This article reviews conversation analytic research on explanations in pedagogical interaction, particularly in language learning classrooms. In reviewing this literature, this paper aims to provide a comprehensive account of what is interactionally involved when giving pedagogical explanations so that future research investigating the…

This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

During narration, speakers constantly choose appropriate referential forms (nominals or pronominals). Children may engage in this reference marking differently than adults. Discourse- or listener-oriented approaches make different predictions about referential behaviour in cognitively demanding situations: the first predicts a higher number of…

Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

Today, L.S. Vygotsky's concept of a 'zone of proximal development' (ZPD) is often used to just mean best practices in early years teaching, like scaffolding. But in his original theory, the zones linked age periods distinguished by age-specific neoformations -- one of which was the formation of concepts at adolescence. So Vygotsky rejected Stern's…

Heritage language (HL) speakers seem to diverge from monolingual speakers in the acquisition of syntax-discourse interface phenomena. However, most of the studies reporting this finding do not make any distinction between different types of syntax-discourse interface structures. Therefore, it is an open question whether these structures are…

Many sentences of adult English are analytic constructions, namely clauses with a matrix verb complemented by a dependent predicate that does not have an expressed syntactic subject. Examples are subject and object control, raising to subject or object, periphrastic tense, aspect and modality, copular predication and "do"-support. In…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study investigated whether European American and Japanese mothers' speech to preschoolers contained exchange- and alignment-oriented structures that reflect and possibly support culture-specific models of self-other relatedness. In each country 12 mothers were observed in free play with their 3-year-olds. Maternal speech was coded for…

This study considered the linguistic forms used by 63 English-speaking Canadian children from kindergarten to second grade (ages 5;6-8;8) to introduce, maintain reference to, and reintroduce primary and secondary characters throughout their narratives The expected referring forms were used more frequently for the best-matching referential…

Recent developments in theories of language (grammars) seem to share a number of tenets which mark a drastic shift from traditional disentangled descriptions of language: emphasis on a big number of discrete grammatical rules or a corpus of structure patterns has given way to a more unitary, explanatory powerful description of language informed by…

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense,…

Using a discourse analytic approach from the work of Hoey (1991) and a dual processing model from Wray (2000), this paper compares the language produced by the same classes of children when they are engaged in role-play and when they are playing rule-based games. We find that role-play tends to be richer in "frozen" pair parts, where the responses…

This bibliography includes titles of unpublished works in various fields of linguistics such as grammar (morphology, phonology and syntax), socioli nguistics, psycholinguistics, foreign language instruction, language acquisit ion, discourse analysis, poetics, etc. (Text is in German.) (DS)