Chapter 1 Introduction
1.3 Organization
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1.3 Organization
The present study investigates Mandarin maternal regulatory language by analyzing the use of syntactic directness, semantic modification, and content in maternal control acts. The following part of this study is organized as below. Chapter 2 will review the previous studies related to maternal control acts, including: (1) parenting style, (2) regulation of behavior, (3) linguistic socialization, and (4) control acts. Chapter 3 will present the methodology of the current investigation, including the information about the subject and the data, the procedures of data analysis, and the coding system. Chapter 4 will report the results of the current analysis. In chapter 5, a discussion of the results will be shown. Finally, chapter 6 will give a conclusion, point out the limitations of the present study and offer some suggestions for future research.
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Chapter 2 Literature review
Mothers play an important role in aiding children to acquire behavioral standards so as to enable them to be socialized into society. The review of the literature on maternal regulatory language used in socializing children is to investigate research on the parenting style includes the following: in Section 2.1, the parenting style; in Section 2.2, the regulation of behavior; in Section 2.3, linguistic socialization; in Section 2.4, the use of control acts.
2.1 Parenting style
Investigation of parenting style is one of the approaches used to explore how parents influence the development of children’s social and instrumental competence (Darling, 1999). Based on Baumrind (1991), parenting style focuses on normal variations in parents’ attempts to control and socialize their children. Furthermore, Maccoby and Martin (1983) indicated that parental responsiveness and parental demandingness were two important elements of parenting. Parental responsiveness refers to parents’ support of the fostering of self-regulation, self-assertion, and individuality, but parental demandingness means integrating child into the family (Baumrind, 1991). Generally, parental responsiveness is associated with social competence and psychosocial function, while parental demandingness refers to behavioral control and instrumental competence (Darling, 1999).
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The concepts of high or low on parental demandingness and responsiveness were used to create a typology of parenting styles. Baumrind (1971) distinguished three styles: an authoritarian style, in which adults not only control children but also are less warm; a permissive style, in which parents are non-controlling and relatively warm; and an authoritative style, in which parents set a high control while
encouraging children’s independence and autonomy. In addition to responsiveness and demandingness, psychological control is a third dimension. Psychological control means intruding on a child’s psychological and emotional development by guilt induction, shaming, or withdrawal of love (Barber, 1996). Psychological control can be used to explain the difference between authoritarian and authoritative parenting.
Authoritarian parents use high psychological control as they hope their children will accept their values without questioning, and, in contrast, authoritative parents use low psychological control and will give and take with their children and provide
explanations (Darling, 1999).
2.2 Regulation of behavior
Damon (2006) mentions that parents socialized children in establishing their relations with others, becoming an accepted member of society, regulating their behaviors in accordance with society’s standards, and getting along well with others.
In addition, Schaffer and Crook (1979, 1980) examined maternal control techniques when children were two years old. The results showed that the mothers took a directive role, and found that nearly 45% of their utterances had a control function and occurred at the average rate of one every nine seconds.
Some earlier studies have shown that a child’s age is a factor in influencing maternal demands. Mothers make more effort in controlling a child’s attention when
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the child is at the age of 15 months but primarily concentrate on action controls when the child is at the age of 24 months (Schaffer & Crook, 1979). Maternal demands for prosocial behaviors such as helping others and doing chores increase during the period when the child is two to three years old, but number of maternal demands in regard to physical care and protection of the environment decreases (Dubin & Dubin, 1963; Gralinski & Kopp, 1993; Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1995).
Early maturity demands let children perform up to or beyond their ability in social, intellectual, and emotional fields (Baumrind & Black, 1967). Baumrind (1971)
defined early maturity demands as demands due to the maternal expectation that the child benefit the family by performing prosocial tasks, such as putting toys away by 2;6, helping mother by 3;0, doing household chores by 2;6, and taking care of siblings by 4;0. In addition, in North American culture, prosocial and cooperative behaviors including sharing and helping are thought to be important social skills and further influence the quality of interpersonal relationships and social engagement (Cheah &
Rubin, 2003).
Previous research mainly focused on parental strategies and the techniques used by parents in influencing their children. However, Kuczynski and Kochanska (1995) examined the immediate function and content of African American mothers’ demands at children’s ages from 15 to 44 months, and also explored how children respond to their mothers’ control at two ages, 15 to 44 months and 5 years old. Three types of contents of maternal demand were established. One is the demand for competent action related not only to the intellectual aspect but also to instrumental way. The demands produced in this type are deeply influenced by early maturity demands.
According to the authors, an early emphasis on performing competent behaviors tends
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to enhance compliance and fewer behavioral problems at age 5. The second one is demand for appropriate behavior. This type aims to regulate behavior in accordance with socially appropriate standards of personal behavior. The third one is demand for caretaking, including children’s physical well-being. More details of content
subcategories will be stated in the later analysis.
2.3 Linguistic socialization
According to Gleason (1988), linguistic socialization contains two meanings. In the narrow sense, it is associated with how children are socialized to use language appropriately. In the broad sense, it explores how children are socialized through language to make their behaviors and roles conform to the society norms. This study focuses on the actions expected by the speaker.
Hays, Power, and Olvera (2001) found that maternal socialization strategies positively influenced young Mexican-American children’s healthy eating behaviors.
Their mothers’ use of reasoning, verbal nondirectiveness, and the giving of
permission for children to have their own eating decisions were related to children’s nutritional knowledge. Specifically, those mothers who used more semantic softeners of affection, praise, and reasoning rather than commands tended to use the
explanation that children would be able to prevent illness by eating in a healthy way.
Rue and Zhang (2008) explored the similarities and differences in request patterns in Mandarin Chinese and Korean by analyzing not only syntactic directness, but also external and internal modifications of aggravation and mitigation. Gao (1999) investigated Chinese native speakers’ request types. Also, Hong (1998) investigated request patterns employed by Chinese and German.
Gralinski and Kopp (1993) discovered changes in maternal expectations between
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children’s ages of 13 and 48 months, from an emphasis on safety to self-care, rules governing social interactions, family routines, and chores. This age-associated change may be linked to children’s capacities, attainments, and parental socialization goals. In addition, while parents may change their expectations in relation to changes in the age of a child, parents may also vary the extent of beneficial cognitive, social, or other goals when they socialize their children (Kuczynski & Kochanska, 1995).
Perry and Perry (1983) mentioned that external control established early in childhood may lay the foundations for children’s subsequent internalization. Power and Manire (1993) suggested a three-process socialization model to explain how parenting practices influenced children’s acquisition and internalization of cultural values and norms. The following are the processes necessarily required for the occurrence of the internalization of norms and values: (1) an understanding of appropriate behavioral rules in various contexts; (2) the ability to exercise control of impulse and to use self-regulation to follow rules; and (3) the development of internal motivation to comply with these rules.
2.4 Control acts1
Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (1993) define control acts as acts which are intended to get an addressee to act, not to act, or to facilitate the speaker’s current plans (e.g., accept offers, respect ownership, and allow a stated intention). In order to capture speakers’ intentions, Lampert and Ervin-Tripp (1993) divide control acts into six types:
(1) DIRECTIVES, whose point is to get an addressee to act to provide either goods or services; (2) PROHIBITIONS, whose point is to require an addressee to stop
performing or to avoid an action; (3) PERMISSIONS, whose point is to request from
1 Ervin-Tripp (1988) developed the Control Exchange Code, a coding system, to focus on control acts.
The system is used to characterize the organization of verbal and gestural moves intended to control the behavior of others.
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or grant to an addressee permission; (4) INTENTIONS, whose point is to commit the speaker to an action that an addressee is expected to facilitate or at least not block; (5) CLAIMS, whose point is to make an addressee recognize a speaker’s right to certain goods, activities, or services; (6) OFFERS, whose point is to invite an addressee to accept goods or services. Figure 1 represents the differences between types of control acts.
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Figure 1. Flow chart of Lampert and Ervin-Tripp’s (1993) types of control acts Types of control acts are distinguished from each other by whether the hearer or the speaker performs the desired act, and also by varied goals in terms of changes in the location of goods, activities, and states, varying beneficiaries, and the different levels of the conscious attention of the speaker.
This study seeks to explore maternal regulatory language used in the situation of regulating children’s social behavior, so the focus is on how mothers (speakers) ask
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their children (hearers) to perform required actions. Thus, in this study, it is the child (the hearer) not the mother (the speaker) who acts. After deciding the child to do the action, we follow the arrows in Figure 1 from hearer, not to perform optional action and finally to the speaker’ requirement of the hearer. There are three types of control acts. They are directives, prohibitions, and claim. The category of claim is not considered in this study because the claim is used to show ownership to the hearer instead of regulating the actions of the hearer (e.g., “That’s mine”). Only when there is an immediate threat after the claim is the claim used to prohibit the hearer taking goods. The case with an immediate threat is an example of prohibition in purpose (Lampert & Ervin-Tripp, 1993), and the case will be analyzed in this study. Therefore, two types of control acts used by the mother, directives and prohibitions, are under investigation in this study and conform to previous research on maternal controls (Schaffer & Crook, 1979; Bellinger, 1979; Schneiderman, 1983; McLaughlin, 1983).
2.4.1 Directives
A speech which a speaker attempts to get an addressee to act and offer either
goods or services belongs to directives (Searle, 1976; Lampert & Ervin-Tripp, 1993).
Mothers use attention-directing devices as a preliminary strategy to producing action directives. As children grow older, the gaining of attention is more easily accomplished. Thus, after children grow older, their mothers will concentrate on the children’s actions instead of children’s attentions (Schaffer, 2006). This phenomenon is shown in Schaffer and Crook’s (1979) research. They note that mothers focus more efforts on attention-direction at 15 months, but that they primarily concentrate on influencing children’s actions at 24 months.
It has been discovered that mothers use more explicit verbal directives with their
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children who have relatively poor linguistic comprehension (Bellinger, 1979;
Schneiderman, 1983). The syntactic criterion is the most common way to measure verbal explicitness. That is, the use of imperatives is contrasted with the use of less direct forms such as embedded directives or hints (Schaffer, 2006).
Making use of different combinations of literalness and referential explicitness, Schneiderman (1983) divided maternal action directives into one of three subtypes:
standard imperatives, embedded imperatives, and implied action directives. In Schneiderman’s study, the number of maternal action directives decreased with the advance of the child’s age by cross-sectional analysis. The results from longitudinal analysis indicated that mothers vary the ways they phrase action directives according to their children’s ages. The first action directives children heard were standard imperatives. Then, the use of standard imperatives with the younger children was partially replaced by embedded imperatives, and the use of embedded imperatives with the older children was replaced by implied action directives. This sequence showed that more explicit forms were expressed to younger children and also indicated the mothers’ perception of their children’s abilities in being able to comprehend that speech. Furthermore, the author analyzed maternal repetitions for sequences of action directives and deduced that the sequence moved from implied action-directives, embedded imperatives to standard imperatives. The sequence reflected the mother’s intuition that explicit subtypes function to enhance children’s compliance with their action directives.
2.4.2 Prohibitions
A speech which a speaker uses to attempt to make an addressee avoid or stop doing something undesirable belongs to prohibitions such as “Don’t do that” and
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“Stop that” (Lampert & Ervin-Tripp, 1993). The evidence shows that many prohibitions on a child’s behavior cause negative outcomes (Maccoby, 1980;
Maccoby & Martin, 1983).
Gleason, Ely, Perlmann, and Narasimhan (1996) examined variation in parents’
use of prohibitions with their daughters or sons. They discovered three findings. One was that parental prohibitions in the play sessions declined as children’s ages
increased. Another was that boys tended to hear more repeated or clustered
prohibitions than girls. The other was that prohibitions were more commonly occurred at dinner time.
Schaffer and Crook (1979, 1980) found that only about 4% of the controls were prohibitions during a laboratory-directed play situation. The majority of the controls that the mothers in their studies used were to tend to propose a new activity instead of prohibiting the child’s present activity. Like Schaffer and Crook, McLaughlin (1983) also found that the vast majority of control utterances were directives rather than prohibitions in nature. Only 5 % of all controls were prohibitions for both mothers and fathers. Thus, the use of prohibitions was much rarer than that of directives.
2.4.3 Politeness
Since control acts are utterances designed to bring about a change in the other’s behaviors, they are inherently face-threatening (Brown & Levinson, 1987). Thus, politeness becomes a major consideration (Blum-Kulka, 1990). According to Brown and Levinson, three parameters need to be considered during any face-threatening act produced: (1) the ranking of the degree of imposition; (2) the social distance between a speaker and an interlocutor; and (3) the power differential between a speaker and an interlocutor. In earlier studies on traditional directness perspective, directness was
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associated with impoliteness and indirectness with politeness (Ervin-Tripp, 1976;
McLaughlin, Schutz, & White, 1980). However, this perspective has been rejected for the reason that politeness cannot be equated with indirectness.
Blum-Kulka (1990) considers that the contribution of mitigation to politeness was placed as secondary to indirectness in the literature. In addition, according to Blum-Kulka’s view of Brown and Levinson’s model, the different forms of mitigation are considered as sub-strategies of positive and negative politeness and do not justify the centrality of mitigation in indexing politeness, at least for family discourse.
Therefore, studies in analyzing the use of the politeness need to consider the overall mitigation (Blum-Kulka, 1990; Aronsson & Thorell, 1999).
Two studies were conducted on politeness by examining the proportions of mitigation in mothers’ regulatory language. Halle and Shatz (1994) found that only 16% of British mothers’ regulatory language is mitigated, so they consider that British mothers seem not to favor polite, mitigated, or indirect forms. Blum-Kulka (1990) examined parental speech acts of control around the dinner table in middle-class Israeli, American, and American-Israeli families. The finding show that the language of parental control is richly mitigated, so family discourse is essentially polite (39% in Israeli, 32% in American immigrants, and 26% in American). The author found that mitigated directness is used to redress the hearer’s positive face in the context of family discourse. The term mitigated directness represents solidarity politeness according to the term of Scollon and Scollon (1981), or positive politeness according to the term of Brown and Levinson (1987). Although forms of indirectness encode a self-face-saving element which allows for the denial of requestive intent, the use of mitigated directness is hearer-oriented in order to enhance the hearer’s positive face
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by appealing to in-group membership or by giving reasons and justifications.
Blum-Kulka (1990) proposes an index of politeness: (1) IMPOLITE, whose point is to completely disregard face-needs by the use of aggravated-directness; (2)
NEUTRAL, whose point is to not to index directness either politeness or impoliteness in the domain-specific requirements of the family code; (3) MITIGATED
DIRECTNESS, whose point is to take any forms of mitigation; (4) HINTS, whose point is to use nonconventional indirectness to show regard for a child’s face.
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3.1 Subjects and dataIn this study, the subjects were a Mandarin-speaking boy and his mother. They live in Taipei City, Taiwan. H2 is the only child in the family, and his mother, M, has a master’s degree and works in advertising. The data of M’s regulatory language was analyzed when H’s ages were 2;1, 2;7, 3;1, and 3;73. In the collected data, we found Mandarin Chinese was mainly spoken. Southern Min and English were used
occasionally.
The data examined in the present study were adopted from Professor
Chiung-chih Huang’s database4. The data involved 4-hour audio- and video-taped natural interactions between the child and his mother. The interactions were
transcribed in the CHAT (Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcriptions) format.
The data was coded and further computed in the CLAN (Child Language Analysis) program. Only maternal regulatory speech was coded for the present study. During the observation, the mother and child engaged in various activities, including playing cars, reading books, drawing, watching TV, and eating.
3.2 Procedures of data analysis
All maternal utterances that involved initiating, modifying, avoiding or stopping a child’s behavior were identified. Identification was made by viewing the video
records and reading the transcripts. The identified utterances were then analyzed and coded according to the analytical framework listed in Section 3.3. CLAN was then used to compute the frequencies. In this study, the results will be presented in the
2 H and M are subject codes.
3 H’s four ages are based on subjects’ ages in related studies (e.g., Schneiderman, 1983; Kuczynski &
Kochanska, 1995).
4 I am deeply grateful for Professor Huang’s generosity and kindness in allowing me to make use of the data.
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form of descriptive statistics to describe or characterize the data.
3.3 Coding system
This study focuses not only on maternal action directives but also action
prohibitions. Thus, utterances which are intended to initiate, modify, avoid or stop a child’s behavior will be investigated. Following Schneiderman (1983), fragments (e.g., On the table), stock expressions (e.g., Come on), calls for attention (e.g., See, child’s name), false starts (e.g., Do you want…uh…eat the…), test questions (e.g. Can you say cookie?), and routines5 (Where’s your mouth?) are excluded from analysis.
In the present analysis, each coding tier is composed of four levels to examine maternal regulatory language. The first level divides the types of control acts produced by the mother into directives and prohibitions. The second level indicates the types of syntactic directness. The third level indicates the semantic modifications.
The fourth level indicates the content. In other words, maternal regulatory language is
studied by analyzing maternal control acts and the distributions of syntactic directness,
studied by analyzing maternal control acts and the distributions of syntactic directness,