Acquiring pragmatics by Sandrine Zufferey (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Acquiring pragmatics by Sandrine Zufferey Elly Ifantidou Acquiring pragmatics. By Sandrine Zufferey. London: Routledge, 2015. Pp. 202. ISBN 9780415746441. $49.95. Zufferey’s book is organized in five parts that cover pragmatics from its theoretical foundations to its mutual influence with language acquisition (Part 1), social skills (Part 2), and cognitive competencies required in acquiring pragmatic skills (Part 3). Pragmatic development in a second language and autism are examined, too (Part 4). Ten chapters, two under each part, discuss topics such as speech acts, the role of social relations and cultural norms in children’s pragmatic development, metaphor, irony, scalar implicatures, referring expressions, and connectives. Z focuses on cognitive underpinnings on par with social interaction skills; she sidesteps early communicative abilities observed in conversational turn-taking and preschoolers’ situated activities (see Slobin et al. 1996, Matthews 2014). Nevertheless, the book accomplishes the much-awaited unification of the major trends in the pragmatic development of children, that is, the social and the cognitive. Ch. 1 traces popular topics within pragmatic theory back to their origins, namely speech-act theory and H. Paul Grice. This chapter can be a useful review for students who have had semantics and pragmatics courses and are familiar with the standardization hypothesis, nonliteral language in the Gricean framework, and generalized, particularized, and conventional implicatures. It is surprising that the introductory chapter to developmental pragmatics circumvents research on modality, spatial and evidential concepts (see Papafragou 1998, Matsui & Fitneva 2009, Quinn, Doran, & Papafragou 2011, Johanson & Papafragou 2014), and metaphor (see Vosniadou 1989, Pouscoulous 2011, 2014) by drawing on textbooks instead. Other areas where further qualifications are perhaps needed are Herbert Clark’s principle of contrast, intention reading, and cultural learning that have been used to discuss the role of theory of mind (ToM) abilities (e.g. joint [End Page 228] attention, gaze direction, intentional behavior) and social interaction in word learning. Part 1 concludes with an overview of explicit and implicit measures used to assess children’s production and comprehension. Ch. 3 is on the acquisition of speech acts. Emphasis is on effects of age and order of acquisition, direct vs. indirect speech acts, and the use of conventional linguistic forms to convey indirect speech acts. Z introduces evidence on requests and promises, which argues that awareness of conventional rules (in the form of felicity conditions) and level of implicitness do not explain children’s early ability to produce and understand direct and indirect requests. Instead, the data suggest that complexity of syntactic structures and of inferences that are required to retrieve the intended meaning can explain why young children understand indirect requests that tap into their developing ToM abilities better than indirect requests that rely on world knowledge they have not yet acquired. Ch. 4 offers a comprehensive review of pragmatic competencies tapping into social behavior and cognitive growth. Z illustrates three- to four-year-old children’s ability to adapt tone of voice, to shift from direct to indirect speech acts, and to add politeness markers depending on the social status of addressees and the context of conversation. She stresses the role of multiparty peer interaction in situations of conflict where discourse markers are used to mark power relations. In this process, children are exposed to culturally specific routines that forge pragmatic competencies on par with universal linguistic and cognitive traits (e.g. in acquiring requests, discourse markers, arguments in conflicts). On socialization practices, I would have preferred some discussion of current research on young children’s conversational skills as these become manifest in turn-taking (see Cassillas & Frank 2012, Casillas 2014a,b) and on early social traits in infants as these become manifest in faithful imitation (Hilbrink et al. 2013). This would have been very relevant given Amy Kyratzis’s (2007) work on peer group interactions. Returning to the issue of ToM abilities in Ch. 5, Z contrasts evidence from four-year-olds’ success in false-belief tests, earlier success in linguistic tasks, and eye-gaze infant studies. Children are capable of inferential communication required to process metaphors, resolve ambiguity, and understand hints at the age of two and a half years and long before they pass explicit versions of the false-belief task...