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Title:
Pragmatic Development by Anato Ninio and Catherine E. Snow. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996,
222 pp.
Journal Issue:
Issues in Applied Linguistics, 8(1)
Author:
Minami, Masahiko, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Publication Date:
1997
Publication Info:
Issues in Applied Linguistics
Permalink:
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7z40n23v
Copyright Information:
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Many
from
language rules that children learn from early childhood are inseparable
Even
social conventions.
year of
in the first
life,
Over
vocalizes.
skills,
talk.
As
baby vocalizes, then the mother speaks again, and again the baby
its title
suggests,
of
Four scenarios
open Chapter
1,
in
pragmatic
failures
and successes
them
to
everyday situations
in
which Ninio and Snow outline the goals and topics of the book
how
the
en-
acts effectively.
linguistics is
not always clear, the boundaries between developmental pragmatics and other
skills,
are incapable of
them
to
syntactic, semantic,
development, then,
in their
own
socialization throughout
life.
human beings
sentences. Nativists
tance for
first
are genetically
would argue,
for
endowed with
example,
that input
is
of negligible impor-
in the
nativists'
to
in
Japan learn
to
is minimal
and often agrammatical. Ninio and
Snow, on the other hand, bring up a characteristic feature of Japanese conversational discourse called back-channels, and contend that nativists' argument is too
simplistic and that instead, language is shaped by culture-specific experiences and
beliefs.
According
ISSN 1050-4273
Vol. 8
No.
70-73
channels
is
8,
No.
71
is re-
North America,
In
in
and
intelligible
message.
The implication of
the
to
is
that
through the process of socialization, parents transmit to their young children not
only language-specific representational forms and rules but also culturally preferred interaction styles.
In framing the
which
example from
the
same
differently,
home.
It
To draw an
like.
guage development.
The chapters of this volume are logically divided and well organized. Preparing readers for the discussion of later chapters, Chapter 2 provides a valuable and
richly illustrated description of the
it.
An abundance
of speech act
in interpersonal
communication
is
ex-
years to come.
in
first
the authors caution that, due to the general limitation of children's speech, the
social functions are
ter
maps
at least initially).
Chap-
Chapter 6 compares
children's use of speech in face-to- face interaction with their mothers, drawing
on
two longitudinal observational studies one conducted by Ninio and the other
conducted by Snow and her colleagues. The chapter ends with a discussion of
young children's developing indirect communicative strategies, in which, according to the authors, two-year-olds can correctly interpret indirect requests
acts which, considering
young
speech
Ninio and
Snow
start the
main body of
their discussion
(i.e..
Chapter 3) by
later functioning.
view
from scratch, constructing the notion of object permanence, for example, gradu-
Reviews
72
ally
search
(e.g.,
Wynn, 1992)
an understanding of
how
is
that refutes Piaget's belief that infants are not born with
cautiously present a broad array of theories, their criticism of Piaget, and in par-
and
qualitative,
further leads to their partial support of an alternative theory, that children's early
language
is
One
is
meaning
As
Snow
in
of "scaffolding," the temporary support that the mother gives the child
to
perform
language development
infants
make
in the
young
Sometime
child.
in their first
memory
pret the
year of
life,
meaning of what
the
structures in semantic
mother
make
inter-
use of the
become
environmental shaping
that, the joint
The
in
This
More
than
and support
is
is
final
skills
tions,
in
Chapter
8.
among
the
emergence of conversational
skills,
the book). In narrative contexts, for example, like other domains, children's speech
is
ago, children begin to talk about past events at about two years of age, at
much
their mothers.
stylistic differences
that they
The authors
between parents
who
first
with
have acquired
who provide elaborated accounts about setSnow thus repeatedly emphasize that paren-
and
in
is
long
overdue. After reading this book, readers will likely be struck by the substantial
amount of
theoretical discussion.
Another strength
is
its
it
we
are not
As
No.
73
much
its
information on research
is
8,
some
readers.
De-
adults,
most pragmatic
it is
re-
is
recommended
REFERENCES
Bniner,
J.
course Processes,
Wynn, K.
8,
177-204.
7,
315-332.