Gratitude is conceptualized as a moral affect that is analogous to other moral emotions such as empathy and guilt. Gratitude has 3 functions that can be conceptualized as morally relevant: (a) a moral barometer function (i.e., it is a response to the perception that one has been the beneficiary of another person's moral actions); (b) a moral motive function (i.e., it motivates the grateful person to behave prosocially toward the benefactor and other people); and (c) a moral reinforcer function (i.e., when expressed, it encourages benefactors to behave morally in the future). The personality and social factors that are associated with gratitude are also consistent with a conceptualization of gratitude as an affect that is relevant to people's cognitions and behaviors in the moral domain.

Is gratitude a moral affect

Drawing upon recent research findings and upon a case study of a child learning to talk and to read, Catherine Snow outlines the important similarities in the development of both language and literacy. The characteristics of parent-child interaction which support language acquisition—semantic contingency, scaffolding, accountability procedures, and the use of routines—also facilitate early reading and writing development. The author dismisses the explanation that variations in the level of literacy in the home are responsible for social class differences in school achievement. To explain such differences, Snow emphasizes distinctive ways in which middle-class families prepare preschoolers to understand and produce decontextualized language.

Literacy and Language: Relationships during the Preschool Years

Linguistic politeness:: Current research issues☆

Unlike other areas of second language study, which are primarily concerned with acquisitional patterns of interlanguage knowledge over time, most studies in interlanguage pragmatics have focused on second language use rather than second language learning. The aim of this paper is to profile interlanguage pragmatics as an area of inquiry in second language acquisition research, by reviewing existing studies with a focus on learning, examining research findings in interlanguage pragmatics that shed light on some basic questions in SLA, exploring cognitive and social-psychological theories that might offer explanations of different aspects of pragmatic development, and proposing a research agenda for the study of interlanguage pragmatics with a developmental perspective that will tie it more closely to other areas of SLA.

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Developmental Issues in Interlanguage Pragmatics

This paper reports the results of an exploratory cross-sectional study of pragmatic
 development among three groups of primary school students in Hong Kong who completed a
 cartoon oral production task (COPT) designed to elicit requests, apologies, and compliment
 responses. The first two of these speech acts are among the most well represented in the
 pragmatics literature and are also included in the Hong Kong English language syllabus for
 primary schools. The latter has also been studied extensively but is not part of the syllabus. Data
 was collected in Cantonese using the same instrument. Although a number of developmental
 patterns are revealed—particularly in choice of request strategy, frequency of supportive
 moves, and use of adjuncts with apologies and compliment responses—there is little
 evidence of sensitivity to situational variation or pragmatic transfer from Cantonese. This study
 adds to the small, but growing, body of research on pragmatic development in a second
 language.

An exploratory cross-sectional study of interlanguage pragmatic development

This study examines the use of politeness routines at the dinner table in the homes of eight middle‐class American families with preschool‐age children. Politeness routines, for example please, thank you, may I please be excused, were used pervasively. In addition, in six of the eight families parents used routinized prompts for eliciting politeness from their children, for example, What do you say? and What's the magic word? The discussion considers the acquisition of routines not only as social markers and as evidence of linguistic socialization, but as having a linguistic function as well. Adults provide children with their earliest lessons in stylistic variation when they insist that the children change the form of their utterances to more polite variants (routines; politeness formulas: linguistic socialization; parental teaching; stylistic variation; developmental pragmatics).

What's the magic word: Learning language through politeness routines∗

Developmental perspectives on politeness

The Neglected Role of Fathers in Children's Communicative Development

Why Routines Are Different: Toward a Multiple-Factors Model of the Relation between Input and Language Acquisition

This chapter argues that a fuller understanding of language acquisition requires a model of language competence which is broader than the one traditionally held by linguists. It considers first speech to children and then turn to children’s learning of linguistic variation. Children, when they acquire language, acquire, along with the basic grammatical and lexical features, many special social markers that indicate such things as their sex, status and social class. One of the first kinds of contextual signals to which children become sensitive involves characteristics of the person with whom they are speaking. Pragmatic considerations may also affect the way speech is structured. It is necessary to determine the communicative intent of a particular interaction before selecting the appropriate linguistic devices. The social, communicative function of language has to be more broadly defined to include skills other than the ability to convey obscure information to invisible listeners.

Rivka Y. Perlmann

Papers

What's the magic word: Learning language through politeness routines∗

Developmental perspectives on politeness

The Neglected Role of Fathers in Children's Communicative Development

Why Routines Are Different: Toward a Multiple-Factors Model of the Relation between Input and Language Acquisition

Acquiring Social Variation in Speech