Parents shift between standard and vernacular forms when addressing their children and this way (unconsciously) provide them with opportunities to acquire a deeper knowledge of the norms of their speech community (e.g. AUTHOR 2016). This paper verifies whether such implicit language-oriented pedagogical efforts can be correlated with more explicitly observable pedagogical choices parents make, by zooming in on linguistic variation in the social control acts (Blum-Kulka 1990) they direct at their children (Examples 1 to 3).
- Do you think that cleaning your plate with your tongue is polite?
- Don’t drop your cup!
- You shouldn’t let that bully steal your cards.
Specifically, we work with a 32 hour corpus of self-recorded dinner table conversations for 8 Belgian Dutch families and analyze variation between standard (jij ‘you’) and nonstandard (gij ‘you’) forms of the second person pronouns found in the 360 social control acts attested in the data.
Using a mixed methods approach, we scrutinize several factors that can influence the choice for one of the two forms. First, we compare the je/gij-variation in implicit versus explicit directives (Example 1 versus 2). Second, we analyze the effect of the immediateness of the directive (Example 2 vs. 3). Third, we chart variation in the effect of these types of control acts in different discursive frames: we contrast transactional frames focused on the dinner table situation (see Examples 1-2) with relational frames oriented towards social goals (Example 3). Finally, we study the relationship between these control act characteristics and more traditional linguistic and social variables such as type of pronoun (reduced/full form), age of the addressed child, and gender (also of the parent) (see Vogt et al. 2015).
The results are processed both quantitatively (conditional inference trees) and qualitatively (discourse analysis), revealing a complex interplay between the social and interactional parameters and as such further advancing our insight into the importance of style-shifts for the acquisition of a complete sociolinguistic repertoire.
Blum-Kulka. 1990. You don’t touch lettuce with your fingers: Parental politeness in family discourse. JofP 14: 259–288.
Vogt/Mastin/Schots. 2015. Communicative intentions of child-directed speech in three different learning environments. First Language 35(4-5): 341-358.
