The significance of the adversative connectives aber, mais, ma (‘but’) as indicators in young
children’s argumentation
Adversative connectives have been analyzed as articulating explicit and implicit facets of argumentative moves and
have been thus recognized as potential argumentative indicators. Here we examine adversative connectives Ger.
aber, Fr. mais, It. ma (‘but’) in young children’s speech in the context of
the ArgImp project, a research endeavor seeking to understand in which situations children aged between two and six years engage
in argumentation and how their contributions are structured. Two multilingual corpora have been collected for the project: (1)
everyday family conversations, (2) semi-structured play activities and problem solving in a kindergarten setting. Through the
detailed analysis of a small collection of examples, we consider the indicative potential of adversative connectives for
identifying argumentative episodes in interactions involving young children and for the reconstruction of the inferential
configurations of children’s contributions to these argumentative discussions. The results show that fully fledged argumentative
interpretations of adversatives occur as a possibility in children’s speech, and that adversative connectives can be used
profitably to identify less apparent argumentative confrontations and implicit standpoints in children’s speech.
Article outline
-
1.Introduction
- 2.An argumentative semantics for adversative connectives
- 2.1
But and the typology of counterarguments
- 3.Corpus data
- 4.Analysis
- 4.1Banana
- 4.2Day Care
- 4.3I’m bored
- 4.4Something important to do
- 4.5T-shirt
- 4.6Iron bridge
- 4.7But, look!
- 5.Conclusion
- Notes
-
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