Quick questions on Functions and pragmatic development: what children use language to do - OCR A-Level English Language

Halliday's functional account gives you a precise vocabulary for what children use language to do. The functions are:

The commonest weakness in pragmatic analysis is treating the transcript as a list of child utterances rather than an interaction. Conversation has structure, turns, adjacency pairs, topics, and the caregiver scaffolds the child's developing competence. Read the exchange as a whole, analysing how the child participates and how the caregiver supports them (AO3).

"The child's 'no bed' performs a regulatory function, an attempt to control the caregiver's behaviour and resist the routine, while 'what dat?' is heuristic, language used to find out about the world. The range of functions in a short exchange, regulatory, heuristic and, in 'love you', interactional, shows a child using language across several of Halliday's purposes, evidence of functional development beyond simply naming."

"The exchange shows emerging conversational competence: the child takes turns in response to the caregiver's questions, completing the adjacency pairs ('where's teddy?' / 'there'), though the caregiver does much of the work of holding the topic and prompting the next turn. The child's single 'please', modelled in the caregiver's prior turn, marks the early acquisition of politeness through scaffolding."

Name three of Halliday's functions of early language. [2 marks]

What is an adjacency pair, and why analyse it in child data? [2 marks]

Using a transcript, analyse the functions the child's language performs and what they show about pragmatic development. [16 marks]