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In:Pragmatic Development in First Language Acquisition
Edited by Danielle Matthews
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 10] 2014
► pp. 87–104

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Ontogenetic Constraints on Grice’s Theory of Communication

Published online: 26 June 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.10.06moo
For a number of reasons Paul Grice’s account of the nature of intentional communication has often been supposed to be cognitively too complex to work as an account of the communicative interactions of pre-verbal children. Here I review a number of different formulations of this problem, and responses to this problem that others have developed. These include Relevance Theory (by Sperber and Wilson, Section 4.1.1), Pedagogy Theory (by Gergely and Csibra, Section 4.1.2), and recent work on Expressive Communication (by Green and Bar-On). I also discuss my own response to the challenge of Gricean communication (Section 4.2).
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