sometime between Homo habilis and Homo sapiens, that the capacity to learn a spoken language became inscribed in our genetic code and thus possessed its own neural base.2 Several conditions must be present in order for a child to understand the language spoken to it and to speak it. It must be able to distinguish ‘linguistically relevant’ sounds from among all the sounds it hears. Then, it must be able to cut up the flow of words addressed to it or which it hears, and to classify them according to their meaning. Finally, one day, the child will recognise in the adults’ speech their intention to signify.
But language is not the only means of self-expression and communication among humans. The whole body participates, through the gaze, gestures, facial expressions, cries, signs, and so on. As we will see, all these forms of communication are aspects of the symbolising function, which is also inscribed in the human mind. Even before birth, the child is already familiar with the voice of the woman carrying it in her womb, and with the sounds of the language she speaks. After birth, the infant will be immersed in a world of sounds, smells, handling of its body, words spoken to it, all of which inform it about the surrounding world. The child will seek to communicate with this world via its gaze, through a repertory of facial expressions and gestures used to show pleasure, fear, well-being, distress and so on. In short, if the child needs others to survive, it already seeks also to communicate with others by bodily means. Later, when the infant becomes a baby, it will babble and play with the sounds produced. Between nine and eighteen months of age, it will gradually discover the meaning of the words spoken to it, even before it can actually pronounce them. This means that children must start by understanding, to a certain extent, what is going on around them and within them before they can choose the words to talk about it. The connection between the appropriate word and cognition is therefore clear, even if there is a time lag between being able to understand words and being able to produce them.3
And then, between eighteen and twenty-four months, when the child has come to understand what others are saying, it will quickly start talking. Let us not forget that, in order to produce the sounds of articulated speech, there must be a vocal tract that makes it possible. And the vocal tract of the infant does not allow it to do this. In the months following birth, we see a reconfiguration of the organs that will allow the child to speak. It will be helped by the gaze, gestures, the voice, by dialogues with those taking care of it. Once the baby becomes a young child, in order to speak the language spoken to it, it will have to associate sounds and meaning according to phonological and syntactical rules, to the rhythm and the intonation of a particular language. The bulk of the grammar of this language will thus be internalised and acquired before anyone teaches it to the child.4 Yet it is not until the age of six that it will master more or less completely the pronunciation and grammar of its language.
Understanding a language obviously means understanding the words strung together into a sentence. Which raises the question: What is a word? A word is a linguistic sign, but it is two things at once. From the standpoint of morphology, it is a combination of sounds that correspond to the phonological forms characteristic of each language, a ‘semantic unit’ linked to its ‘vocal space’. From the standpoint of meaning, a word is an ideality, a symbol.5 It is, according to Saussure’s famous formula, the inseparable unit of signifier (sounds) and signified (meaning),6 and, as he often repeated, the defining characteristic of human language is the arbitrary character7 of the signifier with respect to the signified. There is no resemblance between the French ‘vache’, the English ‘cow’ and the animal these words designate. This absence of resemblance and the non-motivated nature of the signifier mean that words are ‘symbols’, according to the classification of signs developed by C. S. Peirce. A word is therefore neither a simple signal nor an icon. We will return to this point.
But in order to recognise a word, a mental representation must be produced that corresponds to this word which is a sound pattern. Thus, the representation must posit as equivalent the various ways of pronouncing the same word (‘dog’, for instance) that the child hears, whoever pronounces or has pronounced it and in whatever context. The equivalence the child establishes among all the ways the same word is pronounced makes the mental representation of this word a schematic mental reality, with an abstract pattern and an individualised ideality. Of course, the child is not aware of the unconscious mental operations involved in establishing the equivalence of ways of pronouncing and using a word.
In learning to recognise the meaning of the words and phrases spoken to or around them, and then learning to say them, children unconsciously reactivate the significations their society and culture have given these words. The words and their uses divide the world up into categories based on the child’s experiences. These categories distinguish inanimate objects belonging to the realm of nature (rocks, rain, sun, etc.), culture (ball, doll, bicycle, etc.), persons (father, mother, big sister, etc.), situations (being in bed, falling down, etc.), actions (playing, eating, running, etc.) and interactions between and with persons.8
Acquiring ‘vocabulary’, therefore, means internalising the system of knowledge, cultural representations and values of the society, the epoch, the social birth group and especially the group in which the child grows up. Not only do words carry meaning, but because of this they also carry ‘values’ and ‘emotions’. Learning to talk also means learning to think and to live. But this is not to say that later, when the child has grown up, it will not think and live differently.
Let us continue this analysis of language acquisition, which begins when a child is around the age of nine to ten months and continues until it is eighteen to twenty months, and note – this is fundamental – that it is at this point that the child develops simultaneously an awareness of self and the ability to represent the world (to itself) and to multiply its symbolic practices. This occurs as the social, affective and cognitive exchanges between adults and child increase in number. These reciprocal exchanges provide the child with the model of its language and at the same time with models of psychological and social behaviour. Even before learning to walk, but especially once it does, the child discovers the characteristics of solid objects (whether stationary or moving), of liquids, of space, in short of the surrounding physical world. The child is thus capable of making ‘deductions’ about the nature of its physical and social world even before it possesses the appropriate words to express them.
To conclude, we can now step back and take a global view of the nature and role of language in the functioning of societies and in the construction of the subject. Language occupies two sites at once: on the one hand, the field of intersubjective relations, therefore making it crucial to the life of societies; and on the other hand, it is immanent to the consciousness of each speaker of a particular language, where it functions as the inner speech that each person addresses to him- or herself. This inner speech is none other than the language of the linguistic community to which the subject belongs. In the field of intersubjective relations, to understand what others are telling us is to experience immediately that others are thereby manifesting an intentional life, which makes them alter egos.9 Yet as a subject, I can never gain direct access to the meaning actually intended by others. I can do this only through the mediation of words and gestures, and therefore through the mediation of the signifiers the other uses in order to address me. The same is true for the other’s relation to me. In the last analysis, then, I do not have access to the consciousness and the mind of others as they experience them. The other can lie to me, just as I can lie to them. They can think and pursue something other than what they tell me, and so on. We all know that words (and more generally symbols) can have several meanings, and that to truly understand them we must know how to interpret them, to submit them to a hermeneutic analysis. In this way, language has a double function in societies: as communication, on the one hand; and, on the other, as an instrument for experiencing the other as a subject, a non-ego, which is also an ego but one with which we can be neither fused nor confused, a ‘transcendent’ subject. While it connects people, language also separates them.
In addition, and to the same extent, language unites the subject with himself at the same time as it allows the subject to step back and reflect on himself, on others, on the surrounding
