| Автор | CORRIGAN, ROBERTA |
| Дата выпуска | 2004 |
| dc.description | Although words have both denotative and connotative meanings, there has been little research on the childʼs acquisition of connotations. In large segments of written texts, connotations can be studied by examining word co-occurrences (collocations). Using this technique, corpus linguists have found, for example, that ‘happen’ has a negative connotation; it most often collocates with negative words (e.g. ‘accidents’, ‘something dreadful’). The current research is a case study of the use of the lemma ‘happen’. Adult production of ‘happen/happens/happening/happened’ was examined in 151 American English-speaking, adult–child dyads from the CHILDES database. Within these dyads, 35 children used ‘happen’ and its variants. Both adults and children were increasingly likely to use ‘happen’ to describe negative contexts as childrenʼs language progressed from MLUs around 1·00 to MLUs greater than 4·00. Results are consistent with usage-based theories of language that claim that the relative frequency of information in the input is critical to language learning. |
| Издатель | Cambridge University Press |
| Название | The acquisition of word connotations: asking ‘What happened?’I would like to thank John Surber for his helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript and Shanna Sullivan and students from the School of Education Office of Research for assistance on reliability checks. Portions of this paper were presented at the Society for Text and Discourse, June 2002. |
| DOI | 10.1017/S0305000903005981 |
| Electronic ISSN | 1469-7602 |
| Print ISSN | 0305-0009 |
| Журнал | Journal of Child Language |
| Том | 31 |
| Первая страница | 381 |
| Последняя страница | 398 |
| Аффилиация | CORRIGAN ROBERTA; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee |
| Выпуск | 2 |
