Assent and compliance in children's language comprehension

Abstract

It is conventional to treat the meaning of an utterance in a discourse in terms of two components, the propositional and the pragmatic or speech act component, the first indicating the meaning of the sentence, the second indicating its intended use by the speaker. Some arguments and evidence are pre-sented to show that these two systems are interdependent. Roughly, it appears that social considerations, primarily status, determine which aspects of a proposition are lexicalized in the utterance. Thus, a child with high status relative to his inter-locutor may use a command, "Give me a block", while if he has low status relative to his interlocutor he may use a request, "May I have a block?" If he is an equal, a peer, (and perhaps only then) he will use an explicit true proposition such as, "You have two more than me". Only in this third case is the propositional meaning explicit in the sentence per se, and only in this case is an affirmative or negative response dependent strictly upon truth conditions (on assent rather than compliance). This concept of the social aspects of meaning is examined through an analysis of what is said vs. What is meant in some child-child and teacher-child conversations.