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Repetition in Mandarin-speaking children’s dialogs: its distribution and structural dimensions

  • Guocai Zeng ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 13, 2021
Linguistics Vanguard
From the journal Linguistics Vanguard Volume 7 Issue 1

Abstract

In forty child-to-child dialogs in Mandarin retrieved from CHILDES, 74.23% of the total utterances contain the phenomenon of repetition, with self-repetitions (64.85%) occurring more frequently than other-repetitions (35.15%). Based upon the distribution of the various types of repetitions in the database, this paper also discusses the structural dimensions of repetition at different grammatical levels, concluding that self-repetition and other-repetition in child conversation are not merely copies of previously used linguistic material, but key strategies that children apply to construct their utterances and dialogic interactions. Children’s discourses develop from self-repetitions to other-repetitions, and by doing this, cohesion in discourse is achieved.

Keywords: child language; conversation; dialogic interaction; repetition; utterance
Corresponding author: Guocai Zeng, Sichuan University, Chengdu, China, E-mail:

Funding source: National Social Science Fund of China

Award Identifier / Grant number: 18BYY076

Funding source: China Scholarship Council

  1. Research funding: This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (grant no. 18BYY076) and by a fund from the China Scholarship Council.

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Received: 2020-06-29
Accepted: 2021-05-31
Published Online: 2021-12-13

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2020-0059
Keywords for this article
child language; conversation; dialogic interaction; repetition; utterance

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Editorial Note
  2. Editorial note
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  4. Fast Track: fast (nearly) automatic formant-tracking using Praat
  5. Acoustic investigation of anticipatory vowel nasalization in a Caribbean and a non-Caribbean dialect of Spanish
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  8. Morphology & Syntax
  9. Brand names as multimodal constructions
  10. NP-internal structure and the distribution of adjectives in Mə̀dʉ́mbὰ
  11. A quantitative investigation of the ellipsis of English relativizers
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