Met a Pragmatics

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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
http://www.questia.com/read/95073999http://www.questia.com/read/95073999


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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


26/29

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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