POLITENESS AND PERSUASION IN CHILDRENS CONTROL ACTS

It is theoretically possible to separate the study of politeness into the analysis of social indices, social tactics, and persuasion. The finely graded polite forms even in non face-threatening contexts in Asian languages and the form distinctions in children's role and doll play testify to the conceptual separability of politeness as a social index from intentional dynamics. In turn, tactics directed at persuading the addressee to comply can be distinguished from social tactics which are addressed to social relations. The present study is based on a corpus of 1369 acts intended to control the behavior of others produced by children aged 2 through 11. The children were videotaped in their homes repeatedly with family and friends. By three, children in the study differentiated addressees and owners of desired goods by formal features; by four they tried to remedy failures by social tactics and justifications, and by five they increased politeness in correlation with intrusiveness or costs of demands as Brown and Levinson (1987) would expect. In older children these tactics diminished. Since politeness resulted in a higher adult refusal rate, polite forms by the young children to adults cannot be considered to be directly related to, or learned from, success in persuasion. © 1990.