An Empirical Study On Chinese Preschoolers’ Pragmatic Acquisition From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptability

Children’s pragmatic competence is referred to how children use proper language form to express their communicative goal, how children apply appropriate language strategies to carry on a conversational communication with other people, and how children employ properly-organized language to express their thoughts [1]. Preschool children’s pragmatic competence is a newly-developing research field, and it has get more and more intensive attention from international linguistic scholars and preschool educational staffs in recent years Researching the factors of influential preschoolers’pragmatic competence acquisition and investigating the pragmatic strategies when children organize discourses are quite meaningful and significant, for this kind of researches and studies can supply new ideas and constructive suggestions for the future educational staffs who teach Chinese children languages. Based on four angles of the linguistic adaptability theory proposed by Jef Verschueren (that is referred to contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, and salience of the adaptation processes), this dissertation carries out the research into Chinese preschoolers’pragmatic competence acquisition by adopting the literature data method, the empirical methods of observation and recording investigation, and the mathematical statistics approach. It takes2to6year-old Chinese preschoolers as samples and discusses the main factors that influence children’s pragmatic competence acquisition from the three aspects of age, character and gender.Through this study, the author got the following conclusions. Firstly, age, gender and personality do have an influence on preschoolers’ pragmatic competence acquisition from the perspective of linguistic adaptability theory. Age and personality have a bigger influence than gender. Secondly, the level of the older Chinese preschoolers’pragmatic competence acquisition is higher than that of the younger ones. Thirdly, the level of the extroverted Chinese preschoolers’pragmatic competence acquisition is higher than that of the introverted ones. Lastly, the level of the male Chinese preschoolers’pragmatic competence acquisition is higher than that of the female ones.