The development of communicative background: nonverbal interactions and speech acts

Developmental psychologists working on communication often consider that the concept of speech act is suitable to explain the transition from preverbal to verbal communication in children. In this paper I intend to show that this concept, which is useful to classify different illocutionary forces, is not fit to be used within a cognitive theory of communicative development. Theoretical Framework Cognitive psychologists working on the development of communication have often shown a remarkable interest for the concept of speech act (Dore, 1974; Bates, Camaioni & Volterra, 1975; Bruner, 1975, 1983; Ninio & Snow, 1996; Snow et al., 1996). The reason for the success of this concept among developmental psychologists is that it is thought to be suitable to explain the transition from preverbal to verbal communication in children. According to speech act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969) at the basis of communication there are illocutionary acts. Illocutionary acts are primitive acts where the conventional aspect deriving from language and the cognitive aspect expressed by communicative intentions conflate in a single phenomenon. The main tenet of developmental psychologists working on communication is that language cannot be reduced to grammar. Even if one accepts the Chomskyan point of view on the acquisition of grammar, one has still to explain how children learn to use language for their communicative goals. The interest of speech acts is then precisely that they include linguistic and communicative features. During the preverbal phase children in their interactions with adults receive “speech act lessons” (Bruner, 1983). Developmental psychologists who make use of the concept of speech act are not much concerned with all the problematic aspects of this concept which have caused an intense debate in the domain of pragmatics (Levinson, 1983). This, in spite of the fact that the difficulties appear most clearly precisely in the developmental domain: in particular the treatment of indirect speech acts and the relation between speech acts and conversation. Another important problem is represented by the fact that the acquisition of different speech acts requires different representational capacities (Astington, 1988). Camaioni (1993) has maintained that studies on nonhuman primates and autistic children show that even the interpretation of proto-imperatives and proto-declaratives, the two most basic speech acts, is based on different processes. I will argue that the concept of speech act is not fit to be included into a cognitive theory of the development of communication for at least three reasons: it is a linguistic concept and cannot account for nonlinguistic communication it does not allow to give account of the main feature of communication which is sharedness it does not allow to distinguish between behavioral and conversational aspects of communication. Speech Acts and Developmental Pragmatics Speech acts, according to Searle (1969) are acts characteristically performed by uttering expressions in accordance with sets of constitutive rules. This point has been cricized in AI literature (Cohen and Levesque, 1990; Perrault, 1990). The main argument of these authors is that illocution can be derived from more basic acts. This is motivated by the fact that if felicity conditions are clustered together in an apparently arbitrary way, on the contrary, it is possible to show that such conditions are not independent of each other, but are logically related through general principles of rational action. Moreover, there is no easy way of assigning an illocutionary force to an utterance; therefore, the recognition of an illocutionary act is a very complex task. Within the field of pragmatics it has been claimed that speech act theory, being a way to analyze and classify illocutionary forces and how they are attached to determined linguistic expressions cannot be regarded as a pragmatic theory (Dascal, 1992). The position has then emerged that the interpretation of speech acts demands their inclusion within a Gricean theory of intentional communication. Searle had granted this for indirect speech acts. However, if speech acts have to be interpreted not in isolation but within conversation, the analysis of communicative intentions is always required (Airenti, Bara & Colombetti, 1993). Actually, in recent work on the acquisition of speech acts the insufficiency of analysis at the speech act level has been acknowledged. Papafragou (2000) has argued that speech act theory cannot be the basis of a plausible account of developmental data. Ninio and Snow (1996) consider that 1 There is here a problem of terminology. Declaratives can be assimilated to those acts that in Searle’s taxonomy are called representatives. what is in common between preverbal communication and verbal communication is at the level of social interactions where interpersonal intentions are socially constructed. Snow et al. (1996) in their study on children of 14, 20, 32 months identify and codify communicative intents at two levels: verbal interchange and utterance. The first is a conversational criterion which goes beyond single speech acts: for instance, directing hearer’s attention, negotiating immediate activity, discussing joint focus. Their results are in a way surprising: at 14 months no speech act was used by more than a third of children. The 14-month-olds tried to communicate with their parents relatively infrequently, even when gestures and nonverbal vocalization were included. The authors contend that it was only by introducing the distinction between social/communicative activity or context and the specific speech act expressed that the continuity between children’s early and later communicative behavior was observable. These points of view are opposed to the classical one expressed by Dore (1978) who relying on the definition of speech act given within Searle’s theory where a linguistic component is included, does not accept the equation between nonverbal communicative acts and proper illocutionary acts. Dore thinks that there is discontinuity between preverbal communication based on gestures, intonation, etc. and linguistic communication. So in developmental research we remain with three positions. One uses the concept of speech act to postulate continuity between preverbal and verbal communication using a concept of speech act which ignores all the problems that the concept involves, including the fact that a speech act is by definition speech. A second position, takes the definition of speech act in a serious way and denies the possibility of nonverbal speech acts. So it postulates a discontinuity between preverbal and verbal communication. A third position takes the concept of speech act but it includes speech acts within the context of social interactions. My perspective is that there is no reason to consider this concept at the basis of the development of pragmatics. An alternative approach can be proposed. This approach aims to identify a continuity in the interpretation of the speaker’s meaning both in the preverbal phase and in the different stages of the verbal phase. Nonverbal and Verbal Speech Acts Speech acts have been introduced to account for the action component of language. Is it reasonable to extend a linguistic concept to nonverbal communication? What is a speech act without speech? According to Searle a speech act is defined by its constitutive rules. These are what, following Bruner, a child acquires before language. But these rules define what a speech act should ideally be. To take the example of a request, we cannot ask for something if we know that the other person could not provide it (preparatory condition), and we can ask for something only if we really want it (sincerity condition). In reality, as any other speech act, a request is submitted to our communicative aims. For instance, Othello when asking Desdemona to show the handkerchief he has offered to her is not sincere in his request and knows that the request cannot be met. This is a case where the speaker hides his real goal which is to force Desdemona to confess her presumed betrayal. But these two conditions can also be contradicted in an open way. A lover may say “I will get all the stars for you” to communicate a love beyond reality limits, but actor and partner obviously share the knowledge that the conditions of this promise are not satisfied. Therefore, only if we consider speech acts from the linguistic point of view, i.e. in their literal form and in isolation, we can define them in terms of their constitutive rules. In a sense this is admitted also by Searle (1983) who proposes a distinction between representative intentionality and communicative intentionality, where communicative intentionality is the speaker’s intention that the hearer acknowledges that a given speech act has been performed with representative intentionality. This is what allows, according to Searle to give account of deceit. In fact, Othello communicates his intention to represent a speech act of request involving sincerity. He has not to be sincere himself. Then, if we consider speech acts with their constitutive conditions they are not communicative devices; if we put them inside the process of intentional communication, the main point is how speech acts, independently of their constitutive conditions are used for communicative aims. So a distinction needs to be made between the conventional linguistic component and the component devoted to the expression of communicative intentions. At this point we could make use of a different terminology and state that human interactions are made of communicative acts which at the beginning are nonlinguistic and later can be either linguistic or not. Note that Searle’s model of speech acts cannot be simply substituted by Grice’s theory of communicative intentions (Grice, 1957). Grice’s theory of nonnatural meaning involves higher level repr