Eliciting talk as language socialization in Finnish, Swedish-Finnish, and Swedish families: A look at syntactic structures

Abstract

In this study, three cultural groups were involved: Finns living in Finland, Swedes living in Sweden, and Finnish immigrants living in Sweden, each group represented by 20 families. The study explored possible explanations as to why Swedes produced considerably more talk than Finns and Swedish Finns during dinner conversations as described in a previous study (Tryggvason forthcoming). We approached the research questions through language socialization and examined talk eliciting syntactic structures. Surprisingly, in relation to the amount of talk, Swedes had less talk eliciting utterances than Finns and Swedish Finns. The two latter groups also behaved quite similarly in their preferences for different types of syntactic structures. There were some clear differences in the use of syntactic structures between Finns and Swedes. The Finns used more ellipses in eliciting information talk and more polar questions in eliciting confirmation talk, whereas the Swedes used more declaratives and interrogative ellipses in confirmation talk. The variation in use of syntactic structures does not on its own explain the amount of talk, but other factors such as early participation in family talk, adult models, and discontinuous Finnish talk might also influence the amount of talk. © Walter de Gruyter.