Séminaire de Julien HEURDIER, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 - Date : jeudi 14 janvier 2016, 14h00 - Lieu : salle séminaire, Institut MICA, Hanoi University of Science and Technoloy
Intervenant :
Julien HEURDIER, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3
Date : jeudi 14 janvier 2016, 14h00
Lieu : salle "seminar room", 9ème étage, bâtiment B1, Institut MICA, Hanoi University of Science and Technology
Langue : le séminaire sera présenté en anglais
Résumé/Abstract:
“Moi j’dirais que ça c’est un requin”: in this utterance, Barthélémy, aged 3 and a half, produces a completive subordinate clause (in French). Understanding how young children learn this type of constructions, in their forms and functions, is a challenge for the study of the language development. Indeed, these constructions involve mastering different levels of the linguistic process: grammatical, pragmatic, discursive (Diessel, 2004). The uses of subordinate clauses cannot be reduced to a mechanical matching between forms and functions. The forms have to be put in the ritualistic activities in which children intake the first functions before experiencing them in new and diversified contexts (Gee & Savasir, 1985; Sabeau-Jouannet, 1977). There is still an open question: to what extent the language that interlocutors address to the child (called Child Directed Speech) has an influence on child language productions?
Many researchers have in this way studied lexical and pragmatic-discursive particularities of the language that parents use to address their young child. A literature review shows that there are both differences and similarities between mothers and fathers (Barton & Tomasello, 1994; Berko Gleason, 1975). However, syntactic characteristics of the language that parents use for addressing their child have rarely been studied (Le Camus, 2001; Pancsofar & Vernon-Feagans, 2006). Moreover, there is a paucity of studies examining the effects on the child’s syntactic development of dialogue, speech genres and activities during which parent-child dyads interact (Allen et al., 2008; de Weck et al., in preparation; Salazar Orvig et al., in press). In this presentation, which is an extract of my PhD research (Heurdier, 2015), we explore three lines at the crossroads of a dialogical approach of language acquisition (François et al., 1984) and of an interactional one (Bruner, 1983a; Vygotsky, 1986/1934):
i) the differences and the similarities in the syntactic and pragmatic-discursive aspects of maternal and paternal language and their effect on the child’s language,
ii) the effect of the ongoing activity on the production and the use of mother-child and father-child dyads’ langugage,
iii) the relation between syntactic and pragmatic-discursive dimensions during the language acquisition process.
Seven 3-4 years old native French-speaking children and their parents were observed during two activities: a symbolic play and a picture cards game. Utterances with subordination were analyzed while considering certain discursive and pragmatic properties related to the use of these productions: status of the child’s interlocutor, type of activity and discursive aspects, such as discursive sequences: fictional speech, account of personal experiences, speech about here and now (Bronckart, 1996) and utterances genres: metalanguage, evaluations, processes, explanations/justifications, projections, labellings, descriptions, others (Bakhtin, 1986). Our results suggest that the status of the child’s interlocutor, associated with the type of activity and the dialogue’s specificities, form a body of variables that should be taken into account in order to better describe children’s syntactic uses and their variability.
