The co-occurrences of verb finite forms used by children and their caregivers

Abstract

The article describes the co-occurrences of verb finite forms used by children and their caregivers in directive speech acts of spontaneous everyday speech. The role of co-occurrences of verbs have been described from the perspective of Estonian everyday directive communication and from the perspective of first language acquisition. The co-occurrences of finite verbs are frequent in child directed speech and almost every fifth directive utterance consists of co-occurrence of verb finite forms. These kinds of co-occurrences are not characteristic to children's speech and only a couple of examples can be found from their data. The frequency of verb co-occurrences does not change during the observation period, so, the clear fine-tuning effect of the child directed speech was not observed in the analyzed data. All instances of verb co-occurrences have been divided into two sub-classes-the repetitions of the same lemma and co-occurrences of different lemmas, last sub-class consists of constructions where the first verb denotes movement, that is typical serial constructions; constructions where the first verb was a particlelike verb form; and constructions with conjunctions. The most frequent type of verb co-occurrences in child directed speech were typical serial constructions and constructions where the first constituent was particle-like verb form, repetitions of same lemma were not so frequent. The co-occurrences of verb finite forms used in child directed speech had some features which are not characteristic to adult directed speech, such different features were registered mostly in constructions with particle-like verb forms. In adult-child interaction, verb co-occurrences have mostly been used for intensifying the command, but also for initiating cooperation, stopping, stimulating, and modifying the child's activities.