Question cues in child-directed English: to respond, or not to respond?

Abstract

In this talk I will examine canonical question cues in English and how they are used in child-directed speech.

Using the Teddy corpus of recordings and diary data of one early talker acquiring British English, I will document how canonical morphosyntactic cues for English questions (wh-words, subject-auxiliary inversion) and prosodic cues (prominence, final rising intonation) map onto speech acts that are intended to elicit a response from the child, but also onto speech acts that do not serve such a function. I will demonstrate that inversion in particular is an unreliable cue for ‘true’ questionhood in some children’s input, yet still plays a delimited role in interaction and appears in contexts in which non-inverted utterances tend not to be used. Outside of information-seeking questions and requests, inversion is used for tracking what is thought to be shared in the common ground, whether explicitly in the preceding linguistic material or based on context, which (sometimes) allows the child an opportunity to correct or clarify, but often is more simply a process of making explicit that which is shared; a process that we might refer to as “active listening”. I will proffer ideas on the nature of an “active listening” act type and its own impact on the common ground, comparing analyses of such acts as performative or as modal updates, and comparing such acts with more familiar adult “backchannelling” behaviours.

As to why inversion might be used to explicitly track shared knowledge in child-directed speech, I will present a range of possibilities relating to syntactic motivations for displacing the auxiliary and prosodic prominence expressing some sort of givenness (or ‘acceptance’). Finally, I will consider the impact of the claims made here on how children might make use of morphosyntactic and prosodic cues to acquire clause types and speech act types.

Zoom-ID for online participation: 686 6060 5981