form it does (hare and hair are two words that sound the same but have different spellings and mean different things, one is an animal the other is what grows on parts of our body). We conclude by noting the specialized metalanguage confined to experts like linguists, grammarians, language teachers, writers, and editors.