Pragmatic development By Anat Ninio and Catherine Snow (review)

Abstract

446 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) of PWV (the former name of Gauteng province) as 'Pretoria-Witwatersrand-Vaal', while on the provincial map (xx) it is identified as 'Pretoria-Witwatersrand -Vereeniging' (both acronyms are in popular use now although it seems they were correct in identifying 'Vaal' as the original). The dictionary is completely accessible to a foreigner (although the lack of illustrations may leave you wondering what all those armored vehicles and antelopes look like). One concession to local linguistic politics that might not sit well with an international audience is the use of the South African coinage Sintu as the name of the Bantu language group, because Bantu has become somewhat taboo through its prominence as a racial label in apartheid policy. In etymologies and descriptions, 'Sintu' is always followed in parentheses by 'Bantu' so the motivation for using it seems somewhat muddled. One must concede that the politics of racial, ethnic, and linguistic labeling are particularly tricky in South Africa, so it is to the editors' credit that the usage labeling and description for the many epithets is accurately and sensitively executed. This dictionary, then, makes a wonderful addition to the literature on world Englishes and is a worthy bearer of the Oxford name. I recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone with interests in English, lexicography , or South Africa. [M. Lynne Murphy, Baylor University.] Pragmatic development. By Anat Ninio and Catherine Snow. (Essays in developmental science.) Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 222 This book marks a watershed in the study ofpragmatic development in children. Ninio and Snow have provided the most comprehensive and theoretically consistent account of pragmatic development published to date, and it is likely to become a standard reference point for future work in this area for some time to come. In the first chapter N & S set out their approach to pragmatics which they define as 'knowledge necessary for the appropriate, effective, rule-governed employment of speech in interpersonal situations' (4). This broad and inclusive definition is grounded in the perspective of cultural psychology, and they see the development of pragmatic skills as a process of enculturation and of social development, the latter being seen as 'the accumulation of knowledge necessary for the successful conduct of interpersonal affairs through the medium of language' (12). AU formal aspects oflanguage are viewed as component skills necessary for pragmatic success. In Ch. 2 they present a taxonomy of communicative acts which includes 70 'talk interchange' categories , 63 categories of speech act, and 3 types of discourse category. These are incorporated into three separate coding systems designed to fit particular research goals: the First Communicative Acts (FCA) coding system for children in the single word period, the Inventory of Communicative Acts—Abridged (INCA-A) for older children, and the Parental Interview on 100 Communicative Acts (PICA-100). These include far more material than other coding systems—for example many 'unmarked' forms which others have previously excluded as marginal —e.g. vocatives, interjections, onomatapoeic forms, imitations—and which N & S argue are truly communicative. In previous work on developmental pragmatics there has been no generally agreed method of analysis or theory; most studies have used only small samples; the more detailed coding systems have focused on only a subset of possible features; and the more comprehensive systems which attempt to include both younger and older children are inconsistent with one another. N & S aim to replace this bewildering theoretical and methodological heterogeneity with a single standard framework which is both comprehensive and theoretically consistent. Chs. 3-6 report detailed findings of research using this coding system and provide a comprehensive picture of pragmatic development from infancy up to the age of 2;8. Of particular value is the fact that observational studies are complemented by parental report studies, which means one gets a clear idea of the child's full repertoire rather thanjust what occurs in the observed sessions. The final two chapters focus on the development of conversational ability and connected discourse. They are rather different in style from previous chapters in that they are more discursive, include many transcripts of conversation as examples, and are to a much greater extent overviews of the research literature , drawing somewhat less on the...