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direct way which was not taken as the majority choice when expressing negation. Take refusal among negation meanings as an example. Wang (2001) reported nine strategies other than a direct one in adults’ refusal – negated ability and willingness, grounders, regret, alternative, dissuade interlocutors, acceptance as a refusal, avoidance, principle, and folk wisdom. Regarding children, it is believed that they embark on showing socially adaptive language by the age of three (Mueller, 1972; Garvey & Hogan, 1973).
In the case of disagreement, Hsu (2000) stated that children often adopt a more polite way by the age of four. That is to say, children are capable of expressing negative intent without obvious negation words and inclining to the adults’ way of delivering negation.
In the coming section we will review studies that look into the strategies children applied when expressing negation.
2.2 Negation Strategies of English-speaking children
In order to grasp strategies children utilized in negative expression, it is necessary to look at their linguistic behavior in related speech events such as an adversative episode, dispute, argument, and dispreferred responses.
An adversative episode is defined as a verbal exchange that evolves from an opposition to the interlocutor’s request, assertion, or action (Eisenberg and Garvey 1981, Eisenberg 1992). Hence, researchers locate adversative episodes by finding
“negative responses” like denials, refusals, objections, disagreements, conflicting claims or intentions, and contradictions. Generally speaking, any move of the
interlocutor can be unnoticed, ignored, or accepted. Once opposition occurs, the social context of the adversative episode begins; the ongoing interaction was stopped and any prior goal or task is suspended. It is only possible for the original conversation to be resumed when the opposition has been resolved. This social context assigns different
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functional roles to the opposer and opposee, and the choice of strategies that depends on several social factors demonstrates the distinct roles of interactants.
Eisenberg and Garvey (1981) examined the choice of strategies of both opposer and opposee in peer conflict from a database of 50 preschoolers aged 2;10 to 5;7. It was found that the initial opposition can be conveyed by using a simple negative, supplying a related reason or justification, making a countering move, proposing substitution, evading, or hedging; and the opposee’s reaction to the opposition may be insistence, mitigation, reasons, countering moves, conditional directives, compromise, requesting an explanation, physical force, or ignorance. It is proved that the choice of opposing strategy does affect the response which follows due to the fact that only 25% of adversative episodes ended with single direct opposition. The opposee expects the opposer to oppose with a reason; if not, then the opposer was expected to submit.
Though adversative episodes are potentially aggressive, this study found that children chiefly choose to give reasons, justifications, and a number of different strategies, avoiding the use of physical force, to resolve the conflict regardless of complying or not.
Hence, an adversative episode does not represent the breakdown of interaction, but is rule-governed and contains roles and routines.
Eisenberg (1992) further investigates conflict talk between mothers and 4-year-old children, identifying four types of speech acts being opposed, namely requests for action, requests for permission, statements of intent, and statements of fact. Among these speech acts, statements of intent is the category that is most likely to lead to mutual opposition, while requesting permission is the act that is least likely to lead to such a consequence. Interestingly, when opposing statements of fact, children tend to give direct opposition without reasoned argument and mothers would tend to submit.
Six types of oppositions were also proposed to analyze mother-child conflict talk, as listed below: simply no, indirect no, justification, alternative, delay/ distraction,
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question/challenge. The results showed that both mother and child in conflict talk avoid correcting or disagreeing with each other directly most of the time, and this behavior is in accordance with previous findings on peer conflict (Eisenberg and Garvey 1981).
Like children in peer conflict, mothers as well as children would give reasoning as a response to an initial opposition with reasoning. When a child gave a single direct opposition, she would receive a request for a reasoned argument from her mother.
However, children do not ask for a reasoned argument but instead accept when their mother gives unreasoned opposition, which is different from peer conflict.
Aside from preschoolers, Brenneis and Lein (1977) collected verbal disputes from relatively older children by asking them to perform four situations of role play under a researcher’s direction. By observing these first grade, third grade, and fourth grade children performing assigned role plays, various tactics in children’s argument and structural patterns were found. Children of these grades give threats, bribes, insults, praise, command, moral persuasion, negating or contradictory assertion, and simple assertion to oppose their peer, and denial, affirmative, supportive assertion, demand for evidence, and nonverbal vocal signals may follow as reactions to previous opposition.
Other than using these various tactics, children at this age are also able to understand the structural pattern of argument and successfully anticipate what their opponents may say. A vivid example from their data is provided (p. 57):
JOHN: I am smarter.
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This example demonstrates one of the structural patterns called Inversion; the other two commonly seen structure patterns in Brenneis and Lein’s data are Repetition and Escalation. Though these techniques in role-playing disputes also occur in children’s everyday interactions, Brenneis and Lein admitted that they have found certain discrepancies exist between role-played disputes and disputes in real life after they watched children’s spontaneous disputes happening in daily life.
By the end of the twentieth century, studies of dispute shifted their focus to examine that between children’s different social relationships and its growth across ages (Dunn and Munn 1987, Slomkowski and Dunn 1992, Dunn 1996 for example).
Dunn and Munn (1987) looked into spontaneous disputes between 43 children and their mother and siblings that occurred when they were of ages1;6, 2;0, and 3;0. The topics of dispute found in their data were about possession, rights, hurting/ aggression/
unkindness, rules of the house, physical space, and independence. And these topics were conveyed by justification for other’s action, other’s feelings, one’s own feelings, social rules, and material consequences of action. Also, developmental progress is reported. In the earlier stage, children often showed negative emotions (anger, distress, etc.) in disputes, especially with their siblings. But such emotions decreased with age—
actually, they even found that children of age 3 applied relatively mature justifications over topics that brought out their negative emotions when they were 2 years old. This is not the only study that describes a direction towards a more rational way of child opposition in dispute when they grow up—see also Vaughn, Kopp, and Krakow (1984) and Kuczinski, Kochanski, Radke-Yarrow, and Brown (1987). The research Dunn published in 1996 also shows that the amount of dispute which occurred among children ages two to four did not increase, but the proportion of reasoning argument become greater with age. Nevertheless, both studies certified that instead of
conciliation, children offer reasoned argument to uphold their own immediate wants,
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Besides, even within the family, conflict with different family members may possess different interactional characteristics. It has been found that in a dispute, a mother and siblings are always talking about the child, using other-oriented argument, and giving their focus and attention on the child aged two to three (Slomkowski and Dunn, 1992). But the content of their justification is different. While mothers are more likely to give children arguments about the material consequences of their behaviors, siblings always refer their arguments to social rules. On the other hand, for people in different social relationships, children also treat them differently, as Slomlowski and Dunn (1992) state: “Some children who were able to negotiate and compromise within conflicts with their mothers simply repeated protests and unreasoned accusations in conflicts with their siblings; others who typically took their siblings’ viewpoints into consideration in their arguments simply yelled and protested in an unreasoned way with their mothers.”
Reasoned argument may be other’s-centered (talking about other’s action or feelings) or self-centered (talking about one’s own feelings). So far, we can see that for children under age four, their justifications in conflict between their mother and siblings are mainly self-centered (Slomkowski and Dunn, 1992), yet that cannot present the whole picture of children’s behavior in conflict. Dunn (1996) observed fifty
second-born children at ages 2;9, 3;4, and 3;11 and recorded the pattern of children’s conflict talk in different relationships within and outside the family. When children got involved in conflict with their close friend, they were using significantly more
reasoning argument that showed their understanding of other’s feelings and thoughts than they did with their family members. All of the evidence reviewed in this section confirmed that “children’s use of argument in disputes was specific to each
relationship”, and they “use their social understanding depending on the nature of the
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Oppositions can be delivered directly, less directly, or implicitly. Means of
opposition may, with some adjustment, be based on the degree of intimacy, familiarity, the power of the relationship, and the ranks of imposition between participants (Brown and Levinson 1978). Thus, by examining the strategies children utilized to convey negation meanings, we are able to know their linguistic development, pragmatic knowledge and social, interactive skills. After comparing his own findings with previous studies on refusal, Liao (1994) concluded that the strategies of refusal are universal, but the relative degrees of politeness and the associations between opposition and request may be language- specific. He also summarized his data obtained with native speaker’s intuition, interviews, participant observations and Realistic Conversation Writing (RCW) into twenty two strategies listed below:
1. Silence, hesitation, lack of enthusiasm 2. Offering an alternative
3. Postponement
4. Putting the blame on a third party or something over which you have no control
5. Avoidance
6. General acceptance without giving details 7. Diversion and distraction of the addressee 8. General acceptance with excuse
9. Saying what is offered or requested is inappropriate 10. External yes, internal no