Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.3 The Present Study
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them.
2.3 The Present Study
By the review above, it is clear that children’s politeness develops with age.
Young children, although they may have command of linguistic devices and
politeness strategies, tend to limit their politeness to particular linguistic devices. With such limited linguistic politeness, young children seldom gain the intended
compliance; that is, their politeness is seldom effective in terms of communicative goals. In contrast, older children are found to be able to recognize the detachment between politeness and effectiveness of a polite form and to be able to adjust their politeness strategies according to situational factors and use different linguistic devices accordingly. Generally speaking, researchers agree that older children, particularly those in grade school or above the age of five, demonstrate good command of politeness, both first- and second-order; the former refers to the utilization of linguistic devices to defer to politeness, and the latter refers to the socialization and appreciation of politeness norm in a particular society or culture (Watt et al, 1992). Young children may manifest their first-order politeness via
linguistic enactment, even though their second-order politeness has yet to mature. The study therefore attempts to examine how young children enact politeness in dyads with their parents, when requesting; the particular focus is the linguistic devices utilized to encode requests and politeness as well as developmental changes in the linguistic enactment.
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In addition, the literature reviewed above points to the influence of situational factors on children’s politeness strategies. Children are found to alter their politeness strategies or the linguistic devices to enact politeness in different social situations.
Although children are generally inclined to be impolite when interacting with their mothers, they still heed the necessity of politeness with respect to conversational situations. As mentioned in the review, situational factors may include status, social distance, age, cost of an act, and speaker’s rights. The relative influence or interaction of any of these factors may imply different degrees of politeness in a particular context. Children have been found amazingly good at the fine-tuning of linguistic devices to defer to politeness since an early age. A particular purpose of this study is thus to explore which factors of politeness my influence children’s evaluation of the degree of politeness required in a particular context, when requesting, and what request forms are used to show children’s respect to politeness.
The findings mentioned in the review pertaining to children’s development of request and politeness so far are mainly based on examinations on children in western cultures. Mandarin-speaking children’s development in such respect has been little investigated. It is still unclear whether Mandarin-speaking children also enact requests with various linguistic devices with respect to politeness from an early age on, as do English-speaking children. This study thus aims to explore Mandarin-speaking
children’s enactment of politeness in their requests in spontaneous conversations. The study hopes to contribute to cross-linguistic comparisons of children’s development of requests and politeness as well as to provide cross-linguistic evidence for Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, particularly the linguistic redress of FTAs.
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The present study adopts the framework of Ervin-Tripp et al.’s (1990) to examine Mandarin-speaking children’s politeness. They have pointed out that younger children mostly utilize social indices to defer the social/interpersonal relationship, then at a later age children use such indices and other linguistic devices tactically to encode politeness, and at around age five children give justifications to further effect a control acts. It is thus expected to observe that children develop first from being able to draw upon social indices to encode politeness, then to encode politeness via social tactics, and finally to do so with persuasive tactics. With the adoption of Ervin-Tripp et al.’s framework, the present study hopes to testify their framework; whether the framework is applicable to Mandarin-speaking children’s politeness in requests as well or otherwise whether Mandarin-speaking children’s politeness in requests conforms the prediction of the framework.
In addition, it have been pointed out in the literature that in some languages, linguistic enactment can be done via particular lexical items, such as Mandarin Chinese and Japanese (Gu, 1990; Hsu, 2000; Mei, 1994; Nakamura, 1996). In Japanese, people are socially and culturally required to use honorifics to conform to social dynamic relationship (Nakamura, 1996). In Mandarin Chinese, a number of lexical forms are used to defer to politeness as well. Such lexical forms include address terms or social deixis (Levinson, 1983) to establish and indicate social distance and interpersonal relationship between interlocutors, and lexical items, such as qing ‘please’, bang ‘help’, and mafan ‘please’, to issue a request as well as to defer to the social-dynamic relationship between interlocutors (Mei, 1994). In addition to these lexical forms, there are abundant address forms used to establish and indicate
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social distance and/or social status in Mandarin Chinese. Compared to learning a syntactic construction to perform such functions, learning lexical items seems a
comparatively easier task for children to master. Moreover, Ervin-Tripp et al.’s (1990) study has also pointed out that children first develop the ability to use social deixis to defer to politeness. It is thus predicted that Mandarin-speaking children will first rely on these lexical forms and address forms to enact politeness before they develop the ability to utilize syntactic constructions to convey politeness.
Almost all studies on children’s politeness investigate their requests. It seems that requests are the main venue therein researchers attempt to understand children’s development of politeness (Held, 1992). As pointed out by Ervin-Tripp (1976; 1977) and Garvey (1974), requests involve the desires or wants of one interlocutor to be fulfilled through or probably in conflict with those of the other interlocutor. With this property, Brown and Levinson (1987) thus considered requests as a sort of FTAs. On performing requests, one is required to pay attention to a set of social or interpersonal information between interlocutors, as reviewed previously. Since requests are FTAs and since politeness is also subject to a set of social meanings, requests turn out to be a perfect locus to study politeness. Observing children’s requests not only reflects how they have things done with words, but also reveals their awareness of politeness.
Therefore, this study aims to examine children’s politeness in their requests.
The present study will first investigate linguistic devices children utilize to convey requests. With the investigation of their requests, this study hopes to amass the request repertoire utilized by Mandarin-speaking children. This study then focuses on the examination and discussion of Mandarin-speaking children’s politeness in their
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requests. The major attention will be on the linguistic enactment of politeness at different ages, since the meta-knowledge of politeness, or social norm of politeness, develops late, as pointed out by a number of previous studies (e.g., Axia, 1996;
Garton & Pratt, 1990; Hsiao, 1999). With the examination on the linguistic enactment of politeness, this present study attempts to discuss in mother-child conversations what social or situational factors affect the need of redressed requests. The research questions of this study are as follows:
1. What kind of linguistic devices do Mandarin-speaking children draw upon to perform their requests? Do children use various linguistic devices
systematically to issue requests? Is there any age-related development in this respect?
2. If there are systematic variation of request forms found in children’s requests, what factors of linguistic politeness may have an influence on their uses of a particular request form? In addition, what lexical devices may be used by children to enact their politeness at different ages when requesting? Do Mandarin-speaking children provide justifications for their requests in addition to being polite? Is effectiveness of a request more important for children?
3. If children’s request forms are subject to polite factors, is there a developmental trend in children’s linguistic politeness?
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Chapter 3
METHODOLOGY
Pragmatic studies on children’s development of speech acts and politeness can be pursued in various ways. There are mainly three methodological strategies that can be utilized to study children’s pragmatic development. Many studies in this respect conduct experiments to explore children’s pragmatic development. Researchers design and perform experiments according to an a priori protocol and have children perform responsive replies. With the experiment results, researchers thus answer how children perform speech acts and politeness. Children may be tested to understand their interpretation or knowledge of a particular speech act and/or politeness conveyed in utterances. They may also be experimented on to elicit how they produce a
particular speech act or politeness. Experiments enable researchers to collect a great deal of comparable data within a short period of time. Experiments, however, may reflect only a small part of children’s pragmatic development; the results are basically generated out of experiment designs, mostly responses to stimuli (Ervin-Tripp, 1990;
Tomlin, et al., 1997).
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Other researchers may rely on structured interactions to elicit children’s and adults’ uses of speech acts and/or politeness. They may invite the subjects to a
laboratory room and provide all the subjects with identical props or toys to manipulate while interacting with each other. For example, the Harvard study on children’s pragmatic development utilizes such an approach to collect children’s and their mothers’ uses of communicative acts (Ninio & Snow, 1996; Zhou, 2002). Those four different sets of toys were meant to create four different contexts or situations so as to observe whether subjects interact differently with respect to contexts. Except for the toys, subjects were given full freedom to interact with each other; they were not just asked to respond to pre-designed questions or stimuli. With such experiment design, the researchers were able to collect various communicative acts. One advantage of such methodological strategy is that it not only allows researchers to collect a great deal of comparable data but also enables subjects to interact spontaneously to a certain extent.
A last methodological strategy utilized by researchers to explore children’s
pragmatic development is to collect speech in authentic conversation (e.g. Dore, 1977;
Ervin-Tripp, et al., 1990; Garvey, 1975; Gordon & Ervin-Tripp, 1984). Authentic conversation refers to spontaneous speech produced by interlocutors without a priori designs as to conversation topics, physical contexts or settings, and interaction styles.
Spontaneous speech or naturalistic conversations reveal actual communication between interlocutors. On top of that, spontaneous speech provides clues to the influence of contextual, situational, or functional factors on speech, given that these factors are reported to be influential in how people convey speech acts and politeness (Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990). One major drawback of such methodological strategy,
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however, is that it is time-consuming to collect a representative amount of
spontaneous speech. Even so, the authenticity of spontaneous speech is irreplaceable.
As an endeavor to explore children’s linguistic politeness so as to shed a light on children’s pragmatic development, this study will thus utilize spontaneous speech between children and their parents to examine how children convey requests and how they enact politeness while requesting, as does Ervin-Tripp et al.’s study (1990).
Spontaneous speech to be examined in this study belongs to the Language Acquisition Lab of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics of NCCU, directed by Dr. Chiung-chih Huang.1
3.1 Subjects
Subjects investigated in this study are two girls. Both of them were observed longitudinally. One of the girls (CH1) was observed during the age from 1;7 to 3;2, and the other (CH2) from 1;10 to 3;0. As suggested by Hsu (1996) and Zhou (2002), children are able to produce requests after they have reached 14 months old.
Following the developmental pattern suggested by Hsu (ibid.) and Zhou (ibid.), these two children’s spontaneous speech produced from two years on was recruited for investigation. Attempting to disclose children’s any potential gradual development during the period from 24 months old to 36 months old, this study followed the design in Ervin-Tripp et al.’s (1990) study and observed these children’s spontaneous
requests produced at an interval of about six months. With the design, speech
1 I am thankful to Prof. Huang for allowing me to use the data for the present study.
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produced by these children at three different ages is to be investigated in this study;
speech produced by CH1 at the ages of 2;0~2;1, 2;6~2;7, and 3;0 and that produced by CH2 at ages of 2;0~2;1, 2;6~2;7, and 3;0 will be investigated for their requests and politeness. In the analysis, each of the ages comprised one time point of observation:
2;0~2;1 (mean age 24.5 months old) as Time1, 2;6~2;7 (mean age 30.5 months) as Time 2, and 3;0 (mean age 36 months) as Time 3. Grouping data according to
children’s ages may not be ideal. These two children’s MLT (Mean Length of Turns), nevertheless, suggested that their respective pragmatic development was comparable,2 and thus such grouping would not distort the development pattern to be observed here.
Both subjects live in the Taipei area of northern Taiwan. Judged by their parents’
occupations, these children are both from the upper-middle socioeconomic class. Both children were looked after by a babysitter or grandparents during the day and spent the night, weekends, and holidays with their parents. When interacting with their parents, both children speak Mandarin Chinese.3 Occasionally, the parents may speak regional languages in Taiwan such as Taiwan Southern Min or foreign languages such as Japanese or English, but only restricted to lexical forms. Except for these lexical forms, never did the parents speak these regional languages or foreign languages to the children beyond the scope of an utterance. These children are physically healthy and do no have problems with social tasks.
2 An MLT test run by CLAN program indicates that at Time 1 these two children’s ratio of utterances over turns (U/T) is 1.05~1.17 and their ration of words over utterances (W/U) is 1.28~1.35; at Time 2 U/T is 1.07~1.22 and W/U is 1.25~1.30; at Time 3 U/T is 1.12~1.13 and W/U is 1.14~1.26.
3 Here Mandarin Chinese refers to Taiwan Mandarin Chinese, which may be linguistically different from Beijing Mandarin (or Putonghua) to some extent.
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3.2 Data
Data investigated here were drawn from a larger database, consisting of longitudinally collected spontaneous speech produced by the two subjects. As discussed previously, in order to truthfully reflect children’s development of politeness and requests, spontaneous speech was utilized in this study. The data observed in this study were mostly naturalistic conversations between the children and their mothers. Spontaneous speech or naturalistic conversations in this study refer to unstructured conversations produced by the children and their parents themselves.
During their interaction, no predetermined topics, activities, procedures, or tasks were given to the children and their parents. Interlocutors, namely, children and parents, determined all by themselves what to talk about, what activity to carry out, and what to play with.
Although there were not pre-determined activities or topics, all the data recruited for observation here were balanced according to situational contexts or activities. All sessions of conversations in this study contain similar activities and interactions, including common talks, cooperative activities, narratives and book-readings, and role-playing. With the data, the present study hopes to observe developmental pattern in the respect of requests and linguistic politeness --- how children utilize linguistic devices to demonstrate their adherence to politeness in interaction.
All of the spontaneous speech to be observed was collected at the subjects’ homes.
The observer paid two visits each month to record the conversations with a camcorder.
Since the data collection was carried out at the subjects’ homes, children were very familiar with the physical setting of the house and they would not feel uneasy or nervous during the recording. In addition, the observer started the data collection after
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paying several previous visits. On these previous visits, the observer spent some time with the children and the parents in order to get familiar with the children and also make the recording task clear to the parents. With such previous visits, the children would thus get used to the presence of the observer and the camcorder. During data collection, it was inevitable that children might occasionally look at the camcorder or observer, but this did not affect the children’s performance of speech.
During each visit, the observer would not start the recording until the children had been used to the presence of the observer and the camcorder. Each session of the recording lasted for one hour or so. Normally, the recording was not suspended unless it was necessary to do so — when the children needed to use the bathroom, for
example.
The overall length of the data examined in the study was about nine hours long.
All the recorded and observed conversations were further transcribed into Chinese characters.4 All the data were transcribed according to the CHAT format suggested by the CHILDES project (MacWhinney, 2000). The transcribing conventions are shown in Appendix A.
3.3 Data Analysis
As an endeavor to examine children’s requests and politeness in their requests, cases of requests produced by children in the data were identified first. Then the
4 The transcribing was conducted by the assistants of the Child Language Acquisition Lab of the Graduate Institute of Linguistics affiliated with NCCU, Taipei, and the researcher of this study is one of the assistants.
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politeness involved in each case of requests were examined.
3.2.1 Cases of requests
Given the discussion and review on speech acts and requests in the previous chapter, cases of requests in the data were identified according to the principles in the following. All utterances produced by children were first functionally determined whether they convey an illocutionary act of request in the immediate context. As discussed above, an utterance was identified as a case of requests according to the addressee’s response or reaction to the utterance, i.e., the perlocutionary act of the utterance. For example, such utterance as The water is boiling can convey a request if the addressee of the utterance does something to the boiling water as a response. The utterance may only be considered as a statement, if the addressee does not do any act in reply, otherwise, for example, when talking about pictures or illustrations in a book.
After identified with the illocutionary act, a request case was then to be analyzed according to its linguistic form. As discussed in the literature on speech acts and children’s request repertoire (e.g., Ervin-Tripp, 1976; 1977, Garvey, 1975; Gordon &
Ervin-Tripp, 1984; Searle, 1975), requests may be conveyed via various linguistic forms. The formal identification was done with regard to the syntactic structure as well as other linguistic elements with which a request was conveyed. A request can be encoded with imperative forms, such as gei wo ‘give me’, dakai ‘open it’, and he shuei ‘drink the water’; interrogative forms, such as ke-bu-keyi gei wo ‘Can you give
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