An impact of discourse genre on language means: a new approach to analysis

Abstract

A number of studies in language acquisition have dealt with some parts of speech (PoS). Mainly, a growth of noun and verb diversity as well as a variety of inflections have been evaluated separately from other PoSs. However, the PoSs play a unique functional role of building blocks interacted to each other in utterance, text, and discourse. The more a speech development progresses, the more skillfully and flexibly children manipulate with different PoSs to produce structurally well-organized and semantically transparent discourse. Our study aims at analyzing a distribution of all PoSs in different discourse genres in preschool children. The study was based on a corpus data of Russian monolingual typically-developing children (N=12) (~68 months). Subcorpus No.1 (2451 words) consisted of fictional narratives; subcorpus No.2 (6710 words) consisted of semi-structured dialogues between a child and an experimenter. The subcorpora wereanalyzed as two entities: anincidence of each PoS(a number of different lexemes) in narrative and dialogue subcorpora was estimated.(The study was carried out with the financial support of the RFH, grant No. 14-04-00509.)The results evidenced a significant impact of a genre on a distribution of PoSs. Adistribution of 10 PoSs was distinctive between a narrative and a dialogue: noun, verb, participle, numeral, and conjunction lexemes were significantly more numerous (Р≤0.001) in narratives; adverb, interjection, modal word, pronoun, and particle lexemeswere significantly more numerous (Р≤0.001) in dialogues.This evidenced that speech elicitation method and discourse genre are very influential and significantly modify the PoS Profileat the preschool age.From the dynamic point of view, aprobability of certain type of PoSs distribution and individual PoSP depends both on a level of morphosyntactic development and on discourse genre demands. [...]