A Puzzle About Please: Repair, Increments, and Related Matters in the Speech of a Young Child

Abstract

Children can be required to add please either to their request or to an affirmative response that they make to an offer. Sometimes children as young as 2 years spontaneously add this term after the completion of their turn without being required to do so. In this article, I examine a small number of such instances and situate them within the child's repertoire of skills that have a bearing on this phenomenon—the child's capacity to add increments to a turn after turn ending, the interpretations that the child can place on pauses that occur after turn ending, and the child's techniques for carrying out self-repair on something he or she has just said.

I thank Juliette Corrin and GarethWalker for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Notes

I thank Juliette Corrin and GarethWalker for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

There is a relevant broader literature on children's requests in the preschool years, much of it dating from research in the 1970s and 1980s. For a useful synopsis of this in the 2- to 4-year age range, see Ervin-Tripp and Gordon (1986, pp.73–78). This literature also identifies various kinds of turn that can occur within the sequences in which requests occur. Both Garvey (1975) and Gordon and Ervin-Tripp (1984) show that the child can use what they call “adjuncts” immediately after a request—for example, okay in Do the rest of that, okay?, and I need that in Gimme that, I need that. However, their discussions do not include reference to the kind of please usage that one finds in Extract (1), which in their terms might be viewed as a kind of delayed adjunct. Nor is this usage been identified in analyses of politeness terms spoken by children of this age (notably, Berko Gleason, Perlmann, & Greif, 1984).

I realize that in (4) the parental offer is responsive to the child's pass of the gates toward him, that the offer is here responsive to a request-like action. Although this is technically a request sequence, this is not material to my immediate argument. Offers can occur in this sequential environment, although they can also occur in other environments in which the offerer has no direct evidence that the child currently wants what is to be offered. Some facets of the intelligibility of adult offers to developmentally younger children have been addressed in Zukow, Reilly, and Greenfield (1982) and Wootton (1991), but the parameters of concern here, to my knowledge, have not been investigated in the literature on children.

Walker (2004) also made reference to detailed articulatory characteristics, although in his analysis these turn out to be of more marginal significance than the parameters identified in the text. I have found the rate of articulation difficult to assess on an auditory basis, especially given the brevity of some of the relevant pieces of talk. So it is quite possible that instrumental analysis might reveal further orders of systematicity to those mentioned in the text. Walker also used the adjective phonetic rather than my prosodic to describe such parameters, a preference embedded in linguistic issues that are beyond the scope of this discussion.

In using the term recompleting here I am not meaning to claim that the relevant increments fall into the class of devices referred to as “recompleters” by Sacks et al. (1974, p. 718) in the context of their discussion about turn taking. For example, the increment in Extract (7) occurs after a place where next speaker selection and turn completion have clearly taken place; the increment is not being used to transform a turn into one in which next speaker selection is more transparent—as I discuss later, the point of this increment is to pursue a response to a turn that, although designed for a fitted form of response, has not yet attracted one.

For readers unfamiliar with the notion of adjacency pairs, see Heritage (1984, pp. 245–260) for a clear secondary account.

At these ages, the child makes much use of the word better in environments in which there is already a transparent tension between lines of action that she and her recipient want to pursue. Another example is provided below in which this word is used twice in such an environment. Her usage of this word to modify the verb in line 10 of Extract (11) and in “I better put them on top” following seems to invoke some further order of justification for her preferred line of action and thus represents a way of recognizing the controversial status of this action:

ACW/age 2;3

Child sits on the floor, with father lying on the floor close by. They are playing with animal figures, putting them in a pretend farmyard. The child has just put a rabbit figure on top of a “wall”:

F: Put them behind the wall.

(2.0)

Ch: /ə/ go on to:p?

(.7)

F: Oh:.=°but-

(1.3)

F: Well put them behind the wall and see what they look like there.

(.9)

Ch: ↑I better put 'em on top. ((+ moves her rh, palm down, into a hovering position

above the rabbits, as though to touch them, but not in

fact doing so; this gesture withdrawn on the word “top”))

F: (°O[h:.)

Ch: [And make it better. ((no gesture here, though she glances towards F's

face on the word “better”))

“And make it better” is also a further example of an incremental addition to the child's prior TCU, although in this case its prosody does not redo the prosody in the later part of the prior TCU. In this respect, it resembles the “Please” in Extracts (4) and (16) rather than the increments in (6) and (7).

Interest in spontaneous self-repair in children of about this age within the child language literature originally focused around the work of Clark (1982). For Clark, the occurrence of such repair hinged on children's language comprehension generally being in advance of their production skills. Comprehension implied stored knowledge about the adult language, so in the process of self-repair the child was editing her or his own flawed production in the light of this stored knowledge. If this were true then one might expect, for example, that the revisions of their talk produced by children would be grammatical improvements on the talk that they were repairing. However, such predictions have not been consistently supported in related research (see especially Shatz & Ebeling, 1991). The influential work of Karmiloff-Smith (1986) on repair relates to older children, aged 4 and above, and is principally concerned with what self-repair processes can reveal as to how and when the child develops a grasp of underlying properties of his or her linguistic system.

Other studies that examine ways that children of this age receipt repair initiators include Golinkoff (1986), Becker (1988), Shatz and Watson O'Reilly (1990), and Marcos (1991).

Berko Gleason et al. (1984) make a related point when they say that when a parent insists on the child using please, “the parent has indicated to the child just that class of utterances that will ultimately require special treatment” (p. 499), although they use this observation principally to suggest that the creation of pragmatic awareness in this manner precedes the child's spontaneous use of please.

For further points on the significance of the environments in which parents choose to elicit such repair, see Wootton (1997, p. 181). In Extract (14), the child's smile when she says “please” is a matter of some interest. The sequential position in which the child is required to make a politeness repair in response to some repair initiator from the parent is one that systematically attracts forms of response by the child that are shaped so as to reveal emotional displays. Especially as children get a little older, this position can be occupied with highly creative and idiosyncratic ways of saying please—as well, of course, as ways that make it clear that it is the parent's request for the child to say the word that is egregious rather than the omission of this word by the child. When it is clear to the child that, and how, she or he is expected to reply, she or he quickly learns nonstraightforward and strategic ways of dealing with this.

There is no instance of the child using please as a plead in the video recordings made of her up to and including the age of 3;1.

It remains the case, though, that such sequences still contain the potential for discussion of the correct application of such knowledge in particular instances, for forms of self-repair that orient to ambiguities of application and suchlike. In an audio recording of a 4-year-old, for example, one finds an interesting self-repair from “Yes thankyou” to “Yes please”:

Child is upstairs in the toilet; his mother downstairs. She calls up the stairs to him about whether it is time for her to come and help him:

M: Can I come up now David

(.)

Ch: No:::

(.)

M: Alright

(1.2)

Ch: Ye::s

(2.2)

M: ↑Pardon?

(.)

Ch: Ye:::s

(.6)

M: Yes what

Ch: Yes thankyou

(2.1)

Ch: Ye:s please

This must also be a puzzle within frameworks of analysis adopted by other writers on this subject. For example, Ervin-Tripp and Gordon (1986, p. 71) argue that the child reserves simple politeness markers (which for them include sentential frames such as Can I …' as well as please) for use when the cooperation of the addressee cannot be presumed. The circumstances in Extracts (4) and (16) would thus seem inappropriate for the use of please in that in (4), the cooperation of the addressee is assured, and in (16), it is not required.

An alternative account might be that the child herself simply happened to recognize the noticeable incompleteness of her prior turn, that irrespective of what the parent did after her prior turn the child came to recognize the limitations of what she had just said, and that this was not specifically cued by the parental nonprogression of the talk. On such a view, the display of such a recognition by the child might be aided by the absence of any sequential pressure on her to take a next action and by the creation of an opportunity space for exhibiting such a recognition brought about through the nonreply of the parent. On such an account, the noticeability of the absence to the child would still rely on her using her generic knowledge about the distribution of please within such sequences to locate the absence; but if it were true one might expect to find instances of the child adding pleases in the transition space immediately after the end of the prior TCU, whereas in the (admittedly few) cases of the core phenomenon such additions take place after a more substantial pause.