Recent linguistic studies have proposed that verb morphology has evolved to serve particular functions inherent to discourse. In this paper, an attempt is made to apply this proposal to the development of verb morphology in the spontaneous speech of a child from 1;10. 16 to 2;0.2. The question asked was whether there were any aspects of the child's discourse which may have been in part responsible for her differential use of verb morphology. To answer this question, a distributional analysis is presented of the child's speech in two different speech contexts: dialogue vs. crib-monologue. Despite the exiguous amount of data in the corpus, the analysis yields striking patterns of co-occurrences involving verb morphology and forms of self-reference. The patterns were interpreted as provisional evidence that the child may have been sensitive to discourse factors in her selective use of verb morphology. The data is analysed into four developmental phases. It is suggested that the semantic-level meanings of Phase IV are due in part to the type of discourse use to which the morphology is put in the earlier phases.
In our research, we wish to illuminate different types of discursive intentions which are structured into discourse via the verb inflections and auxiliaries, together with their entailed social effects. In the present report, we examine the use of the simple present by two three-year-olds, and argue that analyses in terms of tense or aspect are not adequate to account for its use. One needs to recognize the way in which the form implicitly refers to norms and thereby entails a type of impersonal motivation -especially as it is just this feature of the use of this form that structures the ongoing activity into a nondialogic, normative activity. (Simple present, normativity, subjectivity, activity-types, nondialogic discourse, the constitutive role of language, American English)
Two aspects of the cognitive development of a 14-to-18-month-old blind child are reported: the development of procedures for the intentional control of objects and the development of certain classificatory skills. The longitudinal data revealed two developmental processes. The first is that a blind baby learns to control objects by devising a strategy involving the simultaneous use of two objects, one in each hand. In addition, since the child showed no preference for sound-making objects, it is argued that manual control is essential for the development of information about objects. The second is a trend in the development of classification, from grouping objects according to their differences to grouping objects based on their similarities. It was found that development of classification in the blind child paralleled that of sighted children studied in other research, with blind children displaying only a slight developmental lag.
Due to the problems involved in trying to determine the validity of life history accounts in the psychoanalytically based encounter, the concept of narrative has proven very useful for promoting the view that the client's tellings represent different versions of the truth rather than a truth that exists prior to and independent of the storied constructions, as Freud's archeological model would have it. However, although the irreducibly narrative character of client talk is not contested, the claim developed herein is that client talk is structured around the practice of account-giving—more specifically, giving accounts of the self. Our mode of investigating this claim was to examine a client's use of a pair of linguistic markers (the discourse markers I MEAN and SO), which have been characterized as forms that function expressively to convey the speaker's attitudes and evaluative stance toward the content of the discourse. Based on this characterization, it was hypothesized that, in the therapeutic context, such forms would be used by the client as a way of carrying out the proposed agenda of providing self-accounts.(Discourse Analysis/Psychotherapy Research)
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