A Case Study On A Mandarin Child’s Language Development Before Age3on Functional Perspective

This dissertation discusses the language development process of a three years oldMandarin child who is my daughter from functional perspective. The corpus rootson her language records before40months. This dissertation consists of6chapters.Chapter1is the introduction. In this chapter, we briefly review the previousresearch of children’s language development. Based on this, we introduce thedirections, content and chapters arrangement, background theory and methods of thisstudy, as well as the symbols and corpus sources.In Chapter2, we clarify our views of language from the macro perspective anddefine the connotation of functional perspective as well as the language functionalsystem. Functional perspective is divided into the broad functional and narrowfunctional perspective. The broad functional perspective means that we focus on thedynamic process of language development of children. The narrow perspective meanswe discuss the path of the children’s language development based on the normalfunctional system of language. The language functional system can be divided intomacroscopic functions which consist of interpersonal function and cognitive functionand microscopic functions which consist of ideational function and syntactic function.Chapter3mainly focuses on the dynamic process of children’s languagedevelopment. We discuss the important factors that affect children’s languagedevelopment in the different sectors from language input and internalization tolanguage utterance of children.In language input, we have carried on the deep interpretation to the motivation ofspeech and the speech environment. Joint attention and intention reading are theguarantees of language input validity. Joint attention ensures the verbal communication occasions while intention reading is the foundation which ensures thesound stimulus can be perceived and learned as linguistic symbols.In internalization, we revisit the role of imitation in children’s languagedevelopment and put forward three levels of imitation: Formal imitation is theimitation of the forms of language in general. Functional imitation is the creativeimitation of the language structures’ function especially the pragmatic function.Behavioral imitation means that children imitate adults’ intentional actions throughusing language in which children won the human beings’ cognitive perspective whichmaterialized in language form at the same time.In language output, we mainly discuss the pragmatics and semantics prioritystrategies during children’s language output and feedback mechanisms. Pragmatic andsemantic priority strategy is relative to sense of grammar. During children’s languagedevelopment, the sense of grammar is increasingly mature, meanwhile serve for thepragmatics which aims to the realization of the communicative intention. We discussthe feedback mechanism from both self feedback and others’ feedback in the processof children’s language development.Chapter4—chapter6is the microcosmic analysis according to differentfunctional category.Chapter4focuses on the development of children’s instrumental discourse.Firstly, we discuss the connotation of instrumental function and put forward thatbehavior demanding is the key character of the instrumental discourse. Meanwhile weanalyze the factors which affect peoples’ choosing of discourse form.Secondly, we described the children’s development process of the instrumentaldiscourse in chronological order. The characteristics of the children’s early languagedevelopment are those language syntax gradually turns complicated and directivesgradually precise. Generally speaking, the characteristic of children’s instrumentaldiscourse development before age3is that the child starts with the direct types whichconsists the intention and the behavior, later, she extends her discourse by perceivingthe agent, the reason of the intention, the acts conditions. Finally, we discussed several factors which affecting the development ofchildren’s instrumental discourse. Language input is the important factors that affectchildren’s language development. Children’s cognitive development which especiallymanifested in the cognitive of properties and logic of the events also promote thedevelopment of children’s instrumental discourse. Pragmatic principle of competitionis the deepest motivation to promote the development of children’s instrumentaldiscourse.Chapter5focuses on the development of children’s representational discourse.As the complexity of the secondary function of the representational function, wemainly choose "narrative" to observe the development of children’s narrativecompetence."Personal narratives" and "stories" are the two outstanding types of thenarratives of children before age3. We discuss the development of the narrativestructure and the form of discourse as well as the discourse features from differenttypes of children’s narratives.Personal narrative development of the children before age3has experiencedfrom quasi narratives to narratives gradually seperated from the context of discourse.The development of narrative structure is mainly reflected as the process thatchildren start with narrating the action only to integrating many factors related to theorientation, cause of action, resolution, evaluation of the events. The development ofdiscourse form is mainly reflected as that the discourse cohesive device has becomeincreasingly rich. We also focused on the development of temporal expressions anddynamic auxiliaries reflected in the narratives: temporal expressions of children startwith distinguishing "already-ahead" category only to narrating past events in asequence state; The order of the dynamic auxiliaries acquisition of the child in ourcase study is: guo1﹥guo2﹥le2﹥le1.The story narratives of the children before age3are mainly divided into threecategories: rehearsal stories, telling stories, stories cooperated with adult. There aretwo characteristics of the stories reflected in this stage:"dialogue" is very outstandingwhich shows that social interactions occupy the important role in the children’s cognition; Local coherence is better than global coherence in children’s stories whichhighly due to the reasons of the lack of cognitive experience and the divergentthinking of children.Chapter6focuses on the development of children’s phatic discourse.We first clarify the connotation of phatic function and propose that discourseswhich aimed to establish and maintain relationships with others are all phaticdiscourse.We present the development of children’s phatic discourse from both case studyand multiple cases study. Case study tries to take an overall investigation on variousphatic discourse: The usage of several polite expressions sort as follows according tousing frequency and willing: bye﹥thanks﹥hello﹥sorry; Children before age3seldom have phatic communion but chatting gradually increases from age3whichreflects their awareness of others mental world. There appears the discourse aimed topull the relationships closer by pointing the mental world of the other. Instrumentaldiscourse reflects the tendency of "polite"."Utility instinct" is the deeppsychological motivation which leads to phatic function of language. Multiple casesstudy mainly survey preschoolers’ polite language usage by investigation, the resultsof the survey are mainly the same as our case study.Based on the research of case study and multiple cases study, we analyzed thefactors that affect children’s polite language acquisition. Differences between thecourtesy language itself, language input and children’s cognitive development are theimportant factors that affect children’s polite language acquisition.Finaly, we summarize the work of this dissertation, the general conclusion andinnovation, and the problems needing further research.