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Research in Clinical Pragmatics pp 3–28Cite as

Pragmatic Development

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Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 11))

Abstract

In this chapter, the development of pragmatic abilities in children is described. Pragmatic abilities are a multifaceted skill. It is argued that using and interpreting language in communication is a demanding task that requires inference abilities and relies on different forms of knowledge. Very often, in everyday use of language, the pragmatic meaning of an utterance is not what is literally said. Consequently, interpreting an utterance requires going beyond what is said in order to identify the speaker’s communicative intentions. This kind of interpretation requires an inferential process based on contextual knowledge or a common ground that interlocutors are supposed to share. Children begin to participate in communicative interactions very early in life, although full pragmatic development is only achieved throughout the school years. It is described how children at different stages of development deal with aspects of implied meaning in communication.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Against this perspective, Chomsky (1975) and his followers (e.g. Kasher 1991) maintain that language exists per se as the expression of thought and that communication is only one of its possible functions and not the fundamental one.

  2. 2.

    In speech act theory, each utterance is a speech act that may be characterized on three levels of meaning: a locutionary act (the linguistic expression of a given meaning); an illocutionary act (the realization of a certain type of act, such as a promise or an order, i.e. an illocutionary force); and a perlocutionary act (the effects of a particular act on the hearer). Every linguistic utterance thus has linguistic content, is expressed with a certain illocutionary force, and realizes certain perlocutionary effects (Austin 1962).

  3. 3.

    In speech act theory (Austin 1962), an act is judged to be felicitous if it abides by certain conditions on its use. These so-called felicity conditions are that the act must be executed by the appropriate people, in the appropriate circumstances, following the appropriate procedure and the people involved must be sincere in carrying out the act. The act of sentencing someone in a court of law is infelicitous if the person carrying out the sentencing is not a judge, or if the judge does not follow certain legal procedures, or if she is not in the correct place, and so forth.

  4. 4.

    Grice’s theory of nonnatural meaning maintains that a communicative act relies on two intentions, the intention to achieve an effect on a recipient and the intention that the previous intention is recognized (Grice 1957).

  5. 5.

    For further discussion of this work and its implications, the reader is referred to Airenti (2015), Apperly and Butterfill (2009), Baillargeon et al. (2016), Helming et al. (2014), Low and Perner (2012), and San Juan and Astington (2012). Theory of mind is addressed further in Chap. 22, this volume.

  6. 6.

    It must be noted that all the processes we are examining are supported by the ability that infants display early in development to acknowledge prosodic differences, e.g. the change of rhythm of speech. This ability is present even before birth and provides children with cues to identify the organization of familiar sounds in their native language and then identify boundaries between different units of the speech like words and phrases (Mehler et al. 1988). In later years, prosodic cues are exploited to facilitate reference processing (Grassmann and Tomasello 2010) and the interpretation of complex communicative acts like irony (Bryant 2010).

  7. 7.

    The status of hyperbole is discussed in the literature. While it has been traditionally associated with metaphor and irony, recent work treats hyperbole as a distinct figure of speech (Carston and Wearing 2015).

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  1. Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Gabriella Airenti

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    Louise Cummings

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Airenti, G. (2017). Pragmatic Development. In: Cummings, L. (eds) Research in Clinical Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 11. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47489-2_1

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