How shall a thing be called?

Abstract

The most deliberate part of first-language teaching is the business of telling a child what each thing is called. We ordinarily speak of the name of a thing as if there were just one, but in fact, of course, every referent has many names. The dime in my pocket is not only a dime. It is also money, a metal object, a thing, and, moving to subordinates, it is a 1952 dime, in fact a particular 1952 dime with a unique pattern of scratches, discolorations, and smooth places. When such an object is named for a very young child how is it called? It may be named money or dime but probably not metal object, thing, 1952 dime, or particular 1952 dime. The dog out on the lawn is not only a dog but is also a boxer, a quadruped, an animate being; it is the landlord's dog, named Prince. How will it be identified for a child? Sometimes it will be called a dog, sometimes Prince, less often a boxer, and almost never a quadruped, or animate being. Listening to many adults name things for many children, I find that their choices are quite uniform and that I can anticipate them from my own inclinations. How are these choices determined and what are their consequences for the cognitive development of the child? Adults have notions about the kind of language appropriate for use with children. Especially strong and universal is the belief that children have trouble pronouncing long names and so should always be given the shortest possible names. A word is preferable to a phrase and, among words, a monosyllable is better than a polysyllable. This predicts the preference for dog and Prince over boxer, quadruped, and animate being. It predicts the choice of dime over metal object and particular 1952 dime. Zipf (10) has shown that the length of a word (in phonemes or syllables) is inversely related to its frequency in the printed language. Consequently the shorter names for any thing will usually also be the most frequently used names for that thing, and so it would seem that the choice of a name is usually predictable from either frequency or brevity. The monosyllables dog and Prince have much higher frequencies according to the Thorndike-Lorge list (8) than do the polysyllables boxer, quadruped, and animate being. It sometimes happens, however, that the frequency-brevity principle makes the wrong prediction. The thing called a pineapple is also fruit. Fruit is the shorter and more frequent term, but adults will name the thing pineapple. Similarly they will say apple, banana, orange, and even pomegranate; all of them longer and less frequent words than the perfectly appropriate fruit. Brevity seems not to be the powerful determinant we had imagined. The frequency principle can survive this kind of example, but only if it is separated from counts like the Thorndike-Lorge of over-all frequency in the printed language. On the whole the word fruit appears more often than the word pineapple (and also is shorter), but we may confidently assume that, when pineapples are being named, the word pineapple is more frequent than the word fruit. This, of course, is a kind of frequency more directly relevant to our problem. Word counts of general usage are only very roughly applicable to the prediction of what will be said when