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From discourse to semantics: the development of verb morphology and forms of self-reference in the speech of a two-year-old*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Julie Gerhardt
Julie Gerhardt*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Buffalo
*
Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, S.U.N.Y., Buffalo, NY 14260, USA.
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Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 337 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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Footnotes

*

The data reported on were given to me while I was a post-doctoral fellow at The City University of New York, Graduate Center with Katherine Nelson. I am grateful to her for allowing me to work independently on data she collected. I would also like to thank Richard Beckwith, Lois Bloom, Nancy Budwig and Katherine Nelson for providing feedback on an earlier draft of this manuscript. I am even more indebted to Melissa Bowerman and Annette Karmiloff-Smith for extensive critical commentary and interest concerning the issues discussed, and for their devoted help with the style. Katharine Perera is also to be graciously thanked for her patience with and correction of the style. Justine Cassell and Susan Goldin-Meadow listened to various oral versions and offered helpful feedback. Needless to say, none of the above necessarily agrees with any of my claims. The research was supported by two Post-Doctoral Research Fellowships in Child Development: NICHD, no. HD07196–05 at the City University of New York, and NICHD, no. 07307–01 at the University of Chicago.

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