Talking about giving: Interactive scaffolding of language and conceptualization

Résumé En

How do children learn to think and talk about giving? The intentional transfer of an object is frequent and salient in children’s experience. Yet the earliest productions involving verbs like give are observed relatively late (Pine et al. 1998), well after they have mastered simpler argument structures—and, crucially, long after they have become competent event participants. Despite the central role such verbs and their associated dative constructions have played in linguistic and developmental theory, relatively few studies have focused on how the linguistic and conceptual underpinnings for giving events are first established. We present a study of the earliest utterances and interactions involving giving events, defined here as an intentional transfer of possession or control. We extend the participant structure of the giving scene or frame (Fillmore 1976) with a richer decomposition into three main phases: initiation (where giver or recipient prompts, requests or announces the transfer), execution (physical act of transfer), and acknowledgment (completion of transfer). Each phase can be accompanied by linguistic constructions that allow the participants to negotiate and coordinate their plans and actions. In English, for example, phrases like “Want more?”, “Here you go”, and “Thank you”, though lacking any verbs of giving, clearly mark specific phases of giving. We then present a longitudinal study of parent-child interactions from the Providence Corpus (CHILDES), coding transfer events for linguistic form (utterance, constructions, speaker), participant structure (giver, recipient, gift), event phase, and pragmatic function (self-initiated, cooperative initiation, request).Preliminary results highlight several patterns. Early utterances fall mainly into two categories: a parental request for a child to give her something, or a parental commentary about either her own or the child’s giving action. Later, the child takes a more active role in initiating transfers, using increasingly better-formed language for each phase. This progression may indicate that the child has mastered the “script” of such interactions, where the predictable nature of the event structure provides a convenient entry point to language (Nelson 2007). We further observe extended interactions in which the phases above each involve multiple steps; in these situations, it may instead be the well-established language associated with simpler events that provides the conceptual scaffold for the child to grasp more complex events. Overall, our analysis illuminates how the complex event structure of giving, and the variety of ways of talking about it, provide the means for the concurrent development and mutual reinforcement of language and conceptualization.