pragmatics Flashcards
What pragmatic skills do children need to learn?
Conversation management, implicature and inference, politeness
How do children use fillers?
Children often use fewer fillers, they do not know that fillers can be used to preserve a turn in speech, adults tend to respect children’s turns in order to encourage them to speak.
How do children use false starts/re-phrasing?
Re-phrasing is very common in children’s speech - they often take a ‘trial and error’ approach, using feedback from their interlocuters to decide how successful their utterance was.
What are Sacks turn taking rules?
1) People speak one at a time
2) People should not be interrupted
3) No gaps in conversation
4) If you are speaking, you can choose to nominate a speaker
5) Speakers speak at a TRP
What may an adult do if a child fails to turn take?
1) Provide their turn for them e.g. ‘Do you want a drink? No? No.
2) Shift the topic to one which the child is more willing to cooperate with
What are interruptions like between adults and children?
If a child interrupts and adult, the adult will often cede their turn, adults rarely interrupt children
What is topic like between adults and children?
Adults tend to choose topics the child will be interested in and let them control topic, if a child rejects their topic, the adult will offer another topic until the child responds, child-initiated topic loops are usually co-operated with
What are Grice’s Maxims?
1) Maxim of quality (honesty)
2) Maxim of quantity
3) Maxim of relevance
4) Maxim of manner (appropriate in terms of formality or difficulty)
Maxim of quality in children
Adults often ignore utterances which break this maxim and treat it as if it were true or correct
Maxim of quantity in children
Adults usually respect long turns taken by children, if children give short responses, adults often use questioning or topic shifts to encourage them to speak
Maxim of relevance in children
If a child makes an irrelevant utterance, adults often accommodate it by treating it as if it was relevant, or may ignore the utterance and loop back to original topic
Maxim of manner in children
Adults usually treat the utterance as if it is meaningful or attempt to clarify what the child means
How is implicature used by children?
Very young children do not understand implicature, and their speech tends to be very direct and explicit
What is politeness theory?
Lakoff- When we have a conversation, we do as much as we can to protect the feeling of our interlocuter
What is face theory?
We change our behaviour in convo to treat our interlocutors in the way they want to be treated
Positive face=self image, negative face=rights
Can perform face threatening acts, or be left face vulnerable
What are Lakoff’s maxims?
Don’t impose, give options, make the listener feel good
What is Halliday’s taxonomy?
1) Instrumental- fulfil a need
2) Regulatory- influence behaviour of others
3) Interactional- develop and maintain relationships
4) Personal- express feelings, opinions and identity
5) Representational- convey info
6) Imaginative- tell stories etc
6) Heuristic- learn about world
What are Dore’s functions?
1) Labelling
2) Repeating
3) Answering
4) Requesting action
5) Calling
6) Greeting
7) Protesting
8) Practising
Outline 4 adjacency pairs
Greeting/Greeting, Question/Answer, Request/Acceptance or Refusal, Offer/Acceptance or Denail
What are the rules of adjacency pairs and how do children use them?
If you interlocuter initiates an adjacency pair, you must complete it, you must complete an adjacency pair with the appropriate second part, if you initiate an adjacency pair, you must allow your interlocuter to complete it.
When speaking to young children, adults will allow them to break these rules, completing the pair for them or abandoning it all together.
