ABSTRACT
A major developmental task in the domain of pragmatics is learning to use speech for the performance of such social-communicative acts. The taxonomy of verbal-communicative acts proposed by Ninio and Wheeler represents an attempt to classify speech acts based on how an utterance relates to its context. Data from studies using these coding systems are difficult to compare with studies on older children's more complex communicative systems. In investigating the development of the speech-act system in children, the first problem is to decide what child behaviors to consider instances of meaningful, intentional communication, and the second is to decide which intentional communications are linguistic, that is, conventional. Responses are reactions to openers; the system distinguishes between positive and negative responses whenever the distinction is appropriate, in terms of whether the responder goes along with or opposes the initiative of the first speaker.
