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development in communicative competence, on the basis of Mandarin-speaking children’s uses of language in authentic conversations with their parents.
5.1 Discussion
It was pointed out in the previous chapter that Mandarin-speaking children by and large draw upon six different syntactic structures to issue their requests, with four of them as the primary ones. They primarily utilize simple imperatives, WANT statements, declaratives, and imperatives with sentence-final particle to issue their requests to their parents. In addition, they may occasionally convey their request intents with imperatives with a tag and yes-no interrogatives. As well as these syntactic devices, Mandarin-speaking children may also make use of lexical devices along with the syntactic structures mentioned above either to mitigate their
illocutionary force or to defer to politeness. These lexical devices include qing
‘please”, bang ‘to help with’, and women ‘we’. The uses of these lexical devices may especially relevant in the demonstration of children’s politeness, given that they explicitly convey one’s adherence to politeness, despite their occasional occurrences.
Children’s uses of these request forms are also found to demonstrate a functional development when the contextual situations are simultaneously taken into
consideration. The functional development starts with a rudimentary division of labor among linguistic devices and to a stable division of labor, particularly between imperatives and WANT statements in interactive activities and common talks respectively.
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A comparison to the findings proposed by Ervin-Tripp (1977) and Hsu (1996) reveals a general accordance in the development of linguistic devices in this respect.
In a review, Ervin-Tripp generalizes the developmental pattern of linguistic devices used in children’s requests or directives. Children develop from a stage wherein gestures, name of objects and linguistic forms showing their wants or desire are used, through a stage in which children request via elaboration of vocabulary, inflections, syntactic structures, and structural modifications, and through a stage where children convey their requests indirectly, without the specification of intended acts, and finally to a stage wherein inferential requests may be also used by children to convey their requests. This development, according to Ervin-Tripp, is accomplished before children reach the age of four.
Hsu (1996) conducted a grand research on Mandarin-speaking children’s
language development and outlined the general pattern of their linguistic development from one year old up to six years old. According to Hsu’s report, children between the second and the third year of their age have had good command of the following syntactic structures and lexical elements: simple imperatives, imperatives with sentence-final particle, imperatives with a tag, declaratives, negatives, interrogatives (including WH-interrogatives and yes-no interrogatives), bang ‘to help with’, and qing ‘please’. In addition to linguistic devices acquired by children, Hsu also points out that children have developed the ability to express their desire and to perform indirect requests before they reach the age of two years old.
Evaluated by the developmental pattern generalized by Ervin-Tripp (1977), children observed in this study generally develop their request repertoire on a par with
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the pattern, save that the children appear to be able to convey their request intents implicitly as early as they are two years old, to a limited occasions though. It seems that the developmental pattern in the linguistic devices used by children to convey requests is likely to be cross-linguistically comparable. In addition, a comparison between Hsu’s (1996) report and the findings in this study shows that the linguistic devices used by the children recruited in this study conform to the developmental pattern indicated in Hsu’s study. The children examined in the study, although no noticeable formal development with age has been found, by and large encode their requests with the linguistic devices as those documented in Hsu’s study on
Mandarin-speaking children during the age between 24 months old and 36 months old.
In addition, the results also show that children tend to use WANT statements to issue low-status requests may also echo with what has been reported earlier regarding the division of labor between simple imperatives and WANT statements. As what was mentioned above, children are more inclined to use simple imperatives when
requesting in interactive activities, while they tend to utilize both simple imperatives and WANT statements when requesting in common talks. Given the findings, it can thus be deduced that such a division of labor may also be related to children’s different statuses in these two distinctive contexts. When they are involved in an interactive activity with their parents, children’s status can be equal to their parents’, particularly in cooperative games, since both parties are cooperating to accomplish a task or collaboratively involved in a game. On the other hand, when children are interacting with their parents in ordinary daily interaction, namely common talks, the
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social hierarchy may thus be in effect: they are lower in status with respect to their parents. In order to defer to politeness required at such a lower status, children thus draw upon WANT statements or occasionally declaratives to issue their requests. The use of expressions conveying their need or desire as the preferred request forms at a lower status can be justified by children’s taking advantage of their role as a child and their parents’ role who to take care of them and fulfill their basic needs (Sealey, 1999).
The findings in the study also indicate that children’s language development of request forms can be a functional one. As reported in the findings, the development of children’s request forms may lie in the uses of a particular linguistic form in a specific context. As what was reported in Section 4.1.3, children’s utilization of request forms appear to develop from a rudimentary association, observed in children’s uses of simple imperatives considerably more in interactive contexts while WANT statements seem preferred in common talks to a further consolidation of such an association.
Therefore, the functional association here refers to the connection between linguistic forms and their uses with respect to the immediate context.
In addition, such a functional development seems to be evidential when the effectiveness is also taken into account. Effectiveness is assumed in this study to disclose children’s appropriate use of request forms such that they can easily obtain the intended compliance. The results presented in the previous chapter reveal that children tend to utilize more effective linguistic forms, e.g., simple imperatives and WANT statements, to issue their requests. In addition, children also demonstrate a slight tendency to use simple imperatives at higher or equal status and WANT
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statements at lower status, such that they may gain the desirable compliance
effectively. The tendency to use more effective forms to convey the communicative intents may thus suggest that children, when requesting, are likely to attempt to make their communicative goal met, and the tendency gradually becomes noticeable at a later age. It seems that children’s utilization of request forms may also be highly related to the probability for the very form to effectively achieve their communicative goal. This aspect of uses can therefore be considered driven by linguistic function.
The second and major objective of this present study is to explore
Mandarin-speaking children’s linguistic politeness. The focus of the investigation in this respect is to disclose children’s uses of social deixis or lexical items, syntactic modifications, or justifications to demonstrate their awareness of politeness required in interaction with their parents. As far as the results are concerned, children seem to demonstrate their linguistic politeness as early as three years old. The finding of an early awareness of linguistic politeness is on a par with what has been found and argued in Ervin-Tripp et al. (1990).
One aspect of children’s linguistic politeness can be observed in their strategic uses of social deixis. This issue has been little discussed in literature on
Mandarin-speaking children. As mentioned in the previous chapter, despite the rare occurrences in the data, children seem to use social deixis strategically not only to convey interactional meanings but also to demonstrate their adherence to politeness.
They use social deixis to avoid the intrusion on the current interaction, as well as to respect the interpersonal status difference between their parents and themselves (cf.
Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990). In addition, children may also use other polite lexical items
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to mitigate their requests, such as women ‘we; let’s’, the first person plural pronoun.
The use of first person plural pronoun can turn a request into a cooperative action involving both parties of the interaction. Using these social deixis or polite lexical items, children may thus increase the probability for the intended compliance to be sanctioned by their parents.
In addition to social deixis, children, when requesting, may also provide reasons to make their requests persuasive, in addition to the main illocutionary force of request, and the use of justification appears to accord with the findings presented by Zhou (2002). The use of justification for children’s requests may earn more
compliance, as has been suggested by Ervin-Tripp et al. (1990). In the data observed here, however, the use of justification in children’s requests appears to be infrequent.
Even so, the cases of persuasion show that justifications for requests are observed at a later age, around three years old, and hence such usage may represent an advanced ability to adhere to politeness.
A major linguistic means to defer to politeness, as suggested by Brown and Levinson (1987), is to draw upon syntactic modifications such that the imposition of the illocutionary force of requests is reduced, and they dub such modifications as redressive acts. According to Brown and Levinson (1987), one way to redress is to rely on indirect speech acts, on-record or off-record, to reduce the potential
imposition of the very speech act. Children’s ability to request indirectly has been attested in many studies (e.g., Axia, 1996; Gordon and Ervin-Tripp, 1984; Garvey, 1974; Hsu, 1996; Leonard, 1993; Wood & Gardner, 1980; Zhou, 2002), and thus children’s redressive requests can be expected. The findings here, however, indicate
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that children tend more to issue their requests with more direct request forms, when requesting to their parents. These results may instead argue against what Brown and Levinson have proposed. Further scrutiny, nonetheless, shows that children may deploy the request forms they draw upon to issue requests with respect to
interpersonal and interactional factors, such as status. Children may vary their request forms with regard to their relative status as opposed to their parents. Interpersonal status, according to Brown and Levinson, play a major role in determining the degree of politeness required in the immediate context. Thus, children’s sensitivity to status may lend support to Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. In addition, the findings that children tend to use different request forms to issue requests with respect to status again accord with what Ervin-Tripp et al. (1990) have found. On a par with their proposal, it is likely that children’s linguistic politeness develops early, at around three years old.1
The view of children’s early awareness of linguistic politeness seems to contradict the view that children’s politeness actually develops at a later age, when children are in school years (e.g., Axia, 1996; Graton & Pratt, 1990). This
contradiction is nevertheless resolvable and understandable. Those studies suggesting a late politeness development are primarily concerned with children’s socialization to appreciate the norm of politeness expected in a particular culture or society. They seem to focus mainly on children’s spontaneous uses of explicit polite forms, such as the polite marker ‘please’ or conventional polite syntactic structures, to demonstrate their adherence to politeness. As shown in the findings here, children’s uses of polite
1 They suggest an early development of linguistic politeness, and they also propose that children’s linguistic politeness matures at around the age of five (Ervin-Tripp et al., 1990).
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forms appear to be infrequent and not spontaneous. Such rare occurrences of spontaneously used polite forms may thus lead the researchers to conclude that children’s politeness develops late. In contrast, the studies, this study included, proposing the early politeness development seem concerned primarily with whether children strategically use linguistic forms with respect to interpersonal and
interactional factors, under the assumption that children’s strategic and systematic uses of linguistic forms may reveal their awareness of linguistic politeness. As pointed out in the findings, children’s early aware of linguistic politeness can be disclosed through the slight variations in their uses of request forms with respect to status and strategic uses of social deixis, polite forms, and persuasive tactics. Based on the respective points of view, it can thus be deduced that politeness may have two aspects, politeness norm and strategic utilization of linguistic forms with respect to politeness factors. Children’s development of politeness can therefore be approached in either how children are socialized with politeness norm in a particular culture or society, or how they become able to fine-tune their uses of linguistic forms in accordance with politeness expectation. In terms of Brown and Levinson’s (1987) politeness theory, the former is concerned with the politeness norm based on a culture or society’s ‘face’ expectation, and the latter focuses on children’s ability to utilize linguistic means such that they redress in response to the expectation of politeness norm. Therefore, the findings in the studies proposing early development of linguistic politeness, including the present one, may imply that children are likely to
demonstrate their linguistic politeness in early years, and through the use of linguistic politeness they are gradually socialized to learn the politeness norm of the society
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they were born in. These two views, in fact, are more convergent than divergent.
The examination over children’s linguistic politeness in the present study also indicates that in addition to taking status into consideration, children, when requesting, may seek to use relatively more effective request forms so that they can successfully have their communicative goal met and obtain the desirable compliance. As presented in the previous chapter, children mostly draw upon simple imperatives at a higher or equal status and WANT statements at a lower status, for these request forms tend to successfully yield the intended compliance. The tendency is even more remarkable when effectiveness of request forms is also taken into account. Hence, effectiveness, compared to status, may have a greater influence on children’s utilization of request forms. As reviewed in Chapter 2, Brown and Levinson (1987) proposed that
politeness is a function of status and cost, apart from familiarity between interlocutors, which is not in question here since the familiarity between parents and children is fixed and hence not crucial. Given the findings in the present study, it may seem that for children politeness may instead be a function of effectiveness, status, and cost, in interactions with parents in family setting.
An alternative account for the influence of effectiveness on children’s uses of request forms, however, may lie in the politeness theories proposed by Fraser (1990) or Pan (2000). Fraser proposes a contract-based view on politeness; he argues that the expectation on politeness is collaboratively negotiated through the unfolding of interaction by interlocutors involved in interaction. Similar to Fraser’s proposal, Pan suggests that politeness expected in Chinese culture tend to be situation-based. In different situations interlocutors are expected to adhere to politeness to a different