RALPH FASOL is Professor Emeritus and former Chair of the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University. Published in the USA by Cambridge University Press, New York Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.
Child language acquisition
Language and the brain
Dialect variation Thanks to
Over thousands of years of evolution, the human species developed a vocal tract flexible enough to make a wide variety of sounds and the ability to perceive differences between those sounds. But most importantly, the human species developed the ability to use these sounds in systems that could communicate meaning.
Universal properties of language
Much of the history (and prehistory) of the human species consists of developing and adapting various tools to meet a wide range of needs: think of the wheel, animal domestication, the steam engine, computers, and the Internet. The ability of an individual to model the world for him/herself and to communicate using language was perhaps the single most advantageous evolutionary adaptation of the human species.
RALPH FASOLD AND JEFF CONNOR-LINTON
The human capacity for self-awareness and abstract thought is facilitated by language, if not dependent on it. Understanding and explaining the properties that are universal to all languages – as well as those that differ between languages – is the fundamental task of the linguist.
Modularity
If there were no shared, universal features of language, we would expect the sounds of language and their combinations to vary randomly. Likewise, all languages follow similar restrictions on how they can combine words into phrases and sentences.
Constituency and recursion
She is very smart is possible, and it is very smart too, she is, but not smart, she is very. Recursion is the property of language that allows grammatical processes to be applied repeatedly, combining constituents to produce an infinite series of sentences of indefinite length.
Discreteness
Interestingly, babies as young as a few weeks old can distinguish even closely related sounds in their native language from a very early age and distinguish sounds belonging to the language they are learning from sounds in other languages. Additionally, in the first year or two of life, children learn to select words from a stream of speech without guidance.
Productivity
Similarly, American English has a set of words for different types of cars (e.g. sedan, SUV, minivan, convertible, wagon, sports car) related to the importance of the car in that culture. The fact that we hear speech as a sequence of individual sounds, words, and sentences is actually an incredible feat (and all the more incredible because we do it instantaneously and subconsciously).
Arbitrariness
But, as you will learn in detail in Chapter 1, the sounds used in English are not all the same as the sounds needed to speak other languages, nor are they put together in the same way. This means that, for example, the sounds a language uses and the principles by which they are combined are not inherently better or worse than those of any other language.
Reliance on context
The meaning of a sentence depends largely on the context in which it is uttered. If someone says "One", the meaning of that utterance is only clear in the context of a preceding utterance—for example, "Would you like a sugar pop or two?" Similarly, "it's cold in here" can be a complaint, a request to close a window, or even a compliment (about a freezer, perhaps).
Variability
But if the same sequence of sounds can represent different concepts in the same language, how can you tell what meaning I mean when I say [wn]. This means that they all come from the same genetic blueprint and are all the same.
The descriptive approach
Grammatical competence is what allows a speaker of English to put together 21 sounds that sound something like "The dog chased the cat up the tree" and allows another speaker of English to understand what dogs, cats and trees are, what chasing is. , and which way is up. The sentence "The dog chased the cat up the tree" can be used to do a number of things: to tell part of a story, to complain to the dog's owner, to help the cat's owner find his pet.
Defining language
The Sounds of Language,” which includes the boundary between phonetics—the observable and observed phenomena of pronunciation—and the more abstract phonological aspects of pronunciation systems—part of grammatical competence. Child Language Acquisition' and in Chapter 13 'Second Language Acquisition' a dual point of view is respectfully addressed, but the authors' sympathies are with primary communicative competence.
The diversity of linguistics
Different aspects of language – and linguistics – are more relevant to different other academic disciplines, and so we suggest several "routes" through different language areas. Linguistics and other areas: The child's language acquisition; Language in culture; Computational Linguistics; The politics of language; The brain and language; Writing; Dialect variation; Discourse; Second language acquisition.
How to approach this book
Our understanding of the world and human behavior has advanced in all these ways. We introduce readers to the study of language in its current breadth and diversity of approaches with their tensions and unresolved issues.
ELIZABETH ZSIGA
CHAPTER PREVIEW
KEY TERMS
The tools of phonetics
The vocal tract
Articulatory phoneticsGOALSThe goals of this chapter are to
The postalveolar region separates from the alveolar ridge towards the hard palate, the oral cavity. The velum is a muscular structure that lines the velar opening, the opening in the back of the mouth that connects the mouth and nose.
Articulation
At the very end of the velum is the uvula, the little pink garland you can see hanging down the back of your mouth when you open wide and say "ah." pull into the correct positions to make the sound you want to make. In some sounds, such as the initial [p] in pop, the vocal folds are spaced far enough and long enough for an extra "puff of air" to leave the mouth at the end of the [p].
Manners of articulation
The l sounds of the world's languages are called lateral because the air flows out over the sides of the tongue. The vibration of the vocal folds causes the air within the vocal tract to vibrate.
Writing sounds: transcription
Listen closely and you will hear that [l]. in an English word like play is also voiceless. with the sound [h], for example. Lots of words end with the letter h, but we're concerned with sound, not spelling.).
Consonants
However, it is also possible for the tip of the tongue to curl back to create a constriction in this area. The sound at the beginning of the English words you and yachtis palatal (a palatal glide, to be precise).
Vowels
The tongue moves forward in the mouth for front vowels [i, I, e, E, Q] and back for back vowels [u, U, o, ç, a]. The phonetic symbol that represents a given sound is not the sound itself, but a "covering symbol" for a set of choices.
Length
Aspects of speech that affect sound fragments larger than a single segment are called suprasegments. Because suprasegmental aspects of speech involve the organization of sounds into larger units, the study of.
Suprasegmentals
You probably learned about long and short vowels in English spelling in grade school (like "long a" as in madeand. But over the years, a series of phonetic changes have affected long and short vowels differently, pushing them out of alignment.
Tone and intonation
English can produce long consonants when two words come together – compare bookcase [bUkkes] with book ace [bUkes] or top part [tappart] with top art [tapart] – but we do not distinguish between long and short consonants in words. Although the idea of tones may seem very strange to English speakers, most of the world's languages are tonal.
Syllable structure
Sonority thus seems to capture most of our intuitions about syllable structure and explains much about the possible syllables in the world's languages. It may be that endings like plural [s] and ordinal [T] are not actually part of the syllable at all;.
Stress
The fixed stress may be alternating, as in Pintupi, an Australian language, where the stress always falls on the first syllable and then on every other syllable after that: [KUraululimpatjura] 'the first (who is) our relative.' Other permanent stress systems may select only one syllable in a word as particularly pronounced. For example, Russian has a lexical stress system: if the stress is on the first syllable, [duxi] means 'spirits'; stressed on the second syllable, means "perfume".
Sound waves
In Persian, the stress is always on the initial syllable, in Turkish always on the last syllable, in Polish always on the second to last syllable. To understand how people use sound to communicate, we also need to understand how articulators turn air movements into sound, what happens to sound after it passes through the lips, how it travels through the air, and how it affects the ears and brain (and sometimes microphones, recorders and computers) of those listening.
Acoustic phonetics
How do the vibrations of a tuning fork reach our ears as sound? These moving air particles alternately push and pull particles next to them, particles on particles next to them, and so on, so that the vibration pattern moves outward from the tuning fork like ripples in a pond.
Simple and complex sounds
Different objects have different natural frequencies of vibration, which determine the pitch of the sound. So, depending on the shape of the tongue and lips, each vocal sound has a characteristic, complex pattern of vibrations.
Hearing
When the eardrum vibrates, the bones in the middle ear vibrate, which in turn causes the membrane in the inner ear (the oval window) to vibrate, starting vibration waves in the fluid in the inner ear. The vibration patterns in the cochlear fluid reflect the complex sound pattern created in the speaker's vocal tract – the fundamental frequency of the vibrating vocal folds as well as the harmonic characteristics of the various vowels.
Measuring speech
Neither of these numbers, however, told us much about the quality of the vowels. Each vowel has a pattern of two or three prominent frequencies, called formants, above the fundamental frequency of the speaker's vocal cords.
Phonemes and allophones
When we move from analyzing the physical aspects of speech sounds to studying their cognitive organization, we move from phonetics to phonology.
Phonology
Not "complimentary" in the "beautiful" sense, but "complementary" in the mathematical sense that half of a circle is complementary to the other half.). If you are learning Spanish as a second language, you may be taught this distribution as a rule, something like "the [d] sound is pronounced as [ð] between vowels." There is no such rule relating [d] and [ð] in English.
Phonotactics
The preference for CV syllables derives from two phonotactic constraints: "Syllables must have onsets" (C before V) and "Syllables must not have codas" (no C after V). Words that are spelled with initial vowels in writing are actually pronounced with an initial voiced stop – for example [/apfEl] 'apple' in German and [/al] 'the' in Arabic.
Alternation and allomorphs
Natural classes help us define the range of sounds intended for alternation, the change itself, and the environments where the change occurs. And the environment in which the change takes place can be defined by a single phonetic parameter: open vocal tract sounds with continuous airflow, such as vowels, [s] and [r].
Types of phonological alternations
Phonologists don't just want to know "What is the inventory of sounds in Polish?" but. Phonologists are also concerned with describing the relationship between phonemes (the underlying representation, or UR—the way words are stored in the brain) and allophones (the surface representation, or SR—the way words are actually pronounced).
Phonological theory
What inventory is possible in any language?" They want to know not only "What changes are common between languages?" but "What changes are possible in any language?" They want to know not only. Each phoneme could be defined in terms of a set of distinguishing features: [m] would be [labial, nasal], for example.
Chapter summary
Exercises
Consider the distribution of [k] (voiceless velar stop) and [x] (voiceless velar fricative) in Florentine Italian (data from Villafana 2005). Justify your answer, either by citing minimal (near) pairs from the data, or by describing the distributions of the two sounds. laxasa 'house' . poxo 'small'. bixa 'stack' . amixo 'friend'. fixi 'fig'. say 'cook'. kwando 'when' . capella 'hat' . blaNko 'white'. makkina 'car' . cabana 'cabin'.
DONNA LARDIERE
Imagine being in an environment where everyone around you was speaking a language you had never heard before, and you couldn't understand a single word they were saying. That typical expression - "could not understand a single word" - underscores our intuition that words are the fundamental building blocks of language.
What is a word?
Tea is the subject of the sentence in (2a), the direct object in (2b), and the subject of the preposition in (2c). The finger-lettered form of "water" signed on Helen Keller's outstretched palm as the water flowed over the other allowed her to "break into" the system of words as.
Morphology: the study of word structure
Morphologists describe the constituent parts of words, what they mean, and how they can (and cannot) be combined in the world's languages. In the sentence in (8a), the word katis has a subject in the third person singular (3SG), which in most varieties of English requires us to add a -to another word - the verb - when they appear together in a sentence.
Morphemes
Finally, although the word maniacalis is a lexeme (because it is an adjective referring to a quality of the dog, just like min), it is a complex word derived from the morpheme -alt at the adding surname maniac. In French, however, the verb gagner'to win' consists of the root gagn-and the infinitive morpheme -er, which are tightly bound together in a single word and cannot be split.
The forms of morphemes
Finally, semantic factors can also play a role in determining how morphemes can be realized. The English prefix un-(meaning 'not') can easily attach to adjectives in the first column in (18), but not the second (Katamba 1993: 79).
Affixation
Some morphological operations of the world’s languages
The complex English word uninterpretability, for example, consists of the root lexeme interpret, a prefix un- and the suffixes -able, and -ity. This kind of attachment is sometimes referred to as concatenative morphology, since discrete morphemes appear linked (or concatenated) together like beads on a string.
Other types of affixation
Another unusual form of attachment is circumfixing, where a two-part or interrupted morpheme surrounds a root. In this kind of root-and-vowel pattern morphology, certain grammatical categories, such as "past tense," cannot be associated with an individual affix.
Reduplication
In the "pretend" verb forms, there is a specific prefix agiN - which attaches to the first CV (consonant and vowel) copied from the root. That is an indication that the consonant copied from the root has been removed from the starting position of the root in the derived word.
Ablaut and suppletion
This is a case of partial augmentation, in which almost the entire root appears to have been replaced by a completely different form, leaving only the original root attachments. The English pair go – wentis a case of total suppletion – went shares nothing with go at all.
Tone and stress
Two purposes of morphology: derivation and inflection
The first noun, cónvict, was derived from stress shift and denotes a person who has been convicted. Inflectional morphology, on the other hand, adds grammatical information to a lexeme in accordance with the particular syntactic requirements of a language.
Derivation
In each of the examples above, a suffix is applied to one particular kind of lexeme to derive another. In many cases it is a category change; for example, the suffix -ungin German applies to verbs to derive a noun denoting a result of the verb (zerstör- 'destroy' _ Zerstörung 'destruction'). Nouns are conventionally capitalized in German orthography.) The French suffix -esse attaches to adjectives to derive nouns meaning something like 'the state or quality of being A' (faible'weak' _faiblesse'weakness').
Inflection
Slovenian marks this three-way number contrast, as shown in (46). The noun mest-'city' is in noun form, which will be discussed shortly.). Both (61b) and (61c) are in the past tense; however, the form was paintingin (61b), which in English is often called the progressive form, indicates that the action of painting was in progress and it is quite possible that John never finished the kitchen. (Imagine if John is interrupted after he has just started painting.) However, the example in (61c) indicates that John has finished painting - that is, the painting of the kitchen has been completed.
Acquiring inflectional contrasts
Let's see how the above words are pronounced - the only type of evidence available to the child. Study the following information and answer the following questions:. breve 'briefly' la brevedad 'brevity, brevity'. corto 'short; shy' la cortedad 'shortness; shyness'. cruel 'cruel' la crueldad 'cruelty'. enfermo 'disease, ill' la enfermedad 'disease'. el) hermano 'brother' la hermandad 'brotherhood'. improprio 'inappropriate' la impropriedad 'inappropriateness'. leve 'light, trivial' la levedad 'lightness'. liviano 'volatile' la liviandad 'volatility'. mal 'evil' la maldad 'wickedness'. solo 'alone, lonely' la soledad 'solitude'. vario 'various' la variados 'different'. la) viuda 'widow' la viudedad 'widowhood'.
DAVID LIGHTFOOT AND RALPH FASOLD
What children know about language goes beyond what they should be able to infer from what they hear, and very far beyond anything they are explicitly taught. The idea that people exhibit a knowledge of grammar that is deeper than what they could glean from the evidence around them is called the poverty-of-stimulus argument.
The amazing robot basketball player
Many linguists argue that the ability to acquire important aspects of natural language is exclusively human. The grammar principles we're talking about don't have much to do with the grammar you're learning in.
Poverty of the stimulusGOALSThe goals of this chapter are to
When the scientist asked, the robot confirmed that it had never seen anyone play basketball before the experiment. The robot had been pre-programmed with the rules of basketball without realizing it.
Applying the metaphor to the structure of sentences
The robot has never seen anyone dribble the ball behind its back, but on several occasions it has done just that. In the case of rule violations, the scientist would ask the robot which rule was violated.
Projection
For example, English speakers have grammars that allow Kim loves himself, but not The people around Kim love themselves. English speakers can tell you that the first example is good and the second is not, but they cannot tell you why.
Compositionality
So if the grammar is projecting a phrase from a transitive verb, it sends a branching stem. We show the complement phrase as a determiner phrase (DP) here, but it can also be an NP.) In a transitive verb phrase, the verb is the head of the phrase.
Merger
This middle node is called I, pronounced "I-bar". The complement verb phrase branches from I and the specifier branches in the opposite direction from the higher IP. For example, in a sentence such as I have heard that these children want a puppy, the clause that these children want a puppy is embedded in a higher sentence as the complement of the verb heard. Complementary sentences are also necessary to understand the structure of questions and relative clauses (e.g. The man who came in was angry), as well as indirect quotations (e.g. He said those children want a puppy ).
Adjunction
The NP in Figure 3.10 would be further expanded with a new “roof-shaped” construction, thus merging into the park. First, the NP in Figure 3-11 would be merged with the complementary branch of the DP headed by those, as in Figure 3-3, to create the DP representing little kids in the park.
Movement and deletion
Building the rest of the structure for Those Little Kids in the Park Want a Puppy went as follows. The empty position represented by the first of the two instances of ein (5) is therefore the position of the specifier.
Grammars are finite; language is not
The specifier position of the CP can be filled by a variety of phrase types, but in Figure 3.13 it is represented as empty, as it is in (5). But an individual human being has the ability to understand and produce an infinite number of sentences.
Recursion
This is the mouse that nibbled on the cheese that was in the house Jack built. These various recursive devices can be combined to create an even greater variety of sentences: this is the house Sue knew Jack had built, and this is the mouse Bill saw eating the savory, delicious, yellow, gourmet cheese.
The significance of recursion
If you had the patience and lived long enough, you could string relative clauses together indefinitely: this is the cow that kicked the dog that chased the cat that killed the rat that caught the mouse that nibbled the cheese that lay in the house Jack built. Coordination links two (or more) sentences (or phrases or words) together on equal terms, using coordinating conjunctions such as and, but, and or: you can try or you can give up.
You can do without that, but not always
Rick went to the movies and Ellen went to the store and Stuart worked but Mike slept and Sue read a book.
Restrictions
The results we get are just as surprising as the discovery of gravity, although they are not yet as widely known. In (8b) the CP containing Kay on the left is the complement of the omitted but understood verb believe, which is not overt (the eagain means empty), and in (8c) the sentence is the complement of nothing.
Heavy determiner phrase movement
We assume that children can learn from their environment that complementizers can be dropped and that difficult DPs can be moved. Moreover, they do not need to learn the constraints because they already “know” the UG state represented in (11), which comes from their genetic inheritance, not from experience.
The Binding Theory
In (15a), who can herself refer to? Herself is an anaphor, so it should obey principle A, meaning that it is co-indexed with (and refers to) the subject of its own clause—its inflectional phrase (IP). As part of UG, children already "know" the three categories of nominals and the constraints on their coreference.
Summary
We will present another syntactic phenomenon that we have not yet mentioned, but which appears in different ways. We're going to call these genders because that's what they're called in European languages that categorize nouns as feminine, masculine, and sometimes neuter.
Head–complement order in Hindi
This is where the interests of syntacticians meet those of people working on the language of young children. So far we have focused on the universal grammar and some principles that seem to be an intrinsic part of the organ of language.
Differences in syntax across languages
For example, we have seen that complements appear to the right of their heads in English. Note that there are no obvious words for Hindi; this is common in many of the world's languages.
Immobile WH-words in Thai
The Hindi present tense consists of a participle and a form of to be, something like going in English, but with a straight present meaning.
Gender in languages
Gender has an effect on the syntax of languages that have gender, but these effects are quite different from one type of language to another. The result is that there are very few studies of the two types that analyze exactly the same phenomenon.
A functional analysis of pronouns
Proponents of functional syntax believe that the formal approach omits too much that is important. Although functional syntax takes this position on a philosophical level, in practice most work in functional syntax deals with aspects of language that formal syntax never addresses.
Functional syntax
The name phrase, the king, is the subject of the leftmost and only clause in the sentence. In (26b) the reference to the king is interrupted, since he was not referred to in the preceding sentence.
Contrasting formal and functional analyses
Merge the tree you made in Exercise 3.1 with the conjunction position of the CP projected in c. The tree will be exactly the same except you will replace the PP in the cafe with the AdvP projected in b. Merge the IP address you got in c with the complement position of the CP projected in a.
PAUL PORTNER
So to some extent the semantic meaning of a sentence depends on the context of use – the situation in which the sentence was uttered, by a specific speaker, to a specific addressee, at a specific time, and so on. The semantic meaning of (1) also depends on the meanings of the individual words dog, chase, a, cat, etc.; therefore, semantic meaning depends on the lexicon of English.
Speaker’s meaning and semantic meaningGOALSThe goals of this chapter are to
Sometimes people will make a nasty joke if they only respond to the meaning of such a question. they will only answer, "Yes, we can." The meaning of this speaker is what I intend to communicate, and it goes beyond the literal, semantic meaning of what I said.
Semantics
The third word is a noun meaning 'big' marked with the same ergative as 'dog'. The fourth word is a verb meaning 'to hunt', and its suffix indicates that the sentence is not about the past. In fact, many languages are similar to Warlpiri in that they have no words to distinguish between "a" and "the" (technically known as definiteness), which can be quite surprising from an English perspective.
Fundamental semantic concepts and compositionality
Another interesting feature of this Warlpiri sentence is that it can either mean 'a big dog is chasing me' or 'the big dog is chasing me.'. With them we can say things like “The Warlpiri sentence (2) is ambiguous; it can mean a big dog or the big dog is chasing me.”.
Subjects, predicates, and arguments
According to the principle of compositionality, the meaning of such a sentence is determined in terms of the meaning of the subject and the meaning of the predicate. According to the Principle of Compositionality, the meaning of the predicate hit the ball is based on the meaning of hit and the ball.
Thematic roles and lexical semantics
Linguists who are interested in the meanings of words, and the relationships between words' meanings, study lexical semantics. In the English sentence I like pasta, the subject I refers to the person who likes something, and the object pasta refers to the thing I like.
Logical words
This view of the meanings of not, and, and or is historically drawn from logic and is part of philosophy. One might therefore doubt whether truth conditions adequately describe the meaning of these words.
Modifiers
For example, the adjective old relates to an age scale, and this scale can be expressed in years: 0 years, 1 year, 2 years,. For example, the adjective good can describe something as morally good (a good deed), as tasty (a good pie), as suitable for a given use (a good dress for the dance), and so on.
Quantification
In other words, the intended meaning is closely related to the subject of the sentence. To understand the meaning of this sentence, we need to identify the limiter and scope for each quantifier.
Intensionality
Since the keys are not on the street, it is likely that they are in the car. For example, Mustin (23a) is epistemic; it implicitly means 'given what I know, I must have left my keys in the car'.
Semantics summary
For example, (33a) says that it rains in the worlds in which Mary believes; it may or may not actually rain. For example, (33a) indicates Mary's relation to the statement that it is raining: she believes that this statement is true.
Indexicality, context-dependency, and anaphora
Pragmatics concerns the relationship between the context of use and the meaning of the sentence and the relationships between the meaning of the sentence, the context of use and the meaning of the speaker. In this section, we will focus on those aspects of pragmatics that relate to how context of use contributes to semantic meaning.
Presupposition
The common ground is the set of propositions that the participants in a conversation mutually accept. For example, if I say to you "I am hungry" (and you believe that I am sincere), the proposition that I am hungry will henceforth be part of the common ground; that is, we'll both assume it's true (until something changes—I eat something, for example).
The Gricean view of meaning
In any normal conversation, many things are implicitly common ground: that the sun rises every morning, that the speaker and hearer are alive, that things fall down when you release them into the air, and so on. The common ground is an important part of the context of use and helps us make explicit the role of presuppositions when using sentences such as John stopped crying at noon: the sentence is only appropriate if the common ground contains all the information that John was cry just before noon or if that information can be added without causing controversy.
Implicature
This 'before' meaning is not part of the semantic meaning of and (as given by truth conditions); it is an implicature. This inference can become an implication of the sentence, that is, part of my speaker's meaning.
Speech acts
For example, (38) has the illocutionary force of warning, while (37a) has the force of promise and (37b) has the force of reporting or assertion. The context in which the sentence is uttered is crucial in interpreting the illocutionary force of a speech act; if a loan shark you owe money to says "I promise to visit tomorrow," the intended speech act may be a threat (disguised as a promise).
Pragmatics summary
The psychological view
Philosophical issues
The basic meaning of over ('up in space') is connected to several other meanings (e.g. 'the other side of', as in The house is over the river, or 'done', as in The movie is over) . This may lead to a new meaning for ear which is similar to 'the other side of.'.
The referential view
Describe the restrictions on the English present tense in terms of the aspectual classes of sentences. Describe the meaning of each of the following words in a way that makes clear how they can be indexical: near, return, tomorrow, above, local, forward.
DEBORAH SCHIFFRIN
For most of its long scientific tradition, linguistics perceived the sentence as the boundary of the linguistic system. And precisely by examining the aspects of the world in which language is used, discourse analysts go "beyond" the sentence.
Language use above and beyond the sentenceGOALSThe goals of this chapter are to
By examining units larger than sentences, discourse analysts go "above" the sentence. Similarly, society is more than the sum of the individuals living in it.
Data: language use in everyday life
Other discourse analysts may be interested in a particular aspect of discourse: how people apologize to each other. You can see many of these symbols in the excerpts of discourse throughout this chapter.
Spoken and written discourse: a first look
In the following sections, we will learn more about the properties of spoken and written discourse and how to analyze both of these ways of creating discourse. To illustrate these points, we will discuss two segments of spoken speech from the same speech situation—a sociolinguistic research interview—in which one speaker seeks information from another about a specific topic of interest.
Spoken discourse
Together, the two segments will illustrate a variety of processes and structures, including question/answer sequences, long-winded corrections of unclear meanings, exchanges of short turns in speaking, and. Read the passage carefully several times, not only to understand the content, but also to get a sense of the rhythm of the interaction (eg, who speaks when) and to "hear" it in your head.
Sequential and distributional analyses
We went down with the carts. v) Ceil: We- like she had Jesse and I had my Ken. What you would learn would be its relationship with other features of discourse, e.g.
Repair and recipient design
What you will learn about is its specific contribution to the meanings emerging in the classroom at that moment. For example, the speaker who made the mistake might "self-initiate/self-repair," sending the face-saving message "I know I made a mistake, but it's just a slip of the tongue and I can fix it ."
Comparing transcripts
Did you go to the south. k) Jack: You know the teacher who came to me over l) She used to take care of all the entertaining, (m) Freda: Yes, I do. p) She used to raise hell with both of us. r) that passed through her, [at. t) Freda: all sorts of things. hhhh [hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhi guess your mom knew about:. Jack: You know one day she-we- I was going to play an elegy on the violin. jj) Jack: ]All the kids would [play it. II).
Adjacency pairs
In lines (a) to (ll), for example, several people are active speakers, sometimes speaking at the same time. Jack and Freda overlap, for example, in lines (p) to (s) after Jack has mentioned his high school teacher in (k) and (l).
Participation frameworks
