A social-pragmatic account of the development of planned discourse

This article presents a social-pragmatic account of the emergence of planne d discourse in development. The central claim is that planned discourse is a product of interactive emergence, arising in development from the creatio n of discourse themes, and that these in turn are dependent on language, es pecially on the linguistic subsystem of cohesion. I propose that the emerge nce of discourse themes relies on children's use and elaboration, in sponta neous speech, of cohesive terms that are at first borrowed from adult sourc es. The extrasentential processes proposed to account for the development o f discourse themes are parallel to those that have been proposed at an intr asentential level. The persistent influence of adult discourse patterns is illustrated with examples from a young child's spontaneous crib talk, espec ially from culturally packaged sources such as nursery rhymes, story books, and fairytales. Copyright (C) 1999 S.Karger AG, BaSel.