Palgrave. SPEECH ACTS IN CHILDREN: THE EXAMPLE OF PROMISES

Promises are central to human exchanges, especially in adult-child interactions. They consist of a commitment on the part of the speaker to perform a future act, as in "je promets de ranger ma chambre " ("I promise to clean my room"). For the past ten years, we have been investigating promise comprehension among children from the point of view that language is a communication system and that language competence is the acquisition and use of that system. The emphasis is therefore placed on the functional aspects of language (Bates, 1976; Bruner, 1983; Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan, 1977; Halliday, 1985; Ninio & Snow, 1996; Tomasello, 2000). It has been shown in this perspective that interaction formats or routines (prototypical exemplars of social relations) are very important for young children (Bernicot, 1994; Marcos & Bernicot, 1994; 1997). Some of the questions that we have been addressing are the following: How do children understand utterances that express a promise? How does their comprehension evolve with age? What cues do children use to interpret utterances expressing promises? Do they consider contextual cues, such as the listener's wishes about the accomplishment of an action (Bernicot and Laval, 1996) or do they rely on textual cues such as the utterance's linguisti