met a pragmatics
TRANSCRIPT
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Janet W. Astington
Metapragmatics: Children's Conception of Promising
CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE, Volume 7. Edited by Gina Conti-Ramsdenand Catherine E. Snow. LAWRENCE ERLBAUM ASSOCIATES,
PUBLISHERS 1990 Hillsdale, New Jersey Hove and London, 223-244
Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com
Five-year-old girl: "I will . . . I will remember . . . I'll do it . . . because Isaid so.
Same child: "I know what a promise is, you tell them you'll do it and youdo it, that's a promise . . . you have to do it if it's a promise and if you don't
do it it's not a promise, it's a sort of joke but it's not a very nice joke."
This chapter compares one aspect of children's pragmatic skills andmetapragmatic understanding: namely, their production of commissive
speech acts and their judgment of speech acts as examples of promising. Itbegins by examining speech act theory, with particular reference to Searle's
( 1969) analysis of promising. It reports a study designed to determine how
closely the ordinary adult concept resembles Searle's description. Thedevelopmental studies are then reported. These studies examined children's
ability to produce promises and the same children's ability to accept as
examples of promising speech acts that conformed with Searle's descriptionand to reject those that did not do so. The chapter concludes with a
consideration of the general relation between children's use of the language
system and their awareness and understanding of it.
Language is both a formal system relating sound and meaning, and a means
whereby one human mind communicates its beliefs and desires to another.
It was in the 1970s that explanations of children's language developmentshifted from an emphasis on acquisition of the formal system to emphasis
on acquisition of the means of communication. It is here, in learning to use
language as a communication system, that speech act theory plays a
centrally important role, as Bruner ( 1975) and others (e.g., Bates, 1976;
Dore, 1975) have shown.
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ANALYSIS OF PROMISING IN SPEECH ACT THEORY
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Speech acts are "things we do with words," such as promising, questioning,
ordering, advising, and so on ( Austin, 1975). Austin argued that, in fact, all
saying is doingsomething; that is, all utterances are speech acts, which he
analysed into three different acts. First, there is the locutionary act, the actof saying something. Second, there is the illocutionary act, which concerns
how the act is intended, what Austin called itsforce,for example, warning,
ordering, promising. Third, there is the perlocutionary act, which concerns
the effects of the utterance on the hearer.
Searle ( 1968) claimed that the distinction between the locutionary act and
the illocutionary act cannot be made, because meaning and force are not
separable. An utterance always contains some indicator of force as part of
its meaning. What is separable, Searle said, is the propositional act, the act
of expressing the propositional content of the utterance. This is anabstraction and is that part of the utterance that does not include indication
of illocutionary force. Thus, illocutionary acts, which Searle sometimes
calls simply speech acts, consist. of a propositional content expressed with
a certain illocutionary force.
Searle ( 1969) also developed Austin's concept of happiness or felicity
conditions, which determine whether a speech act is successfully
performed or not. For Searle, felicity conditions do not merely determine
the ways in which a speech act might go wrong, as Austin described, butwhen specified for a particular speech act they form a set of necessary and
sufficient conditions for the performance of that act; if all the conditions
are fulfilled, the act has been successfully performed, and if the act has
been successfully performed, all the conditions have been fulfilled. These
conditions operate through illocutionary force indicating devices, such as
word order, intonation, verbal mood, and performative verbs. Performative
verbs are those that make explicit the nature of the speech act being
performed, for example, I orderyou to do it; IpromiseI will. Searle stated
sets of conditions that were necessary and sufficient for the performance ofvarious speech acts, for example, promising, requesting, asserting, warning.
Then from the sets of conditions he derived sets of semantic rules for the
use of the linguistic devices marking the different kinds of speech acts. It
follows that if the linguistic device is a performative verb than this is a set
of rules for the use of that verb.
It is important that this be clear because the empirical work reported below
is a test of just this part of Searle's theory. Searle ( 1969) justified his
argument by appeal to what he called the Principle of Expressibility,
which:
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...enables us to equate rules for performing speech acts with rules for
uttering certain linguistic elements, since for any possible speech act there
is a possible linguistic element the meaning of which (given the context of
the utterance) is sufficient to determine that its literal utterance is aperformance of precisely that
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speech act. To study the speech act of promising or apologizing we need
only study sentences whose literal and correct utterance would constitute
making a promise or issuing an apology. (pp. 20-21)
That is, whatever can be meant can be said; any intended illocutionary
force can be explicitly expressed in the utterance, for example as aperformative verb, at least in theory: This proviso allows that the speaker
might not know the relevant performative verb, or such a verb might not
exist in his language, but he could learn it, or one could be added.
Gazdar ( 1981) claimed that Searle's proposal is mistaken, that utterances
containing explicit performative verbs are not necessarily speech acts of the
type named by the performative, but the example he gave does not appear
to satisfy the other conditions on the act, which Searle would surely claim
must be satisfied too. A stronger test of the theory would be to see ifutterances containing the performative verb and satisfying all the other
relevant conditions are judged as speech acts of the type named by the
verb, and utterances containing the verb but not satisfying the other
conditions, are not so judged: This is the experiment I report below.
SEARLE'S ANALYSIS OF PROMISING
The speech act of promising belongs to the type that Austin ( 1975) called
Commissives: "The whole point of a commissive is to commit the speaker
to a certain course of action" (p. 157). Searle ( 1969) specified a completeset of conditions that are "necessary and sufficient for the act of promising
to have been successfully and non-defectively performed in the utterance of
a given sentence" (p. 54). Searle's claim, from the principle of
expressibility, is that for any speech act there is some linguistic device the
meaning of which is sufficient to determine that its literal utterance in an
appropriate context is a performance of that particular speech act. His
procedure is, first, to state a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for
performance of the particular speech act, and second, from the conditions
to extract a set of semantic rules for use of the linguistic device that marks
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the utterance as a speech act of that kind. Thus, in analysing promising,
Searle ( 1969) first specified the conditions from which to draw the set of
rules:
Given that a speaker S utters a sentence T in the presence of a hearer H,
then, in the literal utterance of T, S sincerely and non-defectively promises
that p to H if and only if the following conditions 1-9 obtain:
1. Normal input and output conditions obtain.
2. S expresses the proposition that p in the utterance of T (propositional
content condition).
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3. In expressing that p, S predicates a future act A of S (propositionalcontent condition).
4. H would prefer S's doing A to his not doing A, and S believes H would
prefer his doing A to his not doing A (preparatory condition).
5. It is not obvious to both S and H that S will do A in the normal course
of events (preparatory condition).
6. S intends to do A (sincerity condition).
7. S intends that the utterance of T will place him under an obligation to
do A (essential condition).
8. S intends (i-l) to produce in H the knowledge (K) that the utterance of Tis to count as placing S under an obligation to do A. S intends to
produce K by means of the recognition of i-l, and he intends i-l to be
recognized in virtue of (by means of) H's knowledge of the meaning o
T.
9. The semantic rules of the dialect spoken by S and H are such that T is
correctly and sincerely uttered if and only if conditions 1-8 obtain. (pp.
57-61)
The analysis so far applies only to sincere promises. However, Searle (
1969, p. 62) rightly claimed that insincere promises are also promises.
When an insincere promise is made, although the speaker does not intend
to perform the promised act, he or she professes to have the intention to so
perform. Thus, Searle modified condition (6) to read: S intends that the
utterance of T will make him responsible for intending to do A, and
dropped "sincerely" from condition (9). That is, whether or not the speaker
intends to perform the future act, he or she expresses that intention. The
performance of any speech act is necessarily an expression of the
corresponding mental state: "I promise to do it, but I don't intend to" is
nonsensical. Austin ( 1946/ 1970) erred uncharacteristically on this point
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when he suggested that in the case where you promised and then did not
perform that "the sense in which you 'did promise' is that you did say you
promised. . . . But it may well transpire that you never fully intended to do
it . . . and in another 'sense' of promise you can't then have promised to doit, so that you didn't promise " (p. 101). However, he is surely wrong here:
There is no such other "sense" of promise. We will return to this point later.
Summarizing Searle's analysis, the following are the features of a promise
utterance, sincere or insincere:
promise not a promise
(a) refers to future refers to past or present
(b) refers to promiser's act refers to another's act or to an event(c) intentional act unintentional act
(d) possible act impossible act
(e) act not obvious obvious act
(f) promisee present promisee absent (or no promisee)
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(g) desirable to promisee not desirable to promisee
(h) expresses intention to act does not express intention to act
(i) speaker is obligated to act speaker is not obligated to act
Features (a)-(g) refer to the propositional content of the promise; that is, the
promised event should be a future act of the promisor, made to a promisee
who desires that action, and it should not be obvious that the action will be
performed without the promise. Features (c) and (d) are included, because
for Searle all actions are intentional, and all intentions concern possible
acts (or they are merely desires); condition (e) is included, because Searle
specifies a hearer to whom the promise is made. The analysis seems toexclude the possibility of making promises to oneself, unless it could be
said that one is both speaker and hearer. Condition (g) is perhaps not well
expressed, but for brevity's sake is stated as "desirable" rather than "would
prefer the promisee's performing the act to his not performing the act"
(Searle's condition 4). Perhaps only the last part of this condition is
required, that is, "S believes H would prefer . . ." It does not seem that the
promise is defective, if I promise you something that I believe you want but
which you actually do not want. Searle thinks that the first part of the
condition is needed in order to exclude invitations, for example. However,
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it seems better to consider, as Hancher ( 1979) did, that an invitation and
other kinds of offer contain a promise. Disregarding this, the main purpose
of feature (g) is to distinguish between promises and threats. Feature (h)
corresponds to condition 6 (Searle's sincerity condition), and feature (i)corresponds to condition 7 ( Searle's essential condition).
THE ADULT CONCEPT OF PROMISING
Do ordinary language users agree with Searle's analysis, that is, do they
accept his conditions on promising? In order to determine this, the
conditions were varied in a set of stories. Each story ended with an
utterance that had to be accepted or rejected as an example of promising. In
two stories this utterance conformed with all the features, (a) to (i), listed
above. In the other stories, the different features were each excluded.Preliminary testing suggested that subjects might be misled into accepting
too many non-promises as cases of promising if the term, promise, was
used in the stories. Thus, the predicated act or event was expressed using
will. Examples of a few of the stories are given here; all the stories were of
a similar length and style:
paradigmatic promise:
There's a parade in town tomorrow and Ben and Rachel would like to see it.They went last year and it was great. So they go to find their dad and ask
him if he will
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take them to the parade tomorrow. Dad says, "Yes, I will take you." Did
Dad promise?
Threat; not desirable to promisee:
Jacob and Sam are always arguing and fighting. Today Sam is mad because
Jacob won't give him any chips. Sam says to Jacob, "If you don't give me
some I will punch you." Did Sam promise?
Insincere promise:
David and John are walking home from school together. David says toJohn, "Will you come and play at my house tomorrow?" Tomorrow is
Saturday and John remembers that he is going to spend the whole day at his
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grandmother's. But he says to David, "O.K., I will come," even though he
knows he won't be able to. Did John promise?
The stories were presented in six different random orders to 20 university
students in English Literature and Education. They were all native speakers
of English, aged between 20 and 39 years. They were asked to judge
whether the final utterance in each story was a promise, a sort of promise,
or not a promise. Their responses indicated that these adult subjects made a
clear distinction between paradigmatic promises on the one hand, and on
the other, statements about a past action, predictions (including a statement
about an unintentional action, which is a prediction too), a statement about
an obvious future action, and a threat. The subjects were less certain
whether insincere and impossible promises (which are also insincere), one
in which the obligation is denied, and one with no promisee are to count aspromises or not.
A more detailed study ( Gibbs & Delaney, 1987) examined adults'
judgments of utterances in which three of Searle's conditions were
systematically violated. The results of that study confirm that adults are
sensitive to Searle's conditions on promising; it showed that threats, and
promises made where the speaker was under no obligation to perform were
less likely to be rated as promises than actual promises. On the other hand,
promises made in cases where it was obvious that the speaker wouldperform the act anyway were often rated as cases of promising. Gibbs and
Delaney concluded that this indicated that promises themselves do not
create an obligation, but are used to affirm an existing obligation.
The adults in these studies presumably could also produce promises.
Indeed, some of Gibbs and Delaney's subjects were actually required to do
so in a story completion task. That is to say, adults have both the pragmatic
ability to produce speech acts of promising and the metapragmatic ability
to judge speech acts as cases of promising or not. Their concept of
promising does reflect Searle's analysis, although it is not as rigid and
precise as Searle's description. This leads to the developmental question:
when do children acquire these abilities to produce and to judge
commissive speech acts?
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DEVELOPMENTAL QUESTIONS
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As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, in the 1970s there was a new
orientation to child language research. Some investigators moved away
from a focus on the syntactic structure and semantic content of children's
speech in order to emphasize the importance of functional, or pragmatic,considerations. This tradition continues and has led to proposals for a
pragmatic-based production system that takes the child's communicative
intent as the basis for language acquisition ( Ninio & Snow, 1988). Others,
too, have emphasized the continuity of function from prelinguistic
communication through the one-word stage to fully developed speech, and
have shown how primitive speech acts develop from prelinguistic gestures
( Bruner, 1983).
Certainly, children have some pragmatic abilities from a very early age.
Very young children can make requests and direct others' attention toobjects. They can also call others' attention with a vocative, and perform
simple expressive speech acts such as "hi" and "bye bye," again often with
an accompanying gesture ( Griffiths, 1979). Other speech acts, such as
declarations ( Searle, 1979) and commissives, including promises, do not
appear until later, perhaps because they have no prelinguistic precursors,
such as an associated gesture. These speech acts are entirely dependent on
language; in a declaration saying it is so makes it so, dependent on some
extralinguistic convention; for example, "I declare the meeting adjourned,"
must be said by the chairperson, and according to the rules of order. In acommissive one gives one's word to do something, Perhaps declarations
appear sooner than some authors (e.g., Clark & Clark, 1977) suggest; it is
true that small children do not declare meetings adjourned and so on, but in
pretend play, speech acts such as "That's the house," "You're the mommy,"
and so forth, have the force of declarations, and saying it makes it so within
the game. As for commissives, their natural occurrence is not reported in
the literature and they do not appear in inventories of preschoolers' speech
acts (e.g., Dore, 1977).
However, children's pragmatic skills, their abilities to produce speech acts
of one kind or another, are likely to precede their metapragmatic abilities. It
is generally the case that a second-order, meta-level understanding
develops after, often some time after, development of the first-order
process. Metacognitive processes operate on cognitive processes and imply
that one has some awareness or knowledge of one's own cognition.
Similarly, metalinguistics concerns knowledge and awareness of language.
It goes beyond the ability to produce and comprehend language in context;
metalinguistic ability is the ability to reflect on language: to think about it
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and to talk about it. In ordinary discourse, we pay little attention to the
forms of language and to linguistic rules, and we focus on meaning and
intent. However, we may focus on the forms and rules; this is what is
meant by metalinguistic awareness. Metapragmatics is metalinguisticawareness of pragmatic rules.
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Awareness is not an all or none phenomenon; one is not totally unaware
and then totally aware of some aspect of form or some rule, but rather
awareness develops gradually. Clark ( 1978) provided numerous examples
of children's developing awareness. She showed how different levels of
awareness are demonstrated in different ways, that is, in different
behaviors. For example, self-corrections show a very low level ofawareness, although even here one must have some awareness of the
discrepancy between one's intent and what one produced. Children correct
pronunciation, word order, word choice, and they start to make such
corrections almost as soon as they start to talk. At a somewhat later age,
they begin to comment on and sometimes to correct others' speech.
Awareness is somewhat differently demonstrated in children's play with
language (e.g., Weir, 1962). All of this evidence is from observation in
natural settings. Much more has been learned from direct questioning and
experimentation. For example, children have been asked to makejudgments about the acceptability of utterances and asked for corrected
versions of those rejected (e.g., De Villiers & De Villiers, 1974; Hakes,
1980; Hirsh-Pasek, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 1978). Much of this work has
focused on grammatical acceptability, that is, on children's awareness of
syntactic anomaly.
Some studies have shown children's developing metalinguistic awareness
in the area of pragmatics, that is, their developing metapragmatic ability.
For example, Shatz and Gelman ( 1973) showed that 4-year-olds had some
awareness of others as listeners, and could modify their own speech
accordingly. Their speech to 2-year-olds was different from that to adults,
although they were talking about the same thing. It is hard to decide
whether such an ability is a pragmatic or metapragmatic skill; certainly
such adjustments could be made with very little conscious awareness. A
greater degree of awareness is required in tasks that require children to
make judgments, for example, to judge what form of request is more polite.
Bates ( 1976) showed that Italian children could make such judgments by
about 4 years of age.
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Interesting studies have addressed pragmatic and metapragmatic questions
in the same investigation, comparing children's productions and their
judgments. For example, Wilkinson, Wilkinson, Spinelli, and Chiang (
1984) showed development between 5 and 8 years of age in children'sability to produce a variety of indirect requests, and their ability to judge
the appropriateness of requests and to justify those judgments. The
pragmatic question is: Can children perform a certain act; can they follow
the rules? The metapragmatic question is: Can children judge a certain act;
can they recognize violations of the rules?
Those are the two questions that are addressed here, with specific reference
to the speech act of promising, analysed previously. Two studies are
reported in the literature examining children's production of commissive
speech acts (Astington, 1988a) and children's understanding of the speechact of promising ( Astington, 1988b). Although not discussed in these
reports, the subject populations for the two studies were actually the same
group of children, making it possible to compare their pragmatic and their
metapragmatic skills in this one area.
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The subjects were 96 children (aged 4;5 to 11; 11) attending a public
school in a mixed-income neighbourhood of Toronto. Twelve boys andtwelve girls at each of four age levels (mean ages 4; 10, 6; 11, 8; 11, and
10;11) were tested on each of the tasks. The first language of 81% of the
subjects was English. The remaining subjects had a variety of first
languages; they were all fluent speakers of English as a second language as
judged by the classroom teacher. Speakers of English as a second language
not so judged were not included in the testing. Subsequent analyses of the
data from these two tasks and from two other tasks assessing
comprehension and syntactic abilities, revealed no significant differences
due to the child's first language. Altogether, ten separate analyses of
variance were performed on these data; no significant effects of first
language and no significant interactions of first language with age or with
task variables were found in any of these analyses ( Astington, 1985/
1986).
CHILDREN'S PRAGMATIC ABILITY: PRODUCTION OF
COMMISSIVE SPEECH ACTS
The children were given this task first so that it would be performed before
the word, promise, had been spoken by the experimenter. The task
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determined at what age and in what form children produce commissive
speech acts, such as promising, by having them speak a doll's part in a role-
playing game where the experimenter, speaking for another doll, attempted
to get the subject's doll to make a promise. Outline dialogues had beenprepared; as in the following example (E = Experimenter, S = Subject):
Let's pretend that the mom wants the boy to clean up his room; (when
testing girls girlwas substituted for boy).But he doesn't want to do it. He
wants to go out and play. Maybe he'll clean it up later but not now.
E: Your room's a mess. Please, will you clean it up?
S: [child's response]
[1) E:How do I know(that you'll do it later?] (or whatever commitment S
makes)
S: (child's response]
[2) E: What can you say to me now so I'll know[that you'll do it later?]
S: (child's response]
[3] E:Is there anything nothing you can say so I'll really know[that you'lldo it later?]
The experimenter made appropriate responses to the child's utterances
using the scripts as a guide. However, the prompts for a commissive speechact (shown in italics) were given in exactly the same form to all children.
That is, after the child made some commitment the experimenter asked
question [1] followed by [2] and then [3], unless the child used the word,
promise,in his or her reply. The same
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three prompts were also given in another dialogue in which the brother
wanted to take his sister's ball to the park and she said, "How do I know
you'll bring it back?" Two further dialogues separated these two. In these
other two dialogues the experimenter attempted to get the child's doll to
produce a directive speech act. This was done because previous studies
have shown that children of this age are able to produce directive speechacts in games like this (e.g., James, 1978; Read & Cherry, 1978). Thus,
here, if children produced directive speech acts and not commissive ones, it
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could appropriately be claimed that their difficulty lay with the specific
speech act type.Children's responses to the prompts for a commissive
speech act were coded according to the following scheme:
1. (1) Irrelevant response, or noresponse2. (e.g.,I don't know;because1)
3. (2) Commitment implied, but not made explicit,
4. (e.g.,Because the ball is yours; implied:"and so I'll bring it back")
5. (3) Commissive speech act not using promise
6. (e.g.,I will do it)
7. (4) Commissive speech act using the explicit performative promise
8. (e.g.,I promise I"ll do it)
The code assigned for a dialogue was that of the highest category reached,
whether it was in response to the first, second, or third prompt. Childrenwho did not receive the same code for the two dialogues were given the
higher of the two codes they received. Responses from a random sample of
25% of the subjects were independently coded by a second rater with
agreement of 93.8%.
Only three 5-year-olds, one 7-year-old, and one 9-year-old produced no
commitment. A small proportion of children at each age level (17% or less)
produced an implied commitment. At all age levels, most of the children
produced explicit commissive speech acts appropriate to the context. Therewas one change with age, however; only two 5-year-olds, approximately
one-half of the 7-year-olds, and a majority of the 9- and 11-year-olds
marked the commitment with the explicit performative verb, promise.
Because of the repeated requests that were made (How do I know? What
can you say to me? Is there anything you can say?), one might think that
children would be led to use the explicit verb to mark their commitment, if
they were aware of its use for this purpose. This perhaps suggests that
although the younger children have the pragmatic skill to produce appropri-
____________________1 The editors suggested that because may not be irrelevant, but an even
more briefly implied commitment. This is possible. However, putting
this response into category (2) would change the coding for only one 5-
year-old and one 7-year-old and would not change the overall analysis.
The other three subjects eventually recorded as category (1) (becausecodes were combined from the two dialogues) actually gave no response.
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http://www.questia.com/reader/action/next/95073988#1http://www.questia.com/reader/action/next/95073988#1http://www.questia.com/reader/action/next/95073988#1http://www.questia.com/reader/action/next/95073988#1http://www.questia.com/reader/action/next/95073988#1 -
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ate speech acts, they lack metapragmatic awareness of the appropriate
performative verbs.
The nature of the speech acts children produced in this task was
constrained to some extent by the dialogues planned and directed by the
experimenter. If the child produced a commissive speech act at all, Searle's
conditions on promising described above were met, simply because of the
nature of the commitment called for in the dialogue.
There has been little observation of children's production of commissive
speech acts in a less controlled situation. In a small study twenty-four 9-
and 10year-olds made up stories about a broken promise ( Astington, 1985/
1986). In all of their stories Searle's conditions on promising obtained; that
is, the promised event was an intentional future action of the promiser,made to a promisee who desired that action, and it was not obvious that the
action would be performed without the promise. Thus, the promises
produced by the children in this task did conform to Searle's conditions on
promising. By chance, in other pilot work, testing children's comprehension
of different syntactic structures containing promise and tell (in a task
similar to Chomsky, 1969), a 4-year-old wanted to play the part of the
experimenter. He was allowed to tell the experimenter what Ernie and Bert
(the dolls used in the experiment) said and the experimenter acted as
subject and moved the dolls around. The child said, for example, "Erniepromises that Bert is going to spill the soap into the bathtub" and "Emie
promises Bert that the soap sits on Ernie's head." Notice that in these
promises Searle's conditions on promising do not hold, as they did in the 9-
year-olds' stories. Nonetheless, the data from the role-playing study clearly
show that by age 5 most children have the pragmatic ability to produce
commissive speech acts.
CHILDREN'S METAPRAGMATIC ABILITY: JUDGMENTS OF
SPEECH ACTS
This task was developed from the judgment task that adults were given,
described above. One criticism made of the adult study concerned the way
in which the "promises" were made: In the case of the actual promise,
where the speaker says, "I will . . ." critics said that this speech act might
not actually be a promise because the speaker did not say it was. Thus the
form "I will . . . I promise" was used in the present task. Of course, all the
utterances then had to have the tag "I promise." As Searle (and the Oxford
English Dictionary) said, this phrase has the colloquial meaning, "I assure
you," and does not necessarily mark a promise. Nonetheless, inclusion of
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this verb does increase the difficulty of the task. However, it allows a direct
test of Gazdar's ( 1981) claim referred to earlier: Utterances containing
explicit performative verbs are not necessarily speech acts of the type
named by the performative.
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In addition to adding the tag, "I promise," to the critical utterances, the
original stories were made simpler, and fewer conditions were varied. A
pilot study determined how children judged paradigmatic promises,
statements about past actions, predictions, and threats, and whether they
considered insincere promises to be promises. After each story, children's
comprehension of and memory for its content were determined, and then
they were asked about the final utterance, "Did [the speaker] promise . . . ?"Following their response, they were asked to give a reason for their answer.
The results of this pilot study indicated that children frequently based their
judgments on an imagined outcome, and so outcomes were written into the
stories in order to investigate this systematically. In addition, in order to
simplify the task, fewer types of speech acts were used and all the critical
utterances were spoken by children in case parental utterances were judged
differently due to the parents' greater power and authority.
The final version of the task is reported here. There were six stories, inwhich the critical utterances were two promises, two predictions, and two
assertions about a past action. Each of the six stories had three versions:
They ended with the target utterance; or they had a final sentence
indicating that the promise was kept, the prediction was fulfilled, or the
assertion was true; or they had a final sentence indicating that the promise
was broken, the prediction was unfulfilled, or the assertion was false. An
example of each speech act type in its three versions follows (the other
three stories are given in Astington, 1988b):
Speech Act Type: Promising
Lisa takes John's comic books to her friend's house.
She leaves them there for a long time.
John wants them back.
Lisa says: I'll get them tomorrow.
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John says: You've said that before. How do I know you will?
Lisa says: I will get them tomorrow, I promise.
Promise kept, as story above, then: The next day Lisa does bring the comicbooks back.
Promise broken, as story above, then: The next day Lisa doesn't bring the
comic books back.
Speech Act Type: Predicting,
Lisa gets up early.
She is going to the zoo with her class.
Lisa says: I hope it won't rain.
John says: It's gonna be sunny.
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Lisa says: I think I'll take my umbrella anyway.
John says: You don't need to. It will be sunny all day, I promise.
Prediction fulfilled, as story above, then:
Lisa goes to the zoo, and it is sunny all day.
Prediction unfulfilled, as story above, then:
Lisa goes to the zoo, and it rains.
Speech Act Type: Asserting
Dad gives Lisa a letter for her teacher.
Lisa takes it to school.
Next day Dad says: Did you give that letter to your teacher?
Lisa says: Yes.
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Dad says: I hope you didn't forget. It was important.
Lisa says: I did give it, I promise.
Assertion true, as story above, then: She even wrote you an answer. I've gotit here.
Assertion false, as story above, then: Dad looks in Lisa's schoolbag, and the
letter is still there.
At each age level, half of the children were given stories that had nooutcome described, and the other half were given stories that included an
outcome. Each child heard two different promise stories, two different
prediction stories, and two different assertion stories; those whose storiesincluded outcomes heard about one promise kept and one broken, one
prediction fulfilled and one unfulfilled, and one assertion true and one
false. After each story, children's comprehension of and memory for itscontent was checked, they were asked whether they thought the speaker
had promised, and then they were asked to give a reason for their answer.
Because pilot testing had indicated that this task was difficult even for 10-
year-olds, it was also given to 13-year-olds and to adults. The 13year-olds
were 20 students attending the same school as the child sample. The adults
were 54 undergraduates, the majority in their early twenties.
The clearest sign of children's developing metapragmatic awareness of the
conditions governing promising is seen in the change with age in their
responses to the prediction stories. More than one-half of the 11-year-olds
and most of the 13-year-olds correctly rejected all the cases of predicting as
being examples of promising, whether the prediction was fulfilled,
unfulfilled, or the outcome was unknown. They also gave appropriate
reasons for their response, referring to the speaker's lack of knowledge of
or inability to control the future state of affairs predicated in the speech act.
Some of them showed explicit awareness of the
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pragmatic rules governing promising by claiming that one can't or couldn't
promise under such circumstances; for example:
Girl, 10;7: You really can't promise anything on the weather, you can't.
Experimenter: Why not?
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Subject: Well . . . you can't control the weather.
Boy, 10;11: He just took a guess sort of . . . you can't promise that.
Girl, 10;11: Well he isn't the one who controls the rain so he couldn'tpromise.
Girl, 13;4: You can't really promise about that, when you promise you're
giving her your word that it'll happen as you said it would, and you can't
promise that will happen.
Some of the 9-year-olds occasionally said "you can't promise" but less
often than the 11-and 13-year-olds did. None of the 5-and 7-year-olds ever
said, "you can't promise."
Indeed, the younger children showed no awareness of the conditions on
promising, unless it can be said that they were implicitly aware of theessential condition: that the speaker intends to take on an obligation to
bring about the outcome predicated in the speech act. This is suggested by
their focus on the outcome in making their judgment. Certainly, when theywere given an outcome in the stories, almost all 5-, 7-, and 9-year-olds said
that the speaker promised in the case where the prediction was fulfilled and
that the speaker did not promise, when it was unfulfilled. Even those
children who were not told an outcome at the end of the story seemed to be
using the same strategy to make their judgment; in this case they imagined
an outcome and based the judgment on that. For example, concerning
John's prediction that it would be sunny all day at the zoo, one boy (aged
4;8) said John promised "because it will. . . it would be sunny every single
day," whereas concerning exactly the same story, a girl (aged 4; 11) said
that John did not promise, "because it was raining." Remember that neither
child had been told an outcome in the story. Similarly, concerning another
story in which John was sick and Lisa predicted that he would feel better
the next day, one boy (aged 5;1) said Lisa promised "'cos sometimes whenI'm sick, I get better the next day," whereas a girl (aged 5;4) said Lisa didn't
promise, "because I think he'll won't do that. . . he won't feel better
tomorrow." Thus, if the outcome came about or if they imagined that it
would, children said the speaker promised, and if the outcome didn't come
about or if they imagined that it wouldn't, they said the speaker didn't
promise. This may indicate the children's implicit understanding that
someone who makes a promise thereby assumes an obligation to bring
about the promised outcome.
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For speech acts of asserting, it was only a minority of even the oldest
children who showed awareness of the condition on promising that the
predicated act must be in the future. Those who were aware of this
condition again made it
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explicit by objecting that the speaker can't say "I promise" about a past
action, for example:
Girl (11;3): A promise is something that happens afterwards, you can't say,
"I promise I put the garbage out this morning." You can't say that because it
doesn't make much sense.
Boy (8;6): Because it already happened . . . like you can't say, "I promise I
took it to school."
However, those children who were not aware of this condition again based
their response on the outcome: For true assertions, they said that the
speaker promised, and for false assertions, they said the speaker didn'tpromise. Again, even if they were given stories that did not include any
information about the real state of affairs, they frequently imagined it and
based their answer on that. For example, concerning the story where Lisa
says that she did give a letter to her teacher, one girl (aged 5;4) said Lisa
promised, " 'cos I think she did. . . she did give it to her teacher," and
another girl (aged 4; 11) said Lisa didn't promise, "because she didn't bring
it to school." Again, neither child had been told an outcome for the story.
Similarly, concerning another story where John asserted that he put the
garbage out, one boy (aged 6;5) said John promised, "because he
remembered he forgot the garbage yesterday so he maybe brang it out
today," whereas a boy (aged 4;8) said John didn't promise, "because he was
joking. . . 'cos he didn't take it out."
It is remarkable that even in the case of the actual promises, the same effect
is seen. When the promise was kept, all children at all age levels said that
the speaker had promised. When the promise was broken most of them,
especially the 5-to 11-year-olds said the speaker had not promised, and
often gave as their reason that the promise had not been fulfilled. Even at
13 years of age, not quite half of the subjects said that the speaker promised
in the case where the promise was broken. Recall that even Austin
equivocated on this point, when he suggested that, in a sense, one had not
promised if one did not perform; one had only said that one promised.
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However, promising is only a speech act; thus, to promise, one has only to
say that one does so.
Children judge that the speaker promised, if the promise is fulfilled, and if
the promise is broken they judge the speaker did not promise. Again, it may
be that this is how they show some awareness of the essential condition,
that the speaker has an obligation to bring about the promised outcome.
Those children who heard stories where no outcome was described again
sometimes imagined an outcome and based their response on the imagined
outcome. Even some of the oldest children thought they had to consider
how likely it was that the promise would be fulfilled if this was not told in
the story, before they could decide whether the speaker promised or not, for
example:
After a story where John promises to take Lisa to the swimming pool next
week.
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Experimenter: What do you think: Did John promise?
Subject (Girl, 12;8): I think so.
E: Why do you say that?
S: Because actually it depends on what kind of person he was, I think.
E: What do you mean?
S: If he was a person who usually kept promises like that, then I think it
would be a promise, but if he didn't keep promises, then I'd probably sayno, probably not.
After the story where Lisa promises to get John's comic books from her
friend's house.
Experimenter: What do you think: Did Lisa promise?
Subject (Boy, 12;7): I'm not sure, 'cos if she's done it before (i.e. forgotten
the comic books before), she could very well do it again. You don't know
whether to trust her or not.
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In all cases where there was no outcome described in the story, children
were more likely to say that a speaker promised than they were to say that
he or she did not promise, except for the older children's response to
prediction stories. When children decided that the speaker did not promise,it was usually on the basis of judging that the promise or prediction would
not be fulfilled or the assertion was false. When they decided that the
speaker did promise, it was sometimes on the basis of judging that the
promise or prediction would be fulfilled or the assertion was true, but not
always. Sometimes children referred to the critical utterance and said it was
a promise because the speaker said he would do it, or because he had said,
"I promise."
It is important to point out that the adults who responded to the same
stories were more aware of the conditions governing promising. Inparticular, their judgments were not affected by the outcomes described at
the end of the stories. In the case of promising, all the adults said, as did all
the children, that the speaker promised when the promise was kept.
However, unlike the children, most of them also said that the speaker
promised even in the case where the promise was broken, and they all said
he or she promised when no outcome was given. For predicting, their
responses were like those of the 13-year-olds, that is, most but not all of
them said for each type of story (fulfilled, unfulfilled, outcome unknown)
that the speaker did not promise. However, about a quarter of the timeadults did say that the speaker promised, again this was equally likely for
each case: fulfilled, unfulfilled, or outcome unknown. For asserting, unlike
the children, adults usually said that the speaker did not promise, even in
the case of the true assertion, but again, about a quarter of the time, they
did say that the speaker promised.
These results suggest that, on the whole, adults are aware of the conditions
on
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promising, but that they are not always strictly applied. Sometimes adults
judge that one can promise events outside one's control and that one can
promise that one has performed an action in the past. This result is similar
to that obtained in a study of the speech act verb, lie ( Coleman & Kay,
1981). Coleman and Kay said that the meaning of the term, lie, could be
viewed as a prototype to which real and imagined events corresponded in
varying degrees. They abstracted three elements of lying and varied them
in utterances in a set of stories that were then given to adult subjects who
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had to rate the utterances as lies or not. The three elements were: The
expressed proposition is false; the speaker believes it to be false; and the
speaker intends to deceive the hearer. Coleman and Kay showed that the
more elements that were present, the more likely the utterance would berated a lie. They called the three elements "prototypical properties" whose
presence or absence in an utterance determined the likelihood of that
utterance being rated as a lie; that is to say, determined its proximity to the
prototypical lie. Correspondingly one could view an utterance which meets
all of Searle's conditions for promising as a prototypical promise. Then
other utterances using the word, promise, where some conditions are not
met, could be seen as variations from the prototype: for example, a
prediction, an emphatic assertion, and so on. In a somewhat different
experimental paradigm from Coleman and Kay's, Wimmer, Gruber, and
Perner ( 1984) obtained 4- to 12-year-olds' judgments of a story character's
utterance as lying or not, and showed that younger children do not base
their judgments on the same set of properties as do older children and
adults. These results for promising and lying may indicate the general
development of metapragmatic awareness during the school-age years.
Focusing on the outcome led the younger children not to distinguish
between promises and predictions in their answer to the metalinguistic
question that asked whether the speaker promised. This was especially so
for those children who heard an outcome described at the end of the story.As reported, 5-, 7-, and 9year-olds usually said that the speaker promised,
if the promise or prediction was fulfilled, and did not promise, if the
promise was broken or the prediction was unfulfilled. However, they were
then asked additional causal or moral judgment questions to find out
whether they would hold speakers equally responsible for the fulfilment of
promises and predictions. For stories in which the promise or prediction
was fulfilled, they were asked whether they thought the outcome came
about, becausethe speakerhad promised it; for example, "Do you think it
was sunny all day, because John said, 'It will be sunny all day, I promise'?"For the stories in which the promise or prediction was not fulfilled, they
were asked whether they blamed the speaker for the outcome; for example,
"Would you blame Lisa because she said, 'I will get them tomorrow,' andshe didn't get them?" Responses to these questions showed that some of the
7-year-olds and most of the 9-year-olds did distinguish between promises
and predictions in terms of the speaker's responsibility for the outcome,although they had made no distinction between them in answer to the
metalinguistic question, "Did [the
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speaker] promise?" That is, although they said in both cases that the
speaker promised, when the outcome came about, they were more likely to
think that promised outcomes rather than predicted outcomes came about
because of the speaker's promise. Similarly, although in both cases they
said that the speaker had not promised, when the outcome did not come
about, they were more likely to blame speakers for their broken promises
than for their unfulfilled predictions. Table 10.1 compares typical responses
from 9-year-olds and from adults to the metalinguistic question, and from
9-year-olds to the responsibility judgment question. Although the children
did not make adult-like judgments in answer to the metalinguistic question,
their answers to the responsibility judgment questions showed that
nonetheless they were able to distinguish between promising andpredicting; they were aware that promising involves responsibility or
obligation in a way that prediction does not.
Critics have suggested at least two reasons for the younger children's
difficulty with the story task described here. One is that the children were
misled by the use of the word, promise, in the utterances that were not
cases of promising. As mentioned above, the tag, "I promise," was included
because of criticism of the original adult study where the word, promise,
was not used. It should be noted that adults in the present study stilldistinguished between promising, predicting, and asserting at about the
same level as in the first study, that is, adults' judgments are not altered
substantially by inclusion of the tag, "I promise." However, this may not be
so for children. It may be that inclusion of the term is sufficient to conceal
their emerging awareness of the distinction. However, a recent study
(Astington, 1989) suggests that this is not the case.
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TABLE 10.1
Comparison of 9-Year-Old Children's Metalinguistic Judgments with those of Adults,
and with Their Own Responsibility Judgments
Metalinguistic Judgment
(e.g., Did he promise?)_______________________________________________________________
Child Adult
_________________________ ________________________
Promise Prediction Promise Prediction
fulfilled YES YES YES NO
unfulfilled NO NO YES NO
Child's Responsibility Judgment
(e.g., Would you blame him?)
_________________________________
Promise Prediction
fulfilled YES NO
unfulfilled YES NO
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In this study, children were told two stories that contained speech acts of
promising and two that contained speech acts of predicting, similar to the
stories described above except that the word, promise, was never used. The
story characters said simply, "I will get them tomorrow," for example, or"It will be sunny all day." For each child, one promise and one prediction
were fulfilled, and one of each type was unfulfilled. After each story, the
children were asked whether the speaker had made a promise, and they
were asked a question about the speaker's responsibility for the outcome.
The task was given to 85 children 4 to 9 years of age who all had English
as their first language. Results showed that up to 9 years of age, children
say that a speaker promised so long as the state of affairs predicated in the
speech act comes about, even in cases where the state of affairs is some
event outside the speaker's control. Similarly, they say that the speaker did
not promise, if the state of affairs does not come about, even in cases whereit is made explicit in the story that the speaker desires and attempts to bring
it about. These results support the earlier findings.
CONCLUSION: PRAGMATIC AND METAPRAGMATIC
ABILITIES
Children's performances on the pragmatic production task and the
metapragmatic judgment task are directly compared in Fig. 10.1 Two
measures are shown for each task: production of commissive speech acts
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and production of the performative verb, promise, for the pragmatic task,
and metalinguistic and responsibility judgments for the metapragmatic task.
In the judgment tasks children had a 50% possibility of being right by
chance because they were asked yes/no questions, whereas in theproduction task an appropriate speech act or appropriate perfomative verb
was not produced, perhaps by chance, from one of two alternatives.
Therefore for the judgment tasks subjects' scores were adjusted for chance
(by subtracting 0.5 of the possible total and multiplying by 2; negative
scores were recoded to zero) and then the transformed scores were reduced
to a 0-1 scale. The broken line shows the mean scores at each age level
(similarly adjusted for chance and reduced to a 0-1 scale) for the additional
questions asked after the promise and prediction stories that included an
outcome, concerning the speaker's responsibility for the outcome. Since
only half the subjects received stories of this type these data come from
only half the sample. For the production task subjects were assigned a score
of I if they produced a commissive speech act and a score of 0 if they did
not do so. Similarly, they were assigned a score of I if they produced the
performative verb, promise, and a score of 0 if they did not do so.
The figure makes obvious the results reported above. Most children at all
ages could produce commissive speech acts, but children could not judge
speech acts as cases of promising, or not until after 9 years of age. In this
respect, very little comparison can be made between pragmatic andmetapragmatic ability because
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FIG. 10.1. Adjusted mean scores on production and judgment tasks, by age
the former is already present at 5 years of age, and the latter does not begin
to develop, for this particular measure, until after 9 years of age. However,
the figure also makes clear that in each task competence does improve withage, as shown by use of the explicit performative verb and by appropriate
judgments of the story characters' responsibility. Moreover, these advances
come at the same point in development and show roughly the same form,although at any particular age performance in one domain does not appear
to be related to the level of performance in the other. However, it is notunusual to find that items that discriminate well between age groups do notshow any pattern of relationship within an age group.
Thus, the results of the studies presented here show that by 5 years of age
children have the pragmatic ability to produce commissive speech acts,although it may not be until somewhat later that they are aware of the
appropriate use of the performative verb, promise, to mark their
commitment in cases where the hearer expresses doubt. In contrast, it is not
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until some years later that they can make metapragmatic judgments of
others' speech acts as conforming to or violat-
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ing the rules for promising, so that it is not until after 9 years of age that
they can distinguish appropriately between promising and predicting.
However, children have an implicit awareness of this distinction by 9 years,
if not earlier, as shown by the responsibility judgments that they make; for
example, they blame speakers more for broken promises than for
unfulfilled predictions.
These findings are similar to those in other areas. For example, children
can produce indirect requests before they can make judgments about theappropriateness of different types of request ( Wilkinson et al., 1984). More
generally, children demonstrate implicit awareness of linguistic rules
before they are able to make judgments of violations of a rule. At first, their
focus is on meaning and intent. For example, children will accept violations
of syntax that do not affect their understanding of a sentence; a 5-year-old
child judged the sentence "John and Bill is a brother" to be acceptable;
saying, "Sure . . . they're brothers" (Hirsh-Pasek, Gleitman, & Gleitman,
1978), which is interesting, because in the response the subject and verb
agree in number, as they do not in the task sentence. That is to say, thechild has implicit knowledge of the rule and uses it appropriately in
production but cannot use it to make judgments. Similarly in the present
study, children demonstrated an implicit understanding of promising,
shown by their ability to produce commissive speech acts, and to make
appropriate responsibility judgments of story characters, before they were
able to make explicit judgments of the speech acts. From an early age
children can follow pragmatic rules and perform the speech act. At a later
age they acquire the ability to recognize violations of these rules. This
metapragmatic ability develops later in childhood, at about 10 years of age.
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