Usvajanje lingvističkih markera učtivosti u predškolskoj dobi: analiza govornog čina zahtjeva i odbijanja
The Acquisition of Linguistic Politeness Markers in a Pre-School Age: The Analysis of Requests and Refusals

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the topic of the acquisition of some linguistic politeness markers in Serbian and Italian. The corpus we have analyzed consists of spontaneous language production by children of a pre-school age. The analysis is largely based on the traditional politeness model established by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) and on the concept of face in interpersonal communication. After presenting the theoretical model applied in the analysis, we continue with a qualitative analysis of selected parts of the corpus. We concentrate on mitigation strategies of potentially offensive speech acts, requests, and the act of refusing, and on the way in which children and the adults around them behave towards the interlocutor’s face. The main hypothesis is that children do not produce the same markers as adults, and that adults do not have the same expectations from children. The current research shows that children up to the age of two and a half do understand markers used by adults, but they neither use the same markers as adults nor are they autonomous in their production. This research can further be used in contrastive analysis, but also in other research concerning pragmatics, sociolinguistics or sociology.

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