Publications

Publication details [#25735]

Bernicot, Josie and Virginie Laval. 1996. Promises in French children: Comprehension and metapragmatic knowledge. Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1) : 101–122.
Publication type
Article in journal
Publication language
English
Language as a subject
Place, Publisher
Elsevier
ISBN
0378-2166

Annotation

This study sets out to determine how French children's comprehension of promises and their corresponding metapragmatic knowledge is affected by (non-)satisfaction of the preparatory and/or the sincerity condition, and by the linguistic form of the statement. Interpreted in the light of functionalist and interactionist theories of development, the results show that: by the age of 3, both conditions are used to comprehend promises; children's metapragmatic knowledge depends on the satisfaction of the conditions and changes with age; the statement's linguistic form has little effect on promise understanding.