Development of directives in child language - A case study of Czech

Abstract

In this article, the longitudinal development of directives in first language acquisition is described, and examples of the development of directive speech acts in one Czech child from the ages of 2.8 to 4.1 are included. The results show that the child acquires communicative strategies gradually and that he usually prefers one concrete strategy initially, which is later replaced by a new strategy corresponding with the acquisition of morphological categories.

Keywords

• requests
• directives
• developmental psycholinguistics
• child language
• first language acquisition
• politeness