Paper 3 Section B

 In this discourse, which contains a mother and her child Raina. Raina, the child, is five years old. Throughout the discourse, it is evident that Raina is in the late post-telegraphic stage of child language acquisition. This became firstly evident when taking into account the recognition of homophones that their mother uses. This was their mother saying “i can see the sea” and the child’s response “mm hmm.” This recognition of homophones is quite significant in the stage that Raina is in.

    It should also be noted that Raina is able to use intonation and stress in speaking. These prosodic features can be heard when listening to Raina say, “lets go this way mum (.) this way.” This use of prosodic stress also represents Raina’s ability to understand conversational importance of paralinguistic features such as body language, but without use of body language, Raina is still able to show emphasis using this stress in speaking. More examples include the intonation symbol included in a lot of the discourse like saying “what↘… where↘” This shows a clearly expressed emotion of needing and whining asking what and where something is.

    Surprisingly, a significant amount of Raina’s speaking is in the form of regulatory language; used to influence the behavior of Raina’s mother. This in combination with heuristic language shows Raina’s increasing curiosity and the expression of it. For instance, Raina says “i want to go this way” and “LOOK (1) theres one.” In both of these instances, Raina is expressing requests to persuade their mother.    

    In regards to the mother, an interesting feature of language that the mother uses is in using vocabulary like “...creepy crawlies…” This register that the mother uses suggests an elaborated code between the mother and Raina. Only something said to a child would have an odd terminology like creepy crawlies. This can be assumed to be due to the homophones that insects might be confused with such as incest. Speaking of phonetics, the discourse also includes use of phonemic representations like in the use of /k𐐀z/ throughout the conversation. It is also important to see the caretaker language used by the mother. This is most easily discerned by the upward intonation and pauses that the mother uses. We hear this in mother saying “and look (.) theres a blackbird (1) see it in the long grass↗”.

    Most of this article in a contextual sense is just a conversation between mother and Raina. We can draw this based on the language used by the mother and Raina as well. We see this in their conversational turn-taking when they say “mum i’m /gana/ skip over to there (1) can we go in this field↘” which gives us our setting through the use of prepositions. We later see repetition of the question word “WHY↘ (.) WHY↘” with emphasis shown by the capitalization. Furthermore, we notice other paralinguistics in that they do overlap each other more than once. Saying “do you think theres a lot of little birdies in there // oh YES” and “YES (.) a I (1) he can’t fly can he ↘ // i think he can.” This not only shows more overlap but continues to highlight the caretaker language the mother continues to show, this is from the continued evidence of the emphasis through the drawn out answer of the mother saying “can” at the end of her reply.

    There is one example of clear paralinguistic features with the use of “[laughs]” not once but twice within the same conversational-floor shift. This shows mutual understanding and feelings between Raina and mother who both laugh about the spider on her mother’s jacket. This isn’t used any other time but does highlight a key part of the language spoken between the two speakers.