Lecture | Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
Expressing social meaning in requests: Acquisition and cross-linguistic production data
- Date
- Monday 14 September 2026
- Time
- Serie
- Sociolinguistics & Discourse Studies Series
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- 0.26
Abstract
In this talk, we present production data on the expression of social meaning from both an acquisitional and a cross-linguistic perspective. we attempt to answer the question of how children and adults differ in their linguistic expression of social meaning, and we compare the production data of Swiss German and Standard German speakers. Based on data from a variety of production tasks involving adults and children aged 4 to 11, we demonstrate to what extent information regarding the social distance of the addressee (e.g., talking to a family member, a friend, or a stranger) as well as the factors age and gender have an impact on the linguistic patterns used in these different social scenarios. We will focus on lexical means (e.g., pronouns and politeness markers) and on morphosyntax (e.g., variation in sentence mood and modality). Finally, we present preliminary data from a video elicitation task in which the factor imposition was manipulated non-verbally for the first time.