Vocabulary of mothers whose children are at the second fortnight of life in breastfeeding situation

Abstract

This paper aims to check mother's vocabulary (discourse-occurrence) detecting how they select their lexicon when babies-direct talking while breastfeeding them. The corpus comes from the transcription of the mothers, which was videotaped in 12 mother-baby couple’s residences, when the babies were between 16 to 21 days old. The speeches show from 31 to 880 words. The informers employed 36 different words / locutions in order to direct to the babies, totalizing 190 occurrences. Ninety-eight different nouns were detected in the corpus, totalizing 250 occurrences. Mothers seem to direct to their infants using specially “you”/“ya”. Owing and affection were evident. Concrete nouns and flexion of nouns to diminutive degree are highly used in the corpus.