Susan M. Ervin-Tripp

• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley

Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1990), pp. 205-214

The ideas that mark modern-day pragmatics are old, but did not start to get more systematically developed until the 1960s and 1970s. Still, the very recognition of pragmatics as a self-standing academic discipline is a product of the 1980s, not least made possible by the establishment of the International Pragmatics Association. One scholar in part...

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This article reviews Dell Hymes's formative impact on the study of speech socialization. From the early 1960s on, Hymes addressed issues of language socialization, partly in response to the limitations in Chomsky's powerful theoretical interventions on child language, and partly as an extension of a maturing ethnographic paradigm. Focusing on speec...

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in...

Personal humorous remarks may be avoided in certain conversations out of fear of introducing and reinforcing undesirable assumptions. Teases directed at others and self-targeted humor are perhaps the most vulnerable in this regard. Unless participants know each other well, a tease intended as kidding could be heard as an insult, and a self-directed...

SHOSHANA BLUM-KULKA & CATHERINE E. SNOW (eds), Talking to adults: the contribution of multiparty discourse to language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 360. ISBN 0-8058-3666-8. - - Volume 32 Issue 3 - SUSAN ERVIN-TRIPP

This paper discusses links between the conditions of developing child bilingualism and the adult outcomes in semiotic contrast in elicited speech and codeswitching. Analysis of interaction of children raised as bilinguals shows that from the beginning they can recognize the appropriate language for addressees. When the lexical repertoire is inadequ...

This article offers a commentary on the studies by Kyratzis and Guo, Goodwin, Nakamura, and Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski comprising the special issue. The special issue is situated in the history of gender studies in developmental pragmatics. The inadequately recognized role of cultural factors is highlighted.

Discourse markers are linguistic elements that signal relations between units of talk, relations at the exchange, action, ideational, and participation framework levels of the discourse (Schiffrin, 1987). To what extent do young children use markers in these ways, indexing their ability to differentiate these levels of talk? Four- and seven-year ch...

This volume reflects the influence of Chuck Fillmore’s ground-breaking work in the fields of semantics and pragmatics. The papers in the volume pay tribute to his pioneering research into the deepest realms of the nature of ‘meaning’.

The ten volumes of Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While other volumes select philosophical, grammatical, social, variational, interactional, or discursive angles, this third volume focuses on the int...

As children in this country enter preschool and childcare groups at ever younger ages, the quintessential activity of childhood—play—is receiving renewed scholarly attention. While it is widely recognized that children "learn through play," it is far from clear how to harness this natural inclination within early childhood care and education settin...

It is theoretically possible to separate the study of politeness into the analysis of social indices, social tactics, and persuasion. The finely graded polite forms even in non face-threatening contexts in Asian languages and the form distinctions in children's role and doll play testify to the conceptual separability of politeness as a social inde...

This book is about sisters and brothers. When we say these words we think of camaraderie, intimacy, and support. In a recent letter to a newspaper a writer said, “She was my best friend. We were like sisters.” These are treated as synonyms: she did not say “but we were like sisters,” as though there is a contrast. If a man says, “She’s like a siste...

The quality of conversation generated by small groups of second graders, fifth graders, ninth graders, twelfth graders, and young adults was examined. At each age, five groups of acquainted peers were constructed, and each group met with a nondirective adult leader twice a week for 12 meetings. Each group was composed of three females and three mal...

This impressive volume attempts to make an assessment of past achievements, but also to open up new perspectives in the field of pragmatics, exactly ten years after the publication of Searle’s seminal Speech Acts . This rich collection presents an unrivaled diversity of topics and approaches united by the possibilities and limitations generic to th...

This chapter focuses on speech acts, social meaning, and social learning. There are many large issues that could be studied by a union of linguists and social psychologists such as the issues surrounding language identities of the large immigrant groups in Britain; conditions affecting diversity or uniformation of language and of dialect in a count...

Adaptations to a partner perceived to be conversationally incompetent can be heard in speech to children, the hard-of-hearing, foreigners, speakers with certain speech defects, the aged, and hospital patients. These adaptations may be controlled partially by the actual performance of partners in conversations, through influences on perceived abilit...

This chapter discusses the choice of directives as the focus for an analysis of children's speech acts that is based on several advantages. It presents some adult directives to provide a framework for the discussion of the child's abilities. The major finding of the adult research was that there were relatively consistent differences in the type of...

Previous research has shown how macro-structures can affect children's verbalizations. This study focuses on whether conversational contexts of forms are learned along with syntax, on what makes syntax, and on how to predict speech. Transcripts of videotapes of young children provided a matrix of function or act against actual utterance, wherein th...

Directives to hearers can be expressed in a variety of syntactic forms. The social distribution of such forms shows them to occur systematically, according to familiarity, rank, territorial location, difficulty of task, whether or not a duty is normally expected, whether or not non-compliance is likely. Except for some hints and questions not menti...

A considerable array of evidence has been collected about the order and process of mother tongue acquisition. This study compares these findings to second language acquisition (learning of French by English speakers) in a natural milieu in which communication rather than form is the learner's focus of attention, and where the language is heard most...

This chapter describes a few strategies for the first two years of language learning. Studies of children's texts and of such other performances as comprehension and imitation have given some basis for testing plausible generalizations about what is necessary for language processing in its early stages. The prerequisites to language are environment...

This chapter discusses the concepts of substitution, context, and association. The elicited sentences cannot give a particularly biased estimate of word contexts for the stimulus words; however, the substitution task elicits far more antonyms than can be expected on the basis of actual contextual similarities of antonyms. The collocational study in...

Introduction. In the study of language acquisition, some have focussed on phonology, lexicon, or syntax, others on language use (McTear, 1985). Only recently has any connection been seen between these perspectives (e.g., Berman & Slobin 1994). Pragmatics and discourse are typically presented as additions, and if they are included they are treated a...

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This chapter focuses on micro-sociolinguistics, though some references to larger social phenomena are unavoidable. Sociolinguistics in this context will include studies of the components of face-to-face interaction as they bear on, or are affected by, the formal structure of speech. These components may include the personnel, the situation, the fun...

A BILINGUAL-IN-PROCESS COULD BE A CHILD GROWING UP IN A BILINGUAL ADULT MILIEU, OR AN ADULT WHO HAS MOVED TO A DIFFERENT LINGUISTIC MILIEU. THE LEARNING PROCESS MIGHT BE CASUAL EXPOSURE OR SYSTEMATIC PEDAGOGY. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT FOR CHILDREN UNDER ELEVEN LANGUAGE IS SOUND AND FOR ADULTS, SENSE. CHILDREN ATTEND MORE TO THE SURFACE, JUST A...

Adult French bilinguals told TAT stories on 2 different occasions for the same pictures, in French at one session, in English at the other. Predictions derived from studies of child-rearing practices and values in the 2 countries were made regarding expected content differences in the 2 languages. Of 9 predicted content differences, 3 were statisti...

This study investigates correlates of associative probabilities. When responses to different stimuli were pooled, the frequency of various grammatical classes was found to correspond more closely to their frequency in single-word utterances than to their frequency in continuous discourse. This relationship held for lexical-word stimuli but not for...

we would expect that correlated attributes would appear in experienced speakers' usage, in situations of prediction and metaphorical extension, but not in detonation where the evidence for attribute discrimination is available. In new learners, however, one term may apply to both attributes, which are not in fact discriminated, or both terms may ap...

A survey of psycholinguistic theory and research covering such topics as models of the communication process; disciplines concerned with human communication; the linguistic, learning theory, and information theory approaches to language behavior; psycholinguistic units; synchronic psycholinguistics, microstructure and macrostructure; sequential psy...