A Longitudinal Study on the Development of Pre-request Practices by a Four Years Old Girl

Abstract

Requests and requesting language have been a popular topic for researchers from a wide range of fields including linguistic philosophy, pragmatics, social-pragmatics, and discourse analysis since 1960s. Requesting is a dynamic process which is the combination of requests and pre-requests, as well as request negotiations. By now, studies mostly focused on the study of how request was initiated and what were the factors lying behind specific choice of one request form over others, and how request-makers pursued their demands when grants were not given as expected. However, limited studies have been published about the development of the strategies children took to avoid predictable refusals. This paper aims to make a contribution to this topic by conducting a longitudinal study lasting for approximately one year with a four-year-old Chinese girl as the subject. By contrasting and comparing the subject’s natural linguistic performance, the author tried to reveal the developmental procedure, and profound cognitive and cultural factors.