KT: Every group has six scrambled pictures of Snow White. Do you know what scrambled means?
S1: Scrambled egg.
S2: 나 스크램블드 애그 좋아하는데...
KT: Right. What does that mean?
S3: 막 섞인 거요.
S1: mix...
KT: Right. 스크램블드애그는 막 흐트러진 계란이죠...SCRAMBLED IS NOT IN ORDER. one, two, three, four...this is IN ORDER. two, four, one, three is NOT IN ORDER ( X sign with hands)
Now, on the face of it what the KT is doing is a little odd. Instead of SHOWING the children, she TELLS the children.
In telling the children, she uses a rather unusual word. This word has to be explained. So she has to take quite a few utterances (including several utterances in Korean) to explain the word instead of explaining the game.
As in Minkyeong's "Donkey Donut" data, the children give a striking image to illustrate (and remember) the word ("scrambled eggs"). The teacher accepts thism and even rebroadcasts it (in Korean) but then offers a different one which is more closely related to her sense of "scrambled". It is not well related to that of scrambled eggs (because we don't say that unscrambled eggs are "in order").
In fact what the teacher is doing is quite clever: she is building several different meanings of "scrambled" on top of each other, to try to create a concept. But is this really how concepts are created? Are concepts created by associating images, like "doe a deer" or "birds...bees...butterflies" or "donut dragonfly"? Or are they created using a SYSTEM?
Perhaps both. Earlier we saw in Jisu's "sprummer" data that even at the lexical level language is productive. This is important, because since Saussure there has been a common belief, even among teachers, that morphology must be learnt by rote because there is no real link between sound and meaning.
Koreans know this is not true, because there own language is very rich in 의성어 and 의태어, where the links are artistic rather that arbitrary. Even lexis is creative.
Consider the SOUNDING of the following words:
amble bumble crumble
Dumbledore fumble grumble
crumple humble jumble
mumble stumble rumple
...
You can see that there is an "-umble" or "-umple" word for almost every consonant sound in English (in the case of /s/ there are several; "scramble", "stumble", "scumble")! There are a few exceptions, and they are used by writers to make names (e.g. "Professor Dumbledore" or "Mr. Wumble").
You can also see that they all have to do with uncoordinated or mixed up movements. So there is a link between meaning and sounding in English, just as there is in Korean.
Now, what about WORDING? Which is closer to what KT means?
a) six scrambled pictures
b) six pictures scrambled