Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy ETDs

Publication Date

7-11-1973

Abstract

Nominal-pronominal reduplication, a frequently mentioned but seldom studied linguistic phenomenon often associated with lower class and minority group speech, is in actuality not a rarity but quite common in language worldwide. This phenomenon, exemplified by structures such as "My brother, he plays football" and "He plays football, my brother," exists in child language as a function of language universals, language development, and language situation. One of the relevant language universals, that of the process of topicalization, requires analysis beyond the sentence level and is commonly referred to as a speaker's choosing a topic of discourse and then commenting upon this topic. When the topic and the comment do not coincide with the grammatical subject and predicate of the clause, universally the topic may appear as a separate grammatical entity and the comment itself consist of a grammatical subject and predicate. When the topic is a definite noun phrase such as "my brother," establishing the existence of the referent, the comment will consist of a preceding or a following clause in which there occurs a pronominal which is coreferential with the topic, creating nominal-pronominal reduplication (NPR). The phonology associated with this structure both evidences the psychological unity of the topic and the comment and demonstrates their interrelationship. The related literature showed that these topic­comment structures with NPR are universal in adult language and occur in child language when the child has reached the multi-word sentence stage and has begun to acquire the pronominal system of his language. These structures will increase or decline in frequency according to their acceptability within a given community and according to the speaker's judgments regarding the identification of his topic of discourse influenced by situational factors such as his attitudes toward his listener, toward the content of the situation, and toward himself as a speaker. The hypotheses tested were:

(1) Fourth grade children will produce fewer NPRs than second grade children will.

(2) Children in both grades will produce fewer NPRs in conversation with a peer than in conversation with an adult.

Twenty second and fourth grade children representing high, medium, and low levels of linguistic performance were recorded in four test situations: playing with a peer, retelling stories, describing pictures, and answering personal questions. The resultant corpus, thirty hours of both spontaneous and elicited language, was analyzed syntactically and semantically from the word level to the level of discourse. Based on clause count and NPR to clause ratio, it was found that the younger children produced a significantly greater amount of NPR than the older children did although the older children frequently produced more language. Both groups sharply differentiated between the peer-respondent and the adult-respondent situations, producing little NPR playing with their peers and increasing amounts of NPR informing an adult. The more identification needed by the listener, the more known and interesting the content, the greater the involvement as a communicator, the more likely was the child to use topic-comment with NPR. Linguistic implications of this study concern the need for redefinition in terminology, reclassification and semantic interpretation of clause types, and discourse level analysis. Pedagogical implications include the necessity for teacher training in linguistic and cognitive development, the primacy of meaning as opposed to form, the need to listen to children and consequently the need for more adults in the classroom to provide for better learning conditions for the child.

Document Type

Dissertation

Language

English

Degree Name

Elementary Education

Level of Degree

Doctoral

Department Name

Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy

First Committee Member (Chair)

Rodney Wilson Young

Second Committee Member

Marie Morrison Hughes

Third Committee Member

Garland Dee Bills

Fourth Committee Member

David Wayne Darling

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