| Pragmatic competence refers to the ability to properly express and understand the ideas and intentions in specific context. Therefore, the study of pragmatic competence relies on the principles of pragmatics. Based on the previous studies of pragmatic competence and child language acquisition, this study analyzes pragmatic competence of 4-6 year-old children under the guidance of cooperative principle(CP) and politeness principle(PP).More than 40,000 Chinese characters text is collected from the TV talk show Chaotongtianxia(潮童天下),which is a program for Chinese children.The collected text is mainly used for qualitative analysis,and some statistics are also presented for quantitative analysis.It has been found from the research that children tend to violate cooperative principle in 1) quality maxim(most often), 2) relation maxim(often), 3) manner maxim(sometimes) and 4) quantity maxim(sometimes). They tend to violate politeness principle in 1) approbation maxim(most often), 2) modesty maxim(often), 3) tact and agreement maxims(sometimes), generosity maxim(occasionally) and sympathy maxim(none).From the findings above, it is concluded that children’s pragmatic competence bears some characteristics such as 1) unconscious violation of pragmatic principles, 2) poor identification and comprehension of context,3) inadequate linguistic capability, and 4) lack of social knowledge.Some limitations are embedded in the study, most obvious of which is the sole source of data. It would be better if the research is supported by some original evidence from direct contact with children. Besides, classification of some violations may be held to be debatable. |
