Functions of the Russian and Tuvan Languages in Mother — Child Communication in Bilingual Families

Abstract

The research question of the paper is at the crossroads of the most important disciplinary areas of modern linguistics: cognitive linguistics, linguistic conceptology, and ethno-linguistics. The paper considers the specificity of the child’s language consciousness as a carrier of a certain culture. Mother-child communication is a complex communicative cognitive process, as a result of which a subtle “cultural adjustment” of the process of perception and conceptualization of the world by a child takes place. The article is focused on the analysis of verbal communication in bilingual families on the pragma-communicative level. The purpose of the study is to identify significant functions of the two languages (Russian and Tuvan) in Tuvan mother’s communication with her child. A systematic, functional and semantic as well as a pragmatic approaches in the study will help us understand such phenomena as language, culture, and ethnolinguistic identification and will allow us to see the impact of bilingualism on the process of perception and conceptualization of the world by a child in communication with its mother. The research is based on traditional methods: observation of the language material, comparison, description with elements of componential and contextual analysis. The empirical material for the study includes video- and audio recording corpus made during 2017–2018 in Tuvan bilingual families living on the territory of the Republic of Tuva. The following speech situations which reflect the characteristic of the Tuvan-Russian bilingual speech behavior in natural communication between mother and child are analyzed: the pragmatic training situation, the pragmatic ban situation and others. Analysis of video materials and personal observations of speech communication practices in bilingual families who speak Tuvan and Russian languages allows us to state the presence of a specific distribution of languages in various communication situations.

Keywords

practice of maternal communication; functions of a language; bilingualism; conceptualization; pragmatic situation