Children S Discourse

Child Discourse contains papers presented in a symposium on child discourse at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Mexico City in November 1974. Three other papers, one presented by Edelsky at the same meeting, and two by Dore and Garvey, are also included to broaden the scope of methods and issues considered. Organized into three parts, this book generally aims at describing and analyzing social and linguistic knowledge of a child in utilizing language to project socially appropriate identities and to engage in purposive social acts. Part I focuses on children's speech events, while Part II centers more on function and act. The last part takes into consideration the social aspect of language usage among children.

This comparative study explores two central questions in the study of first language acquisition: What is the relative impact of structural and functional determinants? What is universal versus language-specific during development? Maya Hickmann addresses these questions in three domains of child language: reference to entities, the representation of space, and uses of temporal-aspectual markings. She provides a thorough review of different theoretical approaches to language acquisition and a wide range of developmental research, as well as examining all three domains in English, French, German and Chinese narratives. Hickmann's findings concern the rhythm of acquisition, the interplay among different factors (syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) determining children's uses, and universal versus variable aspects of acquisition. Her conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic perspective. Children's Discourse will be welcomed by those working in psychology and language-related disciplines interested in first language acquisition.

School success in the 21st century requires proficiency with expository discourse -- the use and understanding of informative language in spoken and written modalities. This occurs, for example, when high school students read their textbooks and listen to their teachers' lectures, and later are asked to demonstrate their knowledge of this complex topic through oral reports and essay examinations. Although many students are proficient with the expository genre, others struggle to meet these expectations. This book is designed to provide information on the use and understanding of expository discourse in school-age children, adolescents, and young adults. Recently, researchers from around the world have been investigating the development of this genre in typical students and in those with language disorders. Although many books have addressed the development of conversational and narrative discourse, by comparison, books devoted to the topic of expository discourse are sparse. This crossdisciplinary volume fills that gap in the literature and makes a unique contribution to the study of language development and disorders. It will be of interest to a range of professionals, including speech-language pathologists, teachers, linguists, and psychologists who are concerned with language development and disorders.

This book combines studies on referential as well as relational coherence and includes approaches to written and to spoken language, to production and to comprehension, to language specific and to cross-linguistic issues, to monolingual, bilingual and L2-acquisition. The theoretical issues and empirical findings discussed are of importance not only for theoretical linguistics, but also have a broad potential of practical implication.

This volume brings together a collection of 18 papers that look into the expression of modality in the grammars of natural languages, with an emphasis on its manifestations in naturally occurring discourse. Though the individual contributions reflect a diversity of languages, of synchronic and diachronic foci, and of theoretical orientations — all within the broad domain of functional linguistics — they nonetheless converge around a number of key issues: the relationship between 'mood' and 'modality'; the delineation of modal categories and their nomenclature; the grounding of modality in interactive discourse; the elusive category 'irrealis'; and the relationship of modal notions and categories to other categories of grammar.

This book is an empirical study of naturally occurring interaction between child counselling professionals and young children experiencing parental separation or divorce. Based on tape recordings of the work of a London child counselling practice, it offers the reader a unique and sustained look inside the child counselling consultation room at the talk that occurs there. The book uses conversation analysis against a backdrop of sociological work in childhood and family studies to situate the discourse of child counselling at an interface between the increasing incitement to communicate in modern society, the growing recognition of children s social competence and agency, and the enablements and constraints of institutional forms of discourse participation. Chapters include overviews of recent developments in the sociology of childhood and the sociolinguistics of children s talk; conversation analysis and institutional discourse; and detailed empirical studies of the linguistic techniques by which counsellors draw out children s concerns about family trauma and the means by which children, through talking and avoiding talking, either cooperate in or resist their therapeutic subjectification. This book will be of interest to readers in counselling psychology and practitioners of child counselling; to researchers and advanced students in social psychology, sociology and sociolinguistics; and to others interested in childhood and family studies, interactionism, qualitative methodology and conversation analysis.

This book unravels the different notions of time and history that are implicit in the history of child psychoanalysis and in the clinical approach to childhood. It is based, in part, on topics that have been addressed in the seminar Psychoanalysis and the Child.

When child language began to be studied in the sixties, what interested researchers most was what could be considered language per se. Holophrases were excluded as seemingly having no syntax and research work was carried out as of the two-word stage. Language development was studied up to around age seven, the age at which natural acquisition processes were considered to be contaminated by formal schooling in language.In opposition to such an attitude, this volume has ignored this heavily studied area of language development preferring to present research being carried out at the two ends of the development process that had been rejected: that of prelinguistic speech skills, at the one end, and the development of discourse at the other. This book thus begins with the physical properties in human development necessary for language to occur. It also offers studies on a child's initial equipment, i.e. intra-uterine skills and skills acquired before first words. At the other end are studies on the development of discourse, i.e. the child's acquisition of the ability not only to juxtapose ideas, but to link them into cohesive, coherent texts and to use argumentation, skills that are not fully acquired until the child is well into adolescence and nearing adulthood.