Pragmatic Development

The pragmatic system consists of the rules for appropriate and communicatively effective language use. Pragmatic Development provides an integrated view of the acquisition of all the various pragmatic subsystems, including expression of communicative intents, participation in conversation, and production of extended discourse.For the first time, the three components of the pragmatic system are presented in a way that makes clear how they relate to each other and why they all fall under the rubric pragmatics. Ninio and Snow combine their own extensive work in these three domains with an overview of the field of pragmatic development, making clear how linguistic pragmatics relates to other aspects of language development, to social development, and to becoming a member of one's culture. This book is bound to be a valuable text for advanced courses in language acquisition as well as useful supplementary reading for an introductory course.

Introduction: What Is Pragmatics? -- The Communicative Uses of Speech -- Prelinguistic Communication and the Transition to Speech -- The First Stage of Speech Use -- The Acquisition of a Verbal-Communicative Repertoire -- Participation in Verbal Interaction -- Children as Conversationalists -- The Pragmatics of Connected Discourse

Anat Ninio, Catherine E. Snow