Tom 67 (2016): Zeszyt 2 (December 2016)

Contribution presents a partial research probe into the problems of non-institutional dialogue of adults in Eastern Slovakia focused on two representative means of a personal pronouns subsystem – ja [I] and on [he]. We observe their communication use in the spontaneous communication through the prism of the adult dialogue typology (cf. Bodnárová, 2012). One of the main issues associated with the group of the personal pronouns is the motivation of the explicit expression of pronominal subject. In the contribution we reflect on this particular issue, based on the existing research of the analogous issues, above all in Slovak and Czech linguistics. Despite of this fact, it is not limited to affirmative findings and exemplification, but it attempts to deepen and complement the already known findings through their own original material. In addition to communication and pragmatic approach we also apply point of view of the personal deixis and syntax.

The longitudinal case study of the usage of personal deixis I and you in the mother’s speech directed to her first born child from the age of 6 months to 3 years is based on the analysis of 30 one-hour recordings of their interaction transcribed via CHAT in Childes. The focus is on one aspect of the child directed speech register, which is its variability in time. In the longitude of 30 months the number of occurrences of personal pronoun you is constantly decreasing while the number of personal pronoun I is constantly increasing in mother’s speech directed to the child. The communicative functions which are being fulfilled by usage of personal pronouns I and you are also changing in time due to the development of the child’s cognitive and speaking abilities. New communicative function while using personal pronoun I such as explanation to the child occurs in her 33^rd month. New communicative function while using personal pronoun you such as role play starts at her age of 20^th month and mother’s repetitions of the child’s statements as the display of mother’s understanding occur from the 31^st month. Other functions are fading in time such as commenting on the child’s physical abilities, which is dominant to her 17^th month and commenting on the child’s state, which occurs up to one year of her age.

The paper tests the hypothesis that prosodic highlighting of individual words with emotional connotation can affect the recipient’s perception of the expressiveness of the entire utterance. Seventeen respondents listened to two speech realizations of the same text and marked its emotional level on the scale between positive and negative. To achieve emotional neutrality of the utterances, they were synthesized with Kempelen 3.0 speech system. The results show a tendency of respondents to perceive speech with prosodically highlighted negative words as more negative (sad) than speech with positive words highlighted, which was marked as more positive (joyful).