Pragmatic And Discourse Development

Question 1

Pragmatic and discourse development

Answer 1

A child must learn how to read others’ behaviour and interpret the subtle semantic and pragmatic nuances behind what others say!
• They must learn politeness, humour, irony, sarcasm, hinting and how to be economical with the truth!
• Autistic children struggle with this aspect of language acquisition !

Question 2

Halliday (1975) identified seven functions of early language:

Answer 2

Instrumental- Language used to satisfy material needs.
Regulatory- Language used to control others.
Interactional -Language used to maintain relationships and engage in conversations.
Personal- Language used to express feelings, opinions and individual identity.
Heuristic- Language used to seek information, explore ideas and ask questions.
Imaginative- Language used creatively to tell stories, write poetry, play games and inhabit an imaginary world.
Representational- Language used to convey information, facts and ideas

Question 3

Discourse

Answer 3

child’s earliest speech will be entirely egocentric, and will ignore the other speaker! Turn-taking and adjacency pairs can be learned before a child even starts speaking
through games like peek-a-boo. This parallels turn-taking, response, pleasure and common understandin

Question 4

Starting school introduces the child to new discourse structures, namely:!

Answer 4

cueing and bidding!
- tripartite exchanges!
- code-switching registers!
being sensitive to the needs of a listener

Question 5

What is included

Answer 5

Pretend play and CDS