A Study Of Children's Pragmatic Strategies In Achieving Communicative Intentions

Communicative intention is the communicator achieving his purpose or getting certain results through social communication.In children's daily life,the use of pragmatic strategies to realize the communicative intention is a sign of maturity in children's language use.By means of literature analysis method,survey method,observation and statistical method,the present study researches and analyzes the data collected from the corpus of CSUST's research group for the two Mandarin-speaking children MHR(01;03;26-04;11;25)and ZHZ(01;03;25-04;11;26),and the two English-speaking children's data ADA(02;03;04-04;10;00)and SAR(02;03;05-04;10;27)from Brown corpus.It aims at investigating the use and characteristics of pragmatic strategies in achieving communicative intentions.Meanwhile,it compares and analyzes Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children's similarities and differences and the causes in their adoption of pragmatic strategies in achieving communicative intentions.The research result proves that:(1)Direct expression pragmatic strategy is the initial appearance and mostly adopted strategy for Mandarin-speaking children;doubting is the pragmatic strategy most adopted by English-speaking children.(2)Boy and girl have their own pragmatic characteristics.When they are expressing their communicative intentions,boys show a characteristic of initiative and girls have a feature of euphemistic.Boys are adept at doubting,request and proposal pragmatic strategies while girls prefer to use euphemism pragmatic strategies.(3)MHR,ZHZ and SAR's total employment of pragmatic strategies reach its peak at their age periods of four to half past four years old and ADA's total pragmatic strategies appliance reach its largest amount at his age stage of half past three to half past four years old.(4)Cognitive factors,individual preference,language factors and language environment are the factors affecting children's use of pragmatic strategies in achieving communicative intentions.(5)Cultural Difference,Linguistic Complexity,Educational Ideas Difference and Conventional Expression Difference are the Causes for Differences in Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking Children's Use of Pragmatic Strategies in Achieving Communicative Intentions...