Pragmatic Language Literature Review

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In maintaining the semantic – pragmatic distinction she states “logically and ontogenetically all the semantics and syntactics are derived from pragmatics”. She further notes that children do not learn a set of isomorphic sign – referent relation; rather they learn how to do things with sounds continually redefining the appropriate contexts for various language games. Thus, children acquire the word meaning in the acts their utterances perform. According to Bishop (1997), children comprehend language based on the physical context in which the communication takes place. As they grow, they utilize various contextual information in their communication in a flexible way (Robinson & Whittaker, 1987; Llyod Camaioni, & Ercolani, 1995; Ryder, & Leinonen, 2003). Also, in comprehending the meaning of same linguistic expression can vary in different situations, so to understand the actual meaning it is necessary to go beyond the information given linguistically by utilizing the contextual factors (Loukusa et al., 2007). Hence, effective use of pragmatic language involves the processing of contextual information.
Research reveals that the onset of pragmatic language functioning develop at approximately 4 or 5 years of age (Prutting & Kirchner, 1987). For example, Ziatas, Durkin, and Pratt (1998; 2003) have observed evidence of the ability to hypothesize what one 's conversational partner is thinking …show more content…

The first level involves an examination of the communicative intentions that a speaker wishes to convey. The second level analyses the presupposition, which is nothing but the information which is not necessarily explicit in a message, but which must be shared by the communicative partners if a message is to be understood. The third area, social organisation of discourse, has to do with maintaining dialogue between and among partners over several conversation turns. To analyze communicative behaviour at any one of these levels, the context in which an interaction occurs must be …show more content…

These tests contain subtests devoted to inferential comprehension and interpretation of non-literal language, but they are not tests purely of pragmatics. The Test of Pragmatic Language (Phelps- Terasaki & Phelps-Gunn, 1992) is the only whole test devoted to the assessment of language pragmatics. This is a complex test which, in fact, goes well beyond the boundaries of pragmatics and is more similar to a test of high-level language competence, incorporating elements of complex vocabulary, semantics and verbal

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