Interrogatives in Russian and Lithuanian Child-Directed Speech: Do We Communicate with Our Children in the Same Way?

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Acknowledgements

The research was carried out with the financial support of the RF President's Foundation (grant 3433.2010.6 The School of Functional Grammar in St. Petersburg). We would like to express our deep gratitude to Wolfgang U. Dressler and Ineta Dabašinskienė for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper and to Steve Lee for improving our English.

Notes

1. See also a notion of ‘single word speech’ or ‘holophrastic speech’ in Harley (2001, p. 118).

2. The corpus was collected under the supervision of N. V. Gagarina.

3. The next stage of our study will use a more complicated classification of initiative questions, including the semantic criterion which distinguishes between identification, locative, possessive, temporality questions, etc. Moreover, such aspects as dictum and modus (see Bally 1955), i.e. questions to dictum (to the world of the objective) and questions to modus (to the world of the subjective), will be made use of (see Kazakovskaya 2005).

4. The age of the child is 2 years.

5. These are questions that aim to support a dialogue, to dispose of misunderstandings, and/or communicative breakdown (see also Hutchby & Wooffitt 1998; Schegloff 1990).

6. Since MLU is only one of indicators of grammar development, other criteria of linguistic development will also be included.

7. The incorrectly pronounced word kavytę [= karvytę] ‘a cow:DIM’ by Monika phonetically corresponds to the word ‘coffe:DIM’.

8. Both constructions are correct in the given situation, but the mother probably demonstrates to the child an easier one.