Jazykový obraz sveta v reči matky orientovanej na dieťa v ranom štádiu vývinu
Linguistic picture of the world in an infant directed speech of Slovak mothers

Summary/Abstract: This article shows the outcome of a quantitative and qualitative longitudinal study of an infant directed speech and focuses on ways how emotional function of this communication (Wodak – Schultz, 1986) is expressed in the Slovak language. 24 hours of 3 mother-infant dyad interactions were videotaped in 1 hour sessions once a month in the course of 8 months up to the appearance of the first one word utterances of the child and were transcribed via CHAT in CHILDES. We found that 62% of token nouns were in diminutive forms (45% of noun types), 3% of token verbs were used in diminutive forms (10% of verb types) and also 4% of token adjectives (10% of adjective types). These diminutives are used to express positive emotions towards the child. Moreover, only 6% of uttered verbs were used in negative form and these are positive from pragmatic point of view, e.g. neplač ‘don’t cry’, neboj sa ‘don’t be afraid’ and nevadí ‘it doesn’t matter’. Emotional aspect of child directed speech is also shown in the most frequent nouns, which are the proper names of the children in diminutive form and appellative mamka ‘mummy’ also in diminutive form, by which the emotional and existential connection of mother with her infant is emphasized. Positive character of an infant directed speech is pointed out by the fact that affirmative áno ‘yes’, nó ‘well’ and ták ‘right’, with positive pragmatic function shown in intonation, are among four most frequently used lexemes of the frequency lexicon.The most frequently used adjectives and adverbs in the speech of the mothers such as little, good, clever, pretty, nice, well, beautifully, superb also create a positive language picture of the child himself/herself. We can conclude that mothers create safe and positive social environment for the infant by using these words in their speech, or as Kaye (1980) says, “what each mother does in different ways is make the baby into a person and herself into his best friend”.

• Details
• Contents