Abstract
Language acquisition involves more than learning the abstract structures of linguistic competence. The child also has to learn how to use linguistic structures appropriately. In this paper, the speech act is proposed as the unit of analysis for studying the pragmatics of early child language. The results of a study of children's uses of single-word utterances are reported, and the data are analyzed in terms of “primitive speech acts.”
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References
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This paper is based in part on work supported by Research Grant No. 01751 from the Research Foundation of the City University of New York.
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Dore, J. A pragmatic description of early language development. J Psycholinguist Res 3, 343–350 (1974). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068169
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01068169