Form and Content Revisited: Comment on Lisbeth Hedelin's Paper

Extract

In her paper “Methodological reflections on studies of preschoolers' awareness of the form/content distinction, in spoken communication”, Lisbeth Hedelin again raises the long discussed and still murky issue of how children come to understand the distinction between what an utterance means and how exactly it is said. The form/content distinction is, of course, a central feature and defining property of natural languages. It is relevant to the basic grammatical demonstration of ambiguity, which is recurrently offered as evidence for a deep structure/surface structure distinction: “Visiting relatives can be tiresome” as one form with two content interpretations. It is also relevant to any notion of language as an effective communication system in which levels of directness can be manipulated in the service of politeness, and in which deniability is the prerogative of the language user: “It sure would be nice to have a beer in this heat” displays potential ambiguity of interpretation between request and comment —of quite a different sort from “visiting relatives”. The multiplicity of form/content distinctions is central to Hedelin's paper, which takes as a starting point the possibility that different tasks might reveal quite different levels of ability to deal with or display control over the basic notion that form and content do not map in a one-to-one way on to each other.