Routledge. - Acquiring pragmatics: social and cognitive perspectives

ACQUIRING PRAGMATICS

Sandrine Zufferey has done the fields of pragmatics, language acquisition, and cognitive science an invaluable service. Her book covers a remarkably broad range of results and ideas that she skillfully integrates into a beautifully structured, impeccably researched, and engaging synthesis. An authoritative and endlessly fascinating exposition of the state-of-the-art, Acquiring Pragmatics should be required reading for anyone interested in the study of pragmatics, its acquisition, and its place within the sciences of the mind.

Julien Musolino, Rutgers University, USA

Acquiring Pragmatics offers a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics. It introduces the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics, and explores the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs that have been developed to address them.

While each chapter covers one topic in depth, it also places a strong emphasis on the underlying methodological aspects of each issue, which will help the reader to develop their own experimental designs. Key topics covered include:

the interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisition

the social aspects of pragmatic competence

the cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence

the acquisition of pragmatics in autistic spectrum disorders and second language acquisition.

Acquiring Pragmatics is key reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying pragmatics and language acquisition.

Sandrine Zufferey is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way linguistic encoding affects cognitive processes.

ACQUIRING PRAGMATICS

Social and cognitive perspectives

Sandrine Zufferey

First published 2015
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Sandrine Zufferey

The right of Sandrine Zufferey to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Zufferey, Sandrine, author.
Acquiring pragmatics: social and cognitive perspectives/Sandrine Zufferey.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Discourse analysisSocial aspects. 2. PragmaticsSocial aspects.
3. Speech acts (Linguistics) 4. Cognitive grammar. 5. Language acquisition.
I. Title.
P302.84.Z84 2015
401.41dc23
2014024433

ISBN: 978-0-415-74642-7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-415-74644-1 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-74795-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo Std
by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

PART I
Introduction

PART II
Acquiring social aspects of pragmatic competence

PART III
Acquiring cognitive aspects of pragmatic competence

PART IV
The acquisition of pragmatics under specific constraints

This book is based on the teaching material for the course on pragmatics and language acquisition that I taught at the University of Geneva between 2009 and 2011. I therefore first and foremost thank all my students for their numerous insights and stimulating contributions, as well as their useful feedback on the course material. I also thank the Linguistics Department at the University of Geneva, and especially professor Jacques Moeschler, for giving me the opportunity to create this course.

My warmest gratitude is also due to the colleagues who read and commented on portions of the book, namely Andrei Popescu-Belis, Jacques Moeschler, Anne Reboul, and Didier Maillat. I am also greatly indebted to the anonymous reviewers for their useful comments.

This book was written while I was working as a post-doctoral researcher at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS). I thank all my colleagues at UiL OTS, and especially the discourse group led by professor Ted Sanders, for sharing their expertise on language acquisition and processing. I felt privileged to grow professionally as a member of this excellent research group. My post-doctoral stay in Utrecht was supported by an ERC Marie Curie IEF grant for the DISCOM project (299185) and I gratefully acknowledge this financial support.

I also thank the team at Routledge, especially Nadia Seemungal for discussing the early stages of this project with me and helping me to give it its current format, and to Rachel Daw for her constant enthusiasm and support at every stage of the project. It was a great pleasure to work with you.

Finally, I thank my husband for his unfailing love and support in everything that I undertake, and my children for coping with a busy mum and giving me daily examples of their wonderful pragmatic skills.

Pragmatics is one of the core domains of linguistics. During the past decades, it has been a rapidly growing field of study, and considerable paradigm shifts have occurred. From the study of socially determined rules governing the production of speech acts, pragmatics has now also become part of the cognitive sciences and aims at understanding how listeners bridge the gap between the under-determined linguistic meaning of utterances and the full-blown speakers meaning. The multifaceted nature of research in pragmatics has been matched in the developmental literature by a growing number of studies covering many different aspects of verbal communication, ranging from the acquisition of speech acts to the development of theory of mind abilities and the reasoning skills involved in the derivation of scalar implicatures.

The main objective of this book is to offer a synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatic competencies, focusing on a selection of the most thoroughly researched topics (see also Matthews, 2014 for an up-to-date review of additional topics). From a social perspective, the acquisition of pragmatic competencies encompasses the ability to interact with others in an appropriate manner in conversations and to adapt to different addressees, to be polite, and to follow the conventional rules governing the production of speech acts. It also includes the study of the social contexts in which children develop these competencies: peer interactions, family conversations, school, and so on. From a cognitive perspective, acquiring pragmatic competencies means developing the necessary cognitive abilities to enrich the linguistic meaning of utterances. These competencies include the ability to draw inferences, to reason about mental states, and to integrate contextual information from various sources. A major recent development of the field since classical reference books were published (e.g. Bates, 1976; Ninio & Snow, 1996) has been the change of focus from almost exclusively social approaches in developmental pragmatics to new research aiming at empirical testing of the theoretical models stemming from cognitive approaches to pragmatics.