Pragmatic Analysis Of Children's Conversation

With the emergence of pragmatics and the maturity of studies on children's linguistic acquisition, children's conversational development has begun to draw more attention in recent years. Conversation is an important way for us to transmit information and exchange ideas. There are different approaches to the study of conversation, one of which is conversation analysis.Based on the review of the existent studies, the present thesis uses the transcribed materials of recorded children's conversation as the data and attempts to make an analysis of the structure of children's conversation from the aspects of conversational initiation, repairs, overlaps and interruptions. It aims at exploring features and regularities of children's conversational structure. The study also shows that children's conversational development is closely related to their linguistic competence, cognitive development and social ability. Furthermore, the study is significant for children's language education and social development.This thesis is composed of four chapters except for introduction and conclusion.This thesis begins with a brief introduction of the topic sources of present study and the significance of the study, and then shows the outline of the whole thesis.Chapter 1 is a survey of children's conversation. It makes a comprehensive review of the previous studies. It provides general view on conversation, offers relevant studies on children's conversation abroad and in China and provides the relationship between language development and the development of conversation, and then it makes a review of early conversational development.Chapter 2 provides a theoretical framework for the present study. It first makes an introduction to conversation analysis and discourse analysis; then it gives the definition of conversation analysis, which is the theoretical basis of the thesis; at last it makes a brief introduction of conversation analysis theory and its application, including the overall organization and the local organization.Chapter 3 is the most important part of the thesis. In this chapter, data collected from recordings are analyzed in detail under the instruction of conversation analysis theory from different aspects. It shows some features in children's conversational initiation, repairs, overlaps and interruptions. And it is found that children's conversational development is an integrated development involving cognitive development, social skills and linguistic competence.Chapter 4 provides some implications of the analysis. It discusses some differences between children's conversational structure and adults'conversational structure; then it gives the relations among children's conversational development, social competence and cognitive development; then some useful suggestions for children's conversational development are proposed.The thesis ends up with the conclusion, which makes clear the findings, limitations and directions for further research of the study.The present thesis has its important implications for children's conversational development. However, the thesis only discusses children's conversation from the structure, and the application of this research in pragmatics still needs further study in the future.