Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1989. / Also available in print.

本論文藉由分析兩位三歲兒童和他們母親的對話來探討兒童行使請求(request)的情形。文中的討論主要涵蓋了三個層面。分別是兒童行使請求時採取的策略，使用的語言形式，以及運用的互動知識(interactional knowledge)。結果發現，兩位兒童行使請求時會採用下面的策略：指明一特定的動作、指明想要取得的物體、指出自已的需求及間接暗示。此外，他們利用以上的策略行使請求時所使用的語言形式有所不同；而這些差異似乎間接反映出這兩位兒童的一些對話或是人際互動的知識(conversational or interpersonal knowledge)影響了他們請求時所使用的語言形式。因此，本論文推論兒童在三歲左右或許已經知道了一些互動知識，而這些互動知識會影響他們在對話中如何請求。 / This study aims to explore children’s requests in mother-children conversation based on dyads of two three-year-old children and their mothers. Three aspects about children’s requests in daily conversation are concerned: (1) the means or strategies children depend on to convey their request intents; (2) the formal or linguistic elements children employ to realize their request intents; and (3) the conversational or interpersonal skills children may have acquired as they are requesting. With a careful examination over the collected conversations, it is found that children at the age of three tend to demonstrate their requests through the following means. First, children indicate a specific action they intend their hearers to do in their utterances. Second, children request for a desired object by indicating literally the target objects, or information about the target object, e.g. adjectives or quantifiers. Thirdly, they indicate their self-want to have their hearer fulfill their desire. The last means children employ to request is hinting. They indirectly convey their request intents, and their hearer can infer the intended act. In addition, children usually use different formal elements to manifest their requests. For example, their requests for a specific action were found to be conveyed with imperatives, imperatives with sentence-final particles, or imperatives with A-not-A tags. Further investigation on the formal varieties of children’s requests reveals that some conversational or interpersonal factors may play a role in how children convey their request intents, e.g. cooperativeness, social status, conversational topic. The findings, therefore, show that children at the age of three have probably been aware of some conversational or interpersonal knowledge and the knowledge may affect their performance of requests in conversation.

The aim of the logic for pragmatics considered in this work is to provide a logical framework that formalises reasoning about the pragmatic forces with which a sentence may be uttered. The concept of pragmatic or illocutionary force comes from speech act theory and plays a crucial role also in certain branches of artificial intelligence, in particular in the development of communication protocols for software agents. Instead of considering the full-blown theory of speech acts, we focus on speech acts that either have the pragmatic force of an assertion or the pragmatic force of an obligation, and on how these speech acts may be related to each other. In particular, we are interested in a principle proposed by Bellin and Dalla Pozza that allows one to promote acts of obligations through causal chains of acts of assertions. The main achievement of this thesis is a sound and complete categorical semantics for a logic for pragmatics incorporating the aforementioned principle. One of the benefits of the proposed semantics is that it allows one to deal with conditional obligations as well, thus extending the framework in a very interesting way. Although the logical framework considered in this work incorporates only two types of speech acts, we hope to be able to show that we have a well-behaved core fragment that can serve as a fruitful basis for further investigations.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-232).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-245)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-137). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests according to situation, language, age, and hearer variables, and the level of consistency between the child interview results and the validation results. Semi-structured individual interviews with child participants were used as the major method for data collection. Naturalistic school and home observations, interviews with parents and teachers of the children, audio and video recordings, and field notes were also included to validate and triangulate the child interview data, which were coded and analyzed using a modified version of the CCSARP coding scheme and an excellent level of intercoder reliability was reached.Results indicate that overall: (1) requests made under rights-protecting situations seem to be more direct and reasonableness-based than those made under favor-asking situations, (2) Chinese requests appear to be more direct and elaborate than English requests, (3) older children are more likely than younger children to frame direct, brief, and tactful requests, (4) child hearers are more likely than adult hearers to receive direct requests, and (5) for an individual child, the child interview and validation findings appear to be compatible, except that consistency is low regarding requests given to classmates. The results lend strong support to the claim that language use can be highly context-specific as can the request performance of children. This study may bring new insights into understanding the complexity of Chinese children's requests, thus sensitizing educators and parents to the significance of pragmatic competence in Chinese children's earlier development of language, whether Chinese or English, and helping them provide instructions that better suit children's pragmatic development and ability.

This study offers a pragmatic account of verbal irony, arguing that verbal irony can be best treated as a special type of conversational implicature.As the first part of the thesis, Grice's theory of conversational implicature is revised. This is done by 1)an addition to Grice's Maxim of Quality so that this maxim will be able to take presupposition into account; 2)an inclusion of the notion of mutual knowledge in Grice's framework and 3)an establishment of speakers' motivation for violating Grice's Maxims. This motivation is subsumed into three principles--the Politeness Principle (PP) (following previous writers such as R. Lakoff, Brown and Levinson), which embodies the speaker's need and want to be polite to others, the Selfishness Principle (SP), which constrains the speaker to say things that will bring him/her desirable consequences, and the Expressivity Principle (EP), by observing which the speaker will succeed in leaving more propositional and emotional impact on the hearer. Lastly, a heuristic of implicature production and understanding is offered which is believed to be more coherent and explanatory than Grice's original procedures for implicature calculation.Second, the revised theory is applied to verbal irony. Based on the heuristic of implicature production and understanding, a heuristic of irony production and understanding is provided. This heuristic demonstrates that irony is both similar to and different from ordinary conversational implicatures. It is similar in that it results from the speaker's observance of the motivating principles, and thus violation of Grice's maxims. It is different because 1)It is seen as the violation of the Maxim of Quality alone, while in ordinary conversational implicatures, any of the maxims may be violated; and 2)This violation is caused by all the three motivating principles, the PP, the SP, and the EP, whereas an ordinary conversational implicature is usually motivated by one of these three principles. Finally, this heuristic is applied to various cases of verbal irony, showing that the revised theory of conversational implicature is better than previous proposals on the subjuct. / Department of English

Most studies of pragmatic aspects of language learning have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language. None of these studies has investigated a multilingual situation where there is interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Neither have they dealt with an African language as the first language.The present study was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak.Data was elicited from monolingual English and French speakers and trilingual speakers native in Ciluba by written questionnaire, and from monolingual Ciluba speakers by oral interview. In addition, naturally occurring speech acts and TV dialogue were considered. It was found that for the speech acts of apologizing, complaining, and complimenting, Ciluba socio-cultural norms are different from those of English and French, which are similar to each other. In contrast to the socio-cultural norms of French and English, in Ciluba, social distance and relative power between the participants played an important role in deciding whether one of the three speech acts was to be performed or not. However, the results also revealed that, despite the difference in norms which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual speakers showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual speakers in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation from the norms of their native Ciluba was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with the urban environment and its mixed culture.It was also discovered that the trilingual speakers (who were native in Ciluba) used in French and English pattern of address which is not used by native English and French speakers. / Department of English

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78).