Classifications of children's speech acts: a consumer's guide

Abstract

Abstract This paper enumerates eight problems of design and application which must be addressed by any proposed analysis of children's language production into speech acts. These problems fall into two main classes. ‘Problems of definition’ include defining the unit of analysis and its domain in speech data, and defining and relating one to another the taxonomy's levels of abstraction in a motivated fashion. ‘Problems of application’ include vagueness of textual realization of illocutionary force, canonical syntactic realization of illocutionaryacts, sequentially- and simultaneously-multiple illocutionary forces, conversational implicature, illocutionary forces constructed in dialogue, and discontinuous illocutionary acts. Each problem is explicated and exemplified by production data from Subjects taking part in a naturalistic longitudinal study of illocutionary act development. Published proposals for the analysis of children's speech acts are critically reviewed with respect to the adequacy of their treatment of each problem in turn. Finally, it is proposed that clinical or research ‘consumers’ who require speech-act analytic tools for use with samples of child language should assess the appropriateness of such taxonomies by means of their relative success in addressing the range of conceptual and design problems enumerated here.