Many studies have explored children’s acquisition of temporal adverbs. However, the extent to which children’s early temporal language has discursive instead of solely temporal meanings has been largely ignored. We report two corpus-based studies that investigated temporal adverbs in Finnish child-parent interaction between the children’s ages of 1;7 and 4;11. Study 1 shows that the two corpus children used temporal adverbs to construe both temporal and discursive meanings from their early adverb production and that the children’s usage syntactically broadly reflected the input received. Study 2 shows that the discursive uses of adverbs appeared to be learned from contextually anchored caregiver constructions that convey discourse functions like urging and reassuring, and that the usage is related to the children’s and caregivers’ interactional roles. Our study adds to the literature on the acquisition of temporal adverbs by demonstrating that these items are learned also with additional discursive meanings in family interaction.

中文翻译：

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孩子们对时间的表达在多大程度上实际上指的是时间？家庭互动中时间副词的时间和话语用法的调查


许多研究探讨了儿童对时间副词的习得。然而，儿童早期时间语言具有话语意义而不仅仅是时间意义的程度却在很大程度上被忽视了。我们报告了两项基于语料库的研究，调查了芬兰 1;7 岁和 4;11 岁儿童与父母互动中的时间副词。研究1表明，两个语料库儿童使用时间副词来解释他们早期副词产生的时间和话语含义，并且儿童的使用在句法上广泛反映了收到的输入。研究2表明，副词的话语用法似乎是从上下文锚定的照顾者结构中学习的，这些结构传达了诸如敦促和安抚等话语功能，并且副词的用法与儿童和照顾者的互动角色有关。我们的研究增加了关于时间副词习得的文献，证明这些项目在家庭互动中也具有额外的话语意义。