Shaping the perceptual field in interaction: The use and non-use of ga in the speech of very young Japanese children

Abstract

Developmental studies on Japanese children's use of ga report that they start using ga from an early age, but that their usage rate is quantitatively less than that of adults, thus concluding that children's knowledge about ga is limited and takes time before it reaches to the adult level. This study takes an interactional linguistic approach to the phenomenon instead, and observes how children as young as 2 years old deploy ga in order to accomplish particular social actions in their everyday talk-in-interaction. It studies ga's oft-noted “highlighting function” not cognitively, but situated within the field of ongoing participant interaction. The study finds that children mark NPs with ga when certain elements in the environment need to be recognized anew or picked out among other things, in order to shape the joint perceptual field for the purposes of interaction. Conversely, they choose not to mark NPs with ga when such recognition work is not necessary, or when the entity has already become relevant in the current discourse. Thus, children seem to understand the most basic action opportunities that ga affords quite early, and that “seeing” is a both a social practice and an interactional achievement.