The earliest utterances in dialogue: towards a formal theory of parent/child talk in interaction

Early, initial utterances by children have received relatively little attention from researchers on language acquisition and almost no attempts to describe them using a formal grammar. In this paper we develop a taxonomy for such utterances, inspired by a study of the Providence corpus from CHILDES and driven by the need to describe how the contents of early child utterances arise from an interaction of form and dialogical context. The results of our corpus study demonstrate that even at this early stage quite intricate semantic mechanisms are in play, including non-referential meaning, akin to non–specific readings of quantifiers. We sketch a formal framework for describing the dialogue context and grammar that underlies such utterances. We consider very briefly and informally how some such utterances emerge from parent/child interaction.