Direktiivsed kõneaktid ning nende kasutamise dünaamika isa ja ema kõnes: juhtumiuuring

The aim of the article is to give an overview of directive speech acts in Estonian child-directed speech. Two school-age children from the same family and their dialogues with both parents individually are under observation. A longitudinal study has been used as the method (one child has been regularly recorded from ages 7 to 10, the other from ages 10 to 14), including 16 hours of audio material. All directive speech acts have been singled out from the parents’ speech and classified into imperatives, hints, prohibitions, statements of an addressee’s desired actions, permissions, speaker’s wishes, suggestions, hortatives, warnings and statements of social rules. Based on the analysis, comparisons are made between the mother’s and father’s speech with regard to the usage of different types of directives, and the dynamics of using directives when the child is growing as well as in situations of communication have been examined