Вопросительные повторы реплик в русском и литовском инпуте (к проблеме избыточности)

Abstract

The paper focuses on a pragmatic and structural analysis of interrogative repetitions that are typically frequent in child-directed speech (CDS). The cross-linguistic analysis is based on longitudinal corpus data of Russian and Lithuanian, two highly inflected Indo-European languages with rich morphology. Despite the numerous studies oflanguage acquisition in both languages, their CDS have so far escaped comprehensive analysis. A special focus of this study was on redundancy, a typical characteristic of CDS. In line with our previous studies, we proceeded from the ideathat it is the caregivers’ frequent repetition of children’s utterances that may generally be a cause for the so-called CDSredundancy. Our results highlighted numerous communicative similarities between the Russian and Lithuanian CDS, the pragmatics and structural diversity of repetitions among them. The majority of repetitions occur in conversation. It appears that both Russian and Lithuanian caregivers of various age, social groups or kinship status intuitively use conversational repetitions for elaborating a conversation and thus stimulating children’s communicative development. Among all structural types of repetitions, expansions and reformulations seem to be the most frequent, i. e., both Russian- and Lithuanian-speaking caregivers prefer modification of the children’s previous utterances to pure or focus-repetitions. Also, they seem to be similarly sensitive to children’s grammatically correct vs. erroneous utterances. Specifically, they tend to expand children’s grammatically correct utterances and to reformulate the erroneous ones (however, metadiscursive direct corrections were similarly rare in both corpora). The results of the study confirm a prediction about the frequency of repetitions in CDS. However, we still assume that this kind of redundancy should be recognized as a natural and even necessary element of CDS, especially at early language acquisitionstages. [...]