Nyelvtudományi Közlemények 85. kötet (1983)

Tanulmányok - Gleason, Jean Berko: Insights from the Extraordinary: Some New Trends in American Psycholinguistics 140

146 JEAN BERK0 GLEASON adults and children. The study of Hungárián input language should provide some very useful insights into this question. Another impetus for the study of adult-child linguistic interaction arose from an interest in the acquisition of communicative compétence, not just linguistic compétence (Hymes 1971). We wanted to know not just how children acquire the traditional Subsystems of language, phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics, but also the social raies for language use. My own interest lay in this direction rather than in syntactic theory. We wanted to know how children learn to speak to différent addressees in a variety of social settings (Gleason 1973). It soon became clear that the adults' portions of conversations with children contain some very special features aimed at imparting just those social rules for language use. In a séries of papers (Gleason & Weintraub 1976 ; Greif & Gleason 1980 ; Gleason, Perlmann & Greif, in press) we have looked at the role of adults in teaching linguistic routines to children. By routines, I mean rather formuláié utterances that must be produced on certain social occasions, but that may have no intrinsic content ; even if they have meaning in the usual sensé of the word, speakers are required only to produce them, and need not understand them. Thus, very young American children learn to say Trick or Treat on Hallowe'en when they appear in costume at their neighbors'doors, but they do not usually know what tricks or treats are. We found that parents work very hard to reach their children routines. American babies, for instance, are taught to wave their hands in the bye bye gesture long before their first birthdays; and bye bye is something that parents ask their children to say long before children have any intention to engage in leavetaking talk. Some of language is not based on inner intentions or on Cognition in the same way that referential language is. And some parts of language, routines in particular, are learned in rather large chunks, rather than one word at a time. In studying children's acquisition of politeness routines at the dinner table, we found that there is an interface between the learning of routines for social purposes and the acquisiton of linguistic compétence : in teaching their children to be polite, parents help the children to produce forms that are also more complex. Very young children learn that directives are a separate class of utterances because parents insist that they append the politeness marker please. Older children (those who are around four in our sample) are not allowed to use direct imperatives with their parents, even with please added. For instance, Give me more milk, please was rejected by the parents we studied. The children were made to recast their requests into politer forms like May I please have more mïlk% This was observed even for children who did not use such modal auxiliaries in their spontaneous speech. The parents were providing their children with lessons in stylîstic variation. A child might begin with an intention (to get more milk) and the knowledge of only one way of mapping it onto surface structure. At the end of the meal she or could express that same intention in two différent ways. Routines may thus serve a linguistic fonction. Routines have received very little attention, indeed, at least until récent times. But there is now a small group of researchers who are trying to study what people say to one another in their daily lives. Even a brief stay in Hungary has made it clear to me that routines are an important part of the sociolinguistic System and not easily translated. (I have been unable, for instance, to discover ail of the raies for who says csókolom to whom. There also appear to be some