Explanations: A Pragmatic Basis for Early Child Competence

BARBIERI, M.S.; SCHEUER, N. ; COLAVITA, F.

PRAGMATICS (WILRIJK)

International Pragmatics Association

Lugar: Nueva York; Año: 1989 vol. 3 p. 129 - 155

1018-2101

Our work has both theoretical and empirical purposes. On the theoretical level, we intend to identify the conditions that need to be fulfilled when giving an explanation . On the empirical level, we have carried out a qualitative investigation studying the explanations given by three-year-old children in spontaneous interaction and exploring which behavioural cues could be taken into account to decide whether the subjects honour these conditions. Though we think that our model of explanation and the conditions we propose are generally valid, we chose three-year- olds because they are linguistically competent enough to be easily understood, while their early age allows us to investigate which are the most basic features of explanation in interaction.