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The emergence of illocutionary skills*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Kenneth Reeder
Kenneth Reeder
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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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.

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

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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.

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