Are Children Linguistically Creative or Conservative?
Keywords:
Conservatism, Creativity, Parental diary, Emergence of grammar, SociocognitivismAbstract
In our research on the emergence of children's grammar, we identified a property that is little discussed in acquisition studies and is unknown to the general population that deals with and is enchanted by children's utterances. This property concerns a conservative attitude observed in the child's utterances, which generally are characterized as creative. This section of our research, from a socio-cognitive perspective aligned with cognitive-functional linguistics, aims to reflect on creativity and conservatism, properties observed in children's statements. To this end, we mobilized studies that conceptualize and analyze the two properties. We selected two scenes from our corpus of 219 parental diary videos in brasilian Portuguese, published on social media to demonstrate in the language use the phenomena under discussion. The usual conservatism ends up emphasizing creative attitudes in language use.
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