2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report
A Comprehensive Study of Children's Comprehension and Production of Tautology
| Project/Area Number |
15K16753
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| Research Category |
Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B)
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| Allocation Type | Multi-year Fund |
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| Research Field |
Linguistics
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| Research Institution | Nara University |
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Principal Investigator |
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| Project Period (FY) |
2015-04-01 – 2019-03-31
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| Keywords | トートロジー / 修辞表現 / 言語獲得 / 関連性理論 |
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| Outline of Final Research Achievements |
The aim of this study is to clarify children's comprehension and production of tautology, comparing tautology with other figurative expressions such as simile, metaphor and irony. First, I collect children's tautological utterances from various language sources such as databases and children books, and describe their characteristics. Next, based on the findings of my experiment with Japanese schoolchildren, I show that elementary school students have greater difficulty in understanding tautology than simile; unlike simile, there is no significant developmental change in the ability to comprehend tautology during childhood, suggesting that the ability develops in the years after elementary school; unlike metaphor and irony, children fail at the three steps in Winner's (1988) scheme of understanding non-literal expressions; and finally, there appears to be a correlation between the development of understanding tautology appropriately and that of reading the intention of others.
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| Free Research Field |
言語学
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| Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements |
本研究は、従来のトートロジー研究とは異なり、子どもによるトートロジー発話の理解と産出に注目したものである。また、データベースなどの検索結果や質問紙法による調査から得られたデータを用いながら、メタファーやアイロニーといった他の修辞表現との関係性に着目した研究である。そのため、ほとんどの言語に普遍的に存在する名詞句トートロジー発話の解釈メカニズムの全体像を、子どもの言語獲得の観点から解明する上で大変意義がある。その研究成果は、人間の言語認知における普遍的な機能の解明に関わっているだけではなく、今日活発に議論されている修辞表現に関する研究や子どもの言語獲得に関する研究にも大きな貢献が期待される。
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