On The Development Of Chinese-speaking Children's Pragmatic Competence

As a newly developed study, researches into children's pragmatic development are interdisciplinary field of study between pragmatics and language acquisition. Although increasing attention has been devoted to the development of pragmatic competence, we know relatively little about how these develop in Chinese children. On the basis of much related literature, the present paper attempts to introduce the basic theory of pragmatic development, try to find a history of pragmatic development studies in China, and to discuss the development of Mandarin-speaking children's pragmatic competence in Chinese cultural context.The paper explores a controversial subject discussed in international children linguistic world-the drive theory of child language development, and present a hypothesis-pragmatic competence preexist before language appeared. After compared the domains of different language subsystems, and analysis of the relationship between development of communicative acts and other language domains, the hypothesis of pragmatic competence preexistence was proved.The development of communicative acts is a significant component of early pragmatic language acquisition. The thesis based on much investigated data of children's growing repertoire of communicative acts in Mandarin-speaking young children studied at 14, 20, 26 and 32 months, discovered that the mostsignificant development was in the frequency and intelligibility of communicative acts during the period under study. Children's acquisition of communicative acts can be indicated quantitatively with the increasing number of types and frequency of use and qualitatively by means of the degree of interpretability, the emergence of new types and the level of joint attention.There is complicated relationship between pragmatic and syntactic development during the process of language acquisition. Children's syntactic skills assist the social use of language, and the pragmatic need drove them to choose appropriate s\-ntactic forms to express their meanings. Then we can state that pragmatic and syntactic development mutually reinforce each other. However, if the children don't understand what they should say in what situation, and some kind of syntactic forms emerged later in Chinese children's talk, then their intention of expression was limited.The development of children's pragmatic competence is also a combinational process which culture characteristics are embedded and delivered from one generation to another. Mothers as interlocutors very possibly influence their children's learning of communicative behaviors. Information exchange is the central task for a Chinese mother, which may be understood as a cultural focus in the mother-child communication. This cultural emphasis brings special characteristics to children's development of communicative acts and helps to fashion Chinese children into Chinese communicators.Researchers organized the factors which affecting the development of children'spragmatic competence into two groups: social-cultural cognitive skills andformal linguistic skills, both of which affect children' s use of communicative acts. It is easy to see that any children, who learn to master communicative acts, will never escape the influence both of their social-culture and their mother tongue. As a result of unique Mandarin syntax, the development of Mandarin children's communicative acts appears different features. For example, in the acquisition of Mandarin negation, a child must acquire the distinction as well as the appropriate application of these words and syntactically leam the proper place in a sentence for the negative particles, and all above these result different patterns of Mandarin children's pragmatic competence.