Susan M. Ervin-Tripp - US grants

ABSTRACT New work on the study of pragmatics has begun to address its relation to syntactic development. We have identified three ways to investigate this issue: (a) contrastive study of the differential developmental histories of given grammatical forms across different contexts as a first step towards isolating the crucial contexts for the forms and discovering the early interactional and ideational meanings to which they are tied; (b) discovery of children's units of discourse organization and interaction through contrastive study of related grammatical forms; (c) study of crucial contexts (e.g., replies, arguments) to discover the grammatical markers arising in these contexts. Study Area I concers the development of causal constructions, examining the claim that causal expressions first arise as expressions justifying speech acts (Pragmatic Causal Expressions) and only later become used to explain physical events (Mathetic Causal Expressions). Study Area II investigates the discourse features controlling the contrastive use of different temporal, causal, tag, and question forms, and also examines the relevant form-function mappings cross- linguistically. Study Area III examines the development of verb ellipsis and modal auxilliaries within two given discourse contexts, replies and arguments, since these forms appear frequently within these contexts. These studies are intended to inform the issue of how children use communicative functions as guides in acquiring the grammatical categories of their language.

9300063 Ervin-Tripp The purpose of this dissertation project is to examine the acquisition and development of language which reflects pragmatic and social knowledge in young Japanese children. A detailed analysis of the early language usage of preschool children in different contexts will provide insight into their increasingly sophisticated sociolinguistic awareness. This work will fill a long-standing void within the field of language acquisition, as cross-linguistic research on this topic has just begun to appear in the literature. The student will study Japanese children's knowledge of the sociolinguistic rules that underlie appropriate language use by examining the repertoire of registers that young children possess, the specific linguistic devices they use to mark distinct registers and the development of these registers. The objectives of this research are (1) to gain insight into the social and pragmatic understanding of young children, (2) to attain a clearer understanding of the processes by which children become socialized through language, (3) to compile a detailed description of how Japanese children acquire pragmatic competence, and (4) to illustrate how pragmatic factors play a crucial role in the selection of syntactic and lexical forms even in preschool children. Japanese is ideal for studying language use which reflects social and pragmatic knowledge, as this type of information is clearly grammaticized and lexicalized in the language. Data will be collected through role-play situations, naturalistic observations in the home and at school as well as in interviews with children, their mothe rs and their teachers. ' J ( , > # o g Õ d ? $ C m W 6 . L 5 I E G q Y v 2 D i - _ ~ O ? 1 x * j ? * k K = j B X \ D R d 1 8 x / r 8 n * | 6 5 : B M R ? y X > 5 X F _ r q { = a v p W B / m } > . 2 ` 1 8 ~ ! ! F ( Times New Roman Symbol & Arial " h E E 3 A abstract Deidre Renee Burton Deidre Renee Burton