опросительные реплики в русском и литовском языках

Characteristics of child directed speech: Interrogatives in Russian and Lithuanian

Motherese, as a specific register of language, have been investigated intensively in Western psycholinguistic studies during several past decades, however, we still need more comprehensive studies in order to establish specific characteristics (e.g. parental reactions to child’s grammatically correct vs. incorrect utterances) of speech addressed to young children. The present paper deals with adult interrogatives, which appear to be one the most frequent and typical strategies of communicating with young children in both Russian and Lithuanian. The main objective of the study was to identify and to compare a variety and a distribution of interrogatives in Russian and Lithuanian motherese. The analysis was based on a longitudinal data of a Russian boy Vanja (2;0– 2;8) and a Lithuanian girl Monika (2;0–2;8). The transcribed corpus of conversations between children and their parents was annotated for a multipurpose automatic linguistic analysis, using tools of the program CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System). During the investigation, pragmatic, functional, structural and formal features of parental interrogatives were analysed. Following the analysis of conversations between the target children and their parents, the following can be stated. In both Russian and Lithuanian languages the majority of parental interrogatives (87,1– 88,2% in Lithuanian; 86,1–90,5% in Russian) are related to the content of a child’s previous sentence (i.e. conversational questions), while reactions to the form of a child’s previous sentence (i.e. metadiscursive questions) are rare. However, two differences were noted between pragmatic subtypes of conversational questions and between formal subtypes of both conversational and metadiscursive questions. Firstly, the pragmatic analysis indicated an increase in question requests for information (5,8% – 11,5% – 39,1%) and a decrease in question repair of conversation (94,2% – 88,5% – 60,9%) were observed in the Lithuanian corpus, while the percentage of these questions seems to remain relatively unchanged in the Russian corpus (questions requests for information contain 6,6% – 8,7% – 7,3% of all parental conversational questions). Secondly, a differing usage of the question repetitions (i.e. one of the formal subtypes of questions) was noted in that these questions are much more frequent in the Russian corpus (~34,5%) than in the Lithuanian one (~13,1%). Moreover, the number of conversational question repetitions increased significantly in the Russian corpus (3,8% – 12,1% – 18,9%) and decreased in the Lithuanian corpus (7,5% – 4,9% – 2,7%), while the number of metadiscursive question repetitions increased in the Lithuanian corpus (6,9% – 12,1% – 14,4%), while it remained relatively constant (~26%) in the Russian corpus. With the exception of these differences, interrogatives in both Russian and Lithuanian motherese are generally used for the same conversational strategies, and their form and structure seem to be similar or even identical. This leads us to the conclusion that a correlation between parental conversational strategy and the type of language can be identified.