Re: that

Matthew Huntbach wrote:
Farhad wrote:

The concept "native speaker" is an absract construct. What you mean
by that could be very different from what I mean by it. That's why I
asked in earlier postings that the term should be operationalized
before discussing it. But some people, regrettably, interpreted it as
too much confidence and arrogance on my part to "include" myself in
the definition.

I, personally, view the concept "native speaker" apart from socio-
enviromental aspects. I think if anyone has a competence quite
similar to that of Chomsky's "an ideal native speaker" should be
regarded as a native speaker.

No. A "native speaker" is someone who has picked up the language as
their first language when learning to speak as a child. No-one else
is a native speaker. That is the only sensible use of the term.

I agree with that.

Learning a language through being formally taught it is a different
thing from picking it up as the first tongue. However perfect the formally learnt language may
be, it is not processed as the mother tongue - sometimes an aspect of
that is that it is "too perfect".

There is that, but learning a language strictly by immersion at a reasonably young age comes pretty close to learning it as a first tongue.

There is scienttific evidence that there is part of the brain which
picks up language but which only operates when we are children. That
is why any adult learner of a language, however competent they may
be, cannot be counted as a "native speaker" - the langauge will
always be to some extent artificial to them.

That evidence, however, does not apply to every single person, as there are varying rates of maturing among individuals. I was a late bloomer, for instance, and I would say that even though I started learning English at the age of fourteen, I did remarkably well in acquiring it.

To some extent, being
consciously aware of language, and learning grammar formally switches
us off from being "native speakers" of it. I would say the true
native speaker is someone who doesn't know anything about grammar,
phonetics etc, so speaks the language entriely naturally as it comes.

The trouble with that is that anyone who has gone to school and succumbed to the ideas taught there becomes not a true native speaker, by your measuring stick.

I'm a native speaker of Latvian (which I now speak very poorly), but I have about 58 years of experience speaking English -- the only language in which I am still fluent (I was fluent in German in my early teens, but that language is now almost entirely lost from my brain). I have no familiarity with the terms of grammar -- I just learned to speak and write the language by listening to those around me and reading a lot.

Sure, participating in AUE may have taught me a little bit (particularly in paying a bit more attention to what I put on "paper"), but most of what I use to communicate has come from living immersed in AmE, mostly of the Standard American Broadcast English type. There have been brief times when I lived in areas of the USA where a particular dialect was very strong, and I picked up some of that when there, but it faded immediately upon return to areas without such dialectal influence.

--
Skitt
No NESsie, but oh, so close ...

.

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