Syntactic and Semantic Characterizations of Infant Utterances: the Case of Ben in "Daddy Day Care” Film

Language is a fundamental instrument for communication and interaction. Those functions however are only found if the speakers are able to convey the ideas and messages to the hearers successfully. In relation to children's language, it is a long-standing and interesting topic to be discussed. Since the children language development topic has attracted many linguists and psychologists from a certain century, it appears many things in line with the children language in later time. Children's utterances have their own characteristics and uniqueness both in syntactic and semantic features. The problem statements which are carried out are: (1) What are the syntactic characterizations of infant utterances in some conversations of Ben (a 4 year old child) as found in "Daddy Day Care" film? and (2) What are the semantic characterizations of infant utterances in some conversations of Ben (a 4 year old child) as found in "Daddy Day Care" film?

To answer those two problems, the researcher studied the utterances of a child aged 4 year old in a certain film. Here, Ben as an exemplar case of the children utterances. The type of this research is embedded single case study focusing on the description of the syntactic and semantic characterization of infant utterances. The data of this research are the "Daddy Day Care" film itself and the utterances of the movie players especially Ben's utterances which become the main data. The example of syntactic and semantic characterizations of children utterances in early multi-word stage analysis given by Adrian Akmajian is very useful during the process of this research data analysis.

The findings shows that there are 8 syntactic characterizations which are: yes/no question, wh-question, negation sentence, subject+prepositional phrase, one/two constituents, noun phrase, verb phrase, and noun phrase+verb phrase. And there are 18 semantic characterizations whicha are: question (confirmation/clarification, request/expectations, request/imperatives, and information request), negation (denial and rejection), location, request/imperatives, attribution, plurality, greeting, information, protest, ascertainment, replying greeting, appreciation, regretting, and justification.

Referring to the result of this research, the researcher expects all people who have academic or science purpose to study more about the children language development. The researcher also expects the parents who have a child in early age to understand more their children language. Children often fail in uttering words or sentences they actually intend to. In contrast, parents also often fail in understanding their children utterances.