A Longitudinal Case Study On Chinese-speaking Children’s Request From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

With the development of pragmatics and studies on children’s language competence,more and more attention has been paid to children’s utterance and pragmatic competence in recent years.As one of the representative and common speech acts,request is gradually becoming the focus of the study and it is worth further and deeper exploration on the part of children.On the basis of the previous studies,the present longitudinal study put its emphasis on the request strategies employed by a Chinese-speaking child(a 4-year-old girl),the investigation into her request strategy categories during the process of her request acquisition and the development patterns of her request speech act from the perspective of Speech Act Theory.Research findings indicate that during the process of the Chinese girl’s request acquisition,she intends to use conventionally-indirect strategies more than direct and non-conventionally indirect strategy.In terms of different request goals,she chose different request strategies in accordance with the variation of the purpose she wants to achieve.The paper also offers new insights into generally held ideas of non-language strategies and requesting behaviors in Chinese.The findings above are all associated with the respective context.The results lend strong support to the claim that language use can be highly context-specific as can the request performance of children.This study may bring new insights into understanding the complexity of Chinese children’s requests,thus sensitizing educators and parents to the significance of pragmatic competence in Chinese children’s earlier development of language and helping them provide instructions that better suit their pragmatic development and ability.Findings of the case study described in this paper suggest that it should be emphasized that in this study the data from which the conclusions are drawn is daily life data,because other data may reveal different patterns of request strategies.It should also be stated that the patterns generated from the data may be suggestive about certain behaviors in Mandarin Chinese;but overgeneralization of any kind is not the intention of this study.Finally,endeavors to obtain greater quantities of naturally recorded data in terms of children from different families will contribute further to the study of request speech acts in Mandarin Chinese,making research in this field more comprehensive and representative.