4.3 Causal relationships
The findings from Justeson & Katz (1991) work very well with cognitive concepts of memory and learning. An interesting interpretation of the findings would be that we don’t need any inherent meaning to explain antonyms. Children would just learn what antonyms are through language use. Here, we are falling for a common trap though, which is bias towards a specific theory. The findings might be consistent with more than one theory. In order to evaluate the usage-based interpretation, we should also consider alternative explanations.
Usage-based linguistics is most strongly contradicted by nativist theories, such as Universal Grammar. The idea of nativists is that we are born with a capacity for language including some deep undelying linguistic categories. In this view, children already have categories like antonymy (or more generally oppositeness) hard-wired in their brains. Language learning then would consist of categorizing new stimuli against these pre-existing categories. It would be possible to imagine that the structure for antonym relationship is already given and children learn which words are antonyms. As a result of that, use them together more often than other word pairs.
Ultimately, it is a question of causality. Did co-occurrence cause the emergence of antonym pairs, or did the oppositeness of the lexemes cause the co-occurrence? We have arrived at a chicken or egg situation:
- Antonyms co-occur and children/learners associate them. Their oppositeness is a result of this.
- Antonyms have opposite meanings, children learn that first and, as a result, use them together.
One of the main routes to take is the search for an a priori definition of antonymy or oppositeness that we would need to determine a potential pre-language concept. Observational methods are not normally used to infer causal relationships. This is normally the job of experimental methods, where you can setup a controlled environment for language to be produced in order to control for as many confounding variables as possible. However, when it comes to children, the options are limited and it is hardly possible to check whether there is a pre-language concept of antonymy. Without empirical data, the options are limited but, you can still theorize over the most likely explanations. Non-empirical methods are common in literary and cultural studies and also philosophy.
When it comes to language and children, there have been a number of stories and questionable unethical experiments. Friedrich II. and the Nazis experimented on children and deprived them of language, and there have been multiple accounts of orphaned children who grew up alone or with animals. It is tempting to take these stories as evidence. However, neither of these accounts have been carried out with the necessary academic rigor, and there was usually some sort of ideological agenda. Anecdotal evidence is often full of contradictions and fantasy. Sometimes the stories are distorted to fit a particular belief, and sometimes contradicting aspects are simply left out. For the most part, observations that are non-reproducible are not viable even if the reasons for their non-reproducibility are ethical.
In conclusion, many observations in corpus linguistics are simply evidence for correlations, and it is very hard to infer causal relationships without the help of experimental methods. If those are not available, it is necessary to have a good grasp on the philosophy of science to narrow down possible interpretations. In any case, you always have to be aware of the limitations of the data and methodology.
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