School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemLanguage development and socialisation in Sherpa( 2015)This thesis examines the way in which children acquire Khumbu Sherpa, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Himalayas of northeastern Nepal. The study uses a language socialisation framework to examine the relationship between Sherpa children’s acquisition of language and their acquisition of culture, drawing parallels between the children’s Tibetan Buddhist social environment and language-related caregiver practices. Naturalistic videorecorded data from six focal children, aged between 2;1 and 4;9 at study outset, was collected over a period of two years and forms the core data set for this study. Twenty-four hours of this data was transcribed and analysed in terms of both caregivers’ and children’s directive profiles: the frequency of directive utterances as a proportion of all utterances, as well as the level of explicitness in caregiver and child directives. Results show that directives are very frequent in Sherpa caregiver speech, constituting averages of between 23.7% and 83.3% of all utterances in an hour-long session. Direct imperatives form the bulk of these caregiver directives. Both the frequency and the explicitness of caregiver directives to children decline in a statistically significant manner as the children become older. When compared with children’s speech to their caregivers, Sherpa caregivers’ speech to children has a distinctive directive profile, one that these children then reproduce in their own directives to even younger children. Sherpa children therefore show a high level of pragmatic sensitivity from an early age, tailoring the directive profiles in their speech closely to certain characteristics of their interlocutors. Directives appear to constitute a key means used by Sherpa caregivers to modulate a child’s attention, especially given that typical child-caregiver spatial configurations are characterised by considerable physical distance. Sherpa caregiver directives also carry an array of sociocultural meanings, including the modelling of a high level of attentiveness to actions and their consequences. This focus on the child’s actions, and the consequences of these actions, reflects a pervasive organising concept of Sherpa life: lee, or karma. The findings have implications in the areas of pragmatic development and language socialisation.
-
ItemSemantic change in psychiatric categories: the case of DSM-III( 2007)Psychiatric terminology has undergone a number of significant shifts over time. These have reflected broader social circumstances surrounding mental illness. One of the biggest upheavals was publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) in 1980, which created a strictly defined categorical system of diagnostic labels. A framework from historical sociolinguistics, proposed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog (1968), has been used to investigate this change. Three terms were analysed in detail – Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder and Panic Disorder – and were found to have very different histories leading up to DSM-III. The Weinreich et al. framework is evaluated for its utility in this type of complex semantic change, and is found to be effective with some minor modifications. Broader effects of language on shaping perceptions of mental illness are also briefly sketched.