info-childes Digest - 11/24/02

[Melissa Bowerman]

> Subject: imagination & talk
> Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 17:55:20 -0800 (PST)
> From: Carolyn Chaney <cchaney at sfsu.edu>
> 
> One of my undergraduate students has a 3-year-old niece who regularly
> shifts the topic of conversation into an imaginary scenario that may or
> may not be triggered by the conversational context.  My student is
> interested in analyzing the conversations as a way of getting a peek at
> the child's imagination and how it is expressed linguistically.
> 
> Having searched childes, we are not coming up with much in the way of
> previous research on this kind of phenomena...have you encountered it?
> Can anyone suggest key words we may not have tried (we've given imag* and
> creativ* a go) or know of papers on this subject?
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> Carolyn Chaney


Dear Carolyn,

   Sven Strömqvist's dissertation, Make-believe Through Words: A
Linguistic Study of Children's Play with a Doll's House, would be
relevant. It was published as Gothenburg Monographs in Linguistics 4
(Dept. of Linguistics, Univ. of Gothenburg), 1984. 

Best regards,
Melissa Bowerman