Abstract
Promises are central to human exchanges, especially in adult-child interactions. They consist of a commitment on the part of the speaker to perform a future act, as in ‘je promets de ranger ma chambre’ (‘I promise to clean my room’). For the past ten years, we have been investigating promise comprehension among children from the point of view that language is a communication system and that language competence is the acquisition and use of that system. The emphasis is therefore placed on the functional aspects of language (Bates, 1976; Bruner, 1983; Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan, 1977; Halliday, 1985 ; Ninio and Snow, 1996; Tomasello, 2000). It has been shown in this perspective that interaction formats or routines (prototypical exemplars of social relations) are very important for young children (Bernicot, 1994; Marcos and Bernicot, 1994, 1997).
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Bernicot, J., Laval, V. (2004). Speech Acts in Children: the Example of Promises. In: Noveck, I.A., Sperber, D. (eds) Experimental Pragmatics. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230524125_10
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