Early Communication: Beyond Speech-Act Theory

For the past two decades, speech-act theory has been one of the basic tools for studying pragmatics from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. In this paper, I want to discuss certain aspects of the theory with respect to data from early communication in children. My aim will be to show that some of the central assumptions of the speech-act model of utterance comprehension need to be rethought. In the second part of the paper, I will outline a different pragmatic approach to verbal understanding and present a preliminary application of this approach to the developmental data. Let me start with a brief reminder of the basic tenets of the speech-act approach. According to standard speech-act assumptions, understanding utterances is a matter of knowing the rules according to which the utterances have been produced. Rules for producing utterances are rules for performing speech acts (warning, advising, requesting, promising, threatening etc.). The speech act or acts performed in uttering a sentence are in general a function of the meaning of the sentence (the literal force hypothesis – see Searle 1969):