Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions

Abstract

In forty child-to-child dialogs in Mandarin retrieved from CHILDES, 74.23% of the total utterances contain the phenomenon of repetition, with self-repetitions (64.85%) occurring more frequently than other-repetitions (35.15%). Based upon the distribution of the various types of repetitions in the database, this paper also discusses the structural dimensions of repetition at different grammatical levels, concluding that self-repetition and other-repetition in child conversation are not merely copies of previously used linguistic material, but key strategies that children apply to construct their utterances and dialogic interactions. Children’s discourses develop from self-repetitions to other-repetitions, and by doing this, cohesion in discourse is achieved.

Joint attention and its linguistic representation in dialogue: embodiment revisited

“…The latter point significantly indicates the embodied experience-based strategy that interlocutors employ when they take language to structure language in dialogue ( cf. Du Bois, 2014 ; Zeng, 2021 ). The experience-based view of meaning construction, distinct from the rule-based structuring of meaning in the generative tradition of language studies, entails that meaning is personalized but coordinated between speakers in the communication.…”

A dialogic view on construal: A study on the instantiations of wh-interrogative words in wh-dialogues

“…Cases where there are more than one WH-word heading a question and where WH-questions are embedded in other sentences do not fall into the scope of this research and will be addressed in another paper. Langacker (1987,1991,1993,1999) Langacker Weigand, 2017;Zeng, 2021), whereas in dialogue, as Figure 2 demonstrates, the object being construed is jointly focused by the speaker and the hearer. Prototypically, in a WH-dialogue the questioner and answerer work together to negotiate the specified content of the WH-word.…”