17 - Learning to talk about motion UP and DOWN in Tzeltal: is there a language-specific bias for verb learning?

Summary

Introduction

This chapter discusses a case of language-specific semantics, and proposes a language-specific learning process to account for how children acquire the relevant expressions. The language-specific semantics is that of the vocabulary involved in the “uphill/downhill” system of spatial description in the Mayan language Tzeltal. Tenejapan speakers of Tzeltal speak as if the whole world tilted down northwards; thus one can speak of the “uphill” end of a table, for example, using the general South/North slope of the land as a frame of reference for describing spatial relations on the horizontal. I will focus on that subpart of the system which has an element of verticality: the verbs, directional adverbs, and nouns of this system, which are used both for spatial relations arrayed along a vertical axis and for those arrayed along a horizontal axis derived from the overall slope of the land. The vocabulary at issue is set out in table 17.1; for convenience I will refer to this as the up/down vocabulary of Tzeltal, but it must be borne in mind that the role of the vertical axis is precisely what is being treated as problematic in this discussion. I will relate the acquisition of this system to currently controversial issues in the language acquisition literature: the strategies children adopt for learning words, the possible biases they begin the task with, and the role of universal semantic features like “vertical” in this process.