Hostname: page-component-7f64f4797f-kjzhn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-11-04T01:02:58.865Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The emergence of illocutionary skills*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Kenneth Reeder
Kenneth Reeder
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

A psycholinguistic experiment elicits highly reliable judgements from young English-speaking children aged 2; 6–3; 0 about illocutionary force of utterances presented in controlled contexts. Puppet play simulated extralinguistic features judged capable of constituting felicity conditions upon the illocutionary acts Request and Offer. The experimental data bear upon two questions: (1) What set of features, linguistic and pragmatic, constitute cues for the discrimination of illocutionary force by young children? (2) What is the lower developmental bound of the emergence of discrimination of illocutionary force for Requests and Offers? While grasp of illocutionary force for Offers was well-established by 2; 6, discrimination skills for Requests probably continues to develop between 2; 6 and 3; 0. Relevant pragmatic features are explicated, and a model of the comprehension of illocutionary force proposed in the light of the results.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , February 1980 , pp. 13 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

[*]

The research reported here was undertaken with the assistance of a grant from the Humanities and Social Science Grants Committee, University of British Columbia. An abridged version of the paper was presented to the First International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Tokyo 1978. Address for correspondence: Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada V6T 1W5.

References

REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. New York: O.U.P.Google Scholar
Bates, E. (1977). Language and context: the acquisition of pragmatics. New York: Academic PressGoogle Scholar
Bloom, L. (1970). Language development: form and function in emerging grammars. Cambridge Mass.: M.I.T.Google Scholar
Bransford, J. D., Barclay, J. R. & Franks, J. J. (1972). Sentence memory: a constructive versus interpretive approach. Cog Psychol 3. 193–209.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bruner, J. S. (1974). Organisation of early skilled action. In Richards, M. P. M. (ed.). The integration of the child into the social world. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Bruner, J. S. (1975). The ontogenesis of speech acts. JChLang 2. 1–19.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. & Lucy, P. (1975). Understanding what is meant from what is said: a study in conversationally conveyed requests. JVLVB 14. 56–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dore, J. (1977). ‘Oh them Sherriff’: a pragmatic analysis of children's responses to questions. In Ervin-Tripp, S. & Mitchell-Kernan, C. (eds). Child discourse. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Ervin-Tripp, S. (1974). The comprehension and production of requests by children. PRCLD 8. 188–95.Google Scholar
Fillenbaum, S. (1966). Memory for gist: some relevant variables. L & S 9. 217–27.Google ScholarPubMed
Flavell, J. H., Botkin, P. T., Fry, C. L., Wright, J. W. & Jarvis, P. E. (1968). The development of role-taking and communication skills in children. New York: WileyGoogle Scholar
Garvey, C. (1975). Requests and responses in children's speech. JChLang 2. 41–63.Google Scholar
Garvey, C. (1977). Contingent queries. In Lewis, M. & Rosenblum, L. (eds). Interaction, conversation, and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Garvey, C. & Hogan, R. (1973). Social speech and social interaction: egocentrism revisited. ChDev 44. 562–8.Google Scholar
Gelman, R. & Shatz, M. (1977). Appropriate speech adjustments: the operation of conversational constraints on talk to two-year-olds. In Lewis, M. & Rosenblum, L. (eds). Interaction, conversation and the development of language. New York: Wiley.Google Scholar
Gordon, D. & Lakoff, G. (1971). Conversational postulates. Papers from the Seventh Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 63–84.Google Scholar
Gruber, J. (1975). Performative-constative transition in child language development. FL 12. 513–27.Google Scholar
Heringer, J. (1972). Some grammatical correlates of felicity conditions and presuppositions. Ohio State University Working Papers in Linguistics ii. 1–110.Google Scholar
Hymes, D. H. (1972). On communicative competence. In Pride, J. B. & Holmes, J. (eds). Sociolinguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. O. (1974). Conversational competence in children. JChLang i. 163–83.Google Scholar
Kempson, R. (1975). Presupposition and the delimitation of semantics. Cambridge: C.U.P.Google Scholar
Labov, W. (1970). The study of language in its social context. Studium Generale 23. 66–84.Google Scholar
Lakoff, R. (1973). The logic of politeness: or minding your P's and Q's. Papers from the Ninth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 292–305.Google Scholar
Masangky, Z. S., McClusky, C. A., McIntyre, C. W., Sims-Knight, J., Vaughn, B. E. & Flavell, J. H. (1974). The early development of inferences about the visual percepts of others. ChDev 45. 357–66.Google Scholar
Reeder, K. F. (1975). Pre-school children's comprehension of illocutionary force: an experimental psycholinguistic study. Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham England.Google Scholar
Sadock, J. (1972). Speech act idioms. Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 329–39.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: an essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: C.U.P.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1975 a). A classification of illocutionary acts. In Gunderson, K. (ed.). Minnesota studies in the philosophy of science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Searle, J. R. (1975 b). Indirect speech acts. In Cole, P. & Morgan, J. L. (eds). Syntax and semantics Vol. 3: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Shatz, M. (1974). The comprehension of indirect directives. Paper presented to the Summer Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America,Amherst Mass.Google Scholar
Shields, M. (1974). The development of the modal auxiliary system in the verb phrase in children between three and five years. EducRev 26. 180–200.Google Scholar