A classification of interrogatives according to their purposes was devised and applied to four, 100-utterance samples by three mothers to their children when their children had a mean utterance length of (1) two morphemes and (2) four morphemes. The distribution of mothers' utterances into interrogative and noninterrogative types and into the classification of interrogatives by purpose was obtained. Interrogatives comprise from 15 to 33% of mothers' utterances and interrogatives whose purpose is not to ask questions but rather to make suggestions, negative evaluations of the child's behavior, or to make reports occur with all mothers. A study of these mothers' children's interrogatives in the three-morpheme period revealed that at this early period in language development children already use the interrogative form analogously to their mothers for making suggestions and reports. An analysis of the development of this capacity based on the concept of the "speech act" is given which leads to the conclusion that it is the embeddedness of verbalizations in a particular personal relations, action context which fosters this development.
This paper explores the basis for semantic interpretation of naturally occurring English discourse. Findings concerning linguistic analysis of discourse by computer and the child's language imply the necessity of distinguishing between language and the use of language. This is necessary in order to separate competence, the ability to produce novel sentences which conform to the syntactical rules of the language, from abilities with respect to language in its ordinary uses which cannot be subsumed under the acquisition of syntax. Aquisition of the language in its ordinary uses is found to be a necessary condition for the semantic interpretation of discourse. What characterizes natural discourse is the prevalence of various kinds of ellipsis. A categorization of these is made and bases of their interpretation proposed. Conditions regarding syntactic structure which are necessary and sufficient for interpretation of discourse are examined. It is proposed that the lexicon for the deep structure of a transformational grammar adequate to the interpretation of discourse is to be regarded as an index and "book" rather than a dictionary.
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