ABSTRACT
This chapter compares one aspect of children's pragmatic skills and metapragmatic understanding: namely, their production of commissive speech acts and their judgment of speech acts as examples of promising. It begins by examining speech act theory, with particular reference to Searle's analysis of promising. Speech acts are things we do with words, such as promising, questioning, ordering, advising, and so on. The adults in these studies presumably could also produce promises. Interesting studies have addressed pragmatic and metapragmatic questions in the same investigation, comparing children's productions and their judgments. The clearest sign of children's developing metapragmatic awareness of the conditions governing promising is seen in the change with age in their responses to the prediction stories. From an early age children can follow the pragmatic rules and perform the speech act. This metapragmatic ability develops later in the childhood, at about 10 years of age.
