ASSENT AND COMPLIANCE IN CHILDREN'S LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION 
David R. Olson 
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education 
Toronto, Canada 
Abstract 
It is conventional to treat the meaning of an utter- 
ance in a discourse in terms of two components, the 
propositional and the pragmatic or speech act com- 
ponent, the first indicating the meaning of the 
sentence, the second indicating its intended use by 
the speaker. Some arguments and evidence are pre- 
sented to show that these two systems are interde- 
pendent. Roughly, it appears that social considera- 
tions, primarily status, determine which aspects of 
a proposition are lexicalized in the utterance. 
Thus, a child with high status relative to his inter- 
locutor may use a command, "Give me a block", while 
if he has low status relative to his interlocutor 
he may use a request, "May I have a block?" If he 
is an equal, a peer, (and perhaps only then) he will 
use an explicit true proposition such as, "You have 
two more than me". Only inthis third case is the 
propositional meaning explicit in the sentence per 
se, and only in this case is an affirmative or 
negative response dependent strictly upon truth con- 
ditions (on assent rather than compliance). 
This concept of the social aspects of meaning is 
examined through an analysis of what is said vs. 
what is meant in some child-child and teacher-child 
conversations. 
Theories of human cognition have gradually ad- 
justed their accounts of perception and of know- 
ledge to the fact that neither perception nor 
knowledge are simple copies of the environmental 
events that occasion them. Bruner's 0957) "New 
Look" in perception, which was devoted to showing 
the role of hypotheses, expectancies and set on 
the processes of perceptual recognition along 
with Bartlett's (1977) analyses of the role of 
"schema" in remembering helped to relativize the 
accounts of the relation between stimulus and 
perception or between reality and knowledge. 
Now, however, we are asked to make our accounts 
of human cognition even more relative as not only 
to innate categories, and to expectancies based on 
Paper prepared for Theoretical Issues in Natural 
Language Processing (TINLAP-2). Urhana, University 
of Illinois, July 25-Z7, 1978. I am indebted to Ed 
Sullivan and Frank Smith for our lively discussions 
of these issues, and to Canada Council for support. 
prior experience, but rather to the social relations 
in which those knowledge structures are constructed. 
Theories advanced under the banner of the "socio- 
logy of knowledge" have claimed that the structures 
of knowledge and perception reflect the organizing 
properties of the social system in which the exper- 
iences occur and are assimilated. 
This line of argument is usually attributed to Durk- 
helm. According to his biographer Steven Lukes 
(1975) the cognitive processes reflect directly the 
social and political structures of a society. "Con- 
ceptual thought, was," Durkheim claimed, "social 
and nothing but an extension of society" (Lukes, 
1973, pp. 23-24) and again, "Logical life has its 
first source in society" (Lukes, 1973, p. 441). 
In an admirable collection of essays and monographs, 
I~ry Douglas (1975) takes up and extends the Durk- 
heimian view. With Durkheim, she claims that: 
"...ideas rest on classification. Ultimately any 
form of knowledge depend on principles of classi- 
fication. But these principles arise out of social 
experience, sustain a given social pattern and 
themselves are sustained by it. If this guideline 
and base is grossly disturbed, knowledge itself 
is at risk" (p. 245). Specifically, she argues that 
the discriminating principles as to what is clean 
and what is polluted and what generally is "against 
nature" is derived from social structure. Nature 
is classified in such a way as to uphold the social 
order--thus in a social order in which men are 
status-dominant over women and children it seems 
only natural that women and children be assigned 
low-status duties such as dish-washing. 
Taken in their boldest form, these theories argue 
that knowledge is socially constructed; there are 
close ties between the social order and the concep- 
tual order. But how does this social order affect, 
come to be affected, or otherwise interact with 
the conceptual order? 
Most of the theories which attempt to relate social 
structures to cognitive ones have postulated symbols 
as the mediating link. Symbols are culturally de- 
signed and they are acquired by children for use 
in communication and for the interpretation of 
experienee. But where in a symbol system, such as 
language, shall we look for evidence of their 
relation to social structures? The best known 
of these theories of this relation such as those 
i15 
of Vygotsky (1962), Bruner (1966) or Whorf (1956) have 
tried to isolate the social constraints on the se- 
mantic, propositional side of language rather than 
the social, interpersonal or pragmatic side of lan- 
guage. In so doing they followed the then-predomin- 
ant focus of linguistic and semiotic theory. 
Theories of symbols have tended to emphasize the 
semantic, denotative or referential side of meaning 
at the expense of the social, pragmatic or infer- 
personal side of meaning. In his classical treat- 
ment of symbol systems, Nelson Goodman (1968) focus- 
ed exclusively on the objective or informative or 
semantic aspects of symbols, that is, the relation 
that exists between the symbol and the event it re- 
presents, denotes, expresses or exemplifies. 
Chomsky (1972, p. 24) too, focuses on the logical 
or semantic aspects of meaning--that aspect of 
meaning which is invariant across the various func- 
tions to which a sentence may be put, in his theory 
of language. Studies of language and cognition 
have similarly focused on labels and on grammatical 
relations in their attempts to find the relations 
between language and thinking. Hence Durkheim 
looked at classification systems, Vygotsky looked 
at the superordinate categories, and "scientific 
concepts", Bruner and Greenfield looked in the 
structure of adjectives, Cole and Scrihner looked 
in the structure of logical inferences and so on 
for evidence of social-cultural differences. And 
indeed some indications of social differences have 
shown up in those studies although they tend to 
reflect simply degrees of familiarity with a certain 
approach to problems primarily, "learning to con- 
fine interpretation to the text" (Olson and Nicker- 
son, 1978). 
There is however a second dimension of language 
which has been brought to the fore by recent analy- 
sis of the functions of language under the rubric of 
speech act theory. Sentences are now considered 
and analyzed both in terms of the propositional 
content of the sentence, traditionally the seman~ 
tics or meanings of the language, and the pragma- 
tic function, what one is attempting to do by 
means of that sentence--promising, convincing, 
commanding, requesting, stating and the like. 
Searle (1969) following Austin (1962) differentiates 
propositional acts of referring and predicating 
from illocationary acts or stating, questioning, 
commamding, promising and so on. The same refer- 
ence and predication can occur in the performance 
of completely different speech acts as in Searle's 
example: 
i. Sam smokes habitually. 
2. Does Sam smoke habitually? 
3. Sam, smoke habitually~ 
4. Would that Sam smoked habitually. (p. 22). 
Halliday (1970, 1973) too, in his analysis of the 
functions of languages differentiated three primary 
functions of language--the ideational function, the 
interpersonal function and the textual function-- 
which jointly specify the structure of any parti- 
cular utterance or series of utterances. Clark 
and Clark (1977) suggest that speakers and listen- 
ers of the language use two general principles in 
comprehending utterances, the "reality principle" 
and the "cooperative principle". Again note that 
the reality principle has to do with the relation 
between symbol and referent while the latter has to 
do with the relation between speakers. 
Let us try to simply this relationship by means of 
a diagram. Figure I shows the set of relations sus- 
tained by any symbol. 
Logical 
Social: speaker( symbol --9 speaker 
meaning $ 
referent 
Figure i. 
Note first that a symbol simultaneously serves two 
sorts of relations represented in the diagram by 
two dimensions of language--one dimension, repre- 
sented by the horizontal axis in Figure l, is that 
specifying the social relations between speaker/ 
writer and listener/audience; the symbol expresses 
a social relation between speaker and listener. 
And the second dimension, represented by the verti- 
cal axis, is that specifying a relation between 
symbol and meaning or between signifier and signi- 
fied. The first we may call the social or inter- 
personal meaning of a symbol and the second the 
logical meaning of that symbol, linguistic or other- 
wise. 
It is this horizontal dimension, the social one, 
which until recently has not been given its due. Most 
studies of language for example have been devoted 
primarily to the syntactic/semantic meaning of 
words and sentences and the veridical relationships 
between sentences and the situations they represent. 
This is the aspect of language which most weakly 
reflects the social relations. And yet, as I 
mentioned above, this is the dimension of meaning 
that most hypotheses of the Durkheimian sort have 
focused upon. 
It is the horizontal relation, the relations 
between persons that promises to illuminate the 
relations between social and cognitive structures. 
Let us consider what some of these social constra- 
ints on the meaning of a symbol may be. First, 
even the aspect of meaning represented by the 
vertical axis has an important social component. 
To be represented in the language, symbols must 
be socially shared. What gets into the language 
depends upon what others will agree to. Indeed, 
the semantic aspect of language may be important 
partly because it constitutes a relatively undis- 
puted ground for the reaching of social consensus, 
what is coming to be called "intersubjectivit~." 
More recent work on the pragmatics of language, 
the horizontal dimension, and the social relations 
assumed and maintained in the expression of any 
sentence, goes far to put the social dimension of 
language back onto center stage. In the simplest 
case the declaratives "The door is closed" is 
logically related to the con=hand "Open the door" 
and the request "Could you open the door." As 
Searle (1975) would say, the three utterances 
represent the same propositional content yet they 
116 
perform different speech acts: the first, an asser- 
tion, the second, a cormnand and the third, a quest- 
ion serving as a request. While this speech act 
analysis contributes importantly to the view that 
the meaning of a sentence is more than the proposi- 
tion it expresses, that is, it explicates the func- 
tion or pragmatics of language, it seems not to go 
far enough. 
It may be argued that in the above three utterances 
both the propositional content and the pragmatic 
function of the sentences are similar--they all re- 
present the proposition: not (door(open)) and they 
all serve the pragmatic function of A attempting to 
get B to open the door. These sentences which have 
different illocutionary forces as part of their 
"sentence meanings" are being used indirectly to 
perform the same illocutionary act (Searle, 1975, 
p. 71). They vary in their indirectness, and polite- 
ness. 
However, the important point for us to notice is 
that the social relations between the speakers assum- 
ed by the three sentences is entirely different. 
The command assumes that the speaker has superior 
status to the listener, the request assumes a dif- 
ferential inferiority of the speaker and the declar- 
ative assumes, perhaps, the equality of the partici- 
pants. The point I wish to emphasize is that an ut- 
terance is simultaneously doing two things--it is 
specifying the logical relation between symbol and 
referent, the vertical dimension of Figure i, and 
it is specifying a social relation between the inter- 
locutors. Together, they contribute to the meaning 
of the symbol, utterance or expression. However, 
Searle's analysis is above all a theory of language. 
It is less a theory of the social structures that 
those linguistic structures construct and/or sus- 
tain. My concern here is to relate these two sets 
of structures. 
One of the most notable attempts to construct a 
bridge between sociological theory and psycho- 
logical theory of language and the cognitive pro- 
cesses is that of Bernstein and his collaborators 
(1971). Bernstein isolated two patterns of speech 
which, he claimed, mapped on to two social classes. 
The language of working class children he character- 
ized as a restricted code which limited grammatical 
and lexical options, while that of the middle class 
children he characterized as an elaborated code with 
an expanded set of lexical and syntactic options. 
More fundamentally however, he argued that the root 
cause of these linguistic differences could be found 
in the patterns of social relations which held with- 
in each of the family types of the differing social 
classes. Working class familial structures he char- 
acterized as "positional"--a fixed hierarchical 
structure in which authority, responsibility, account- 
ibility and priviledges were assigned on the basis 
of one's position in the family. Middle class 
families he described as person-oriented. Duties 
and priviledges were assigned to various roles, but 
a person was not permanently assigned to a fixed 
role but rather the role was contracted or negoti- 
ated with the other members of the social group. 
Duties, priviledges and responsibilities were as- 
signed by a discussion and contract rather than 
being permanently assigned to particular indivi- 
duals. Social theorists would recognize these 
patterns as essentially '~onarchist" versus "soc- 
ial contract" political structures. In the first 
case the parent with the highest status has the 
right to decree what family members are to do, he 
is awarded respect and he is assigned high status 
duties. Low status individuals are to be obedient 
and to accept responsibility for low status duties. 
In the latter case, such assignments are negotiated. 
These social differences translate directly into 
the linguistic patterns mentioned above. The former, 
relying primarily upon position and status require 
the close observance of status relations and a mini- 
mum of negotiation. For the middle class, the social 
contract requires a high degree of linguistic com- 
petence in negotiating roles, rights, agreements 
and priviledges. Hence the latter can be expected 
to generate an elaborated code. Evidence for this 
theory has generally outweighed evidence against it 
but several writers have attributed the observed 
differences not to linguistic incompetence but to 
the social environments in which the data was 
collected. Labov (1972) for example found that 
speakers of Black English Vernacular were essenti- 
ally as adept with the language when they conver- 
sed with their peers as were white children. Black 
children did especially poorly only when they were 
interviewed by a high-status white teacher/experi- 
menter. 
Bernstein's theory is primarily important for its 
assertion of a direct link between social struc- 
tures and linguistic structures. However the dif- 
ferences should be expected less in the lexical and 
syntactic structures then in the social meanings-- 
in the pragmatics of language. Working class child- 
ren do know the pragmatic options as Mitchell- 
Kernan and Kernan's (1977) interviews make abund~ 
antly clear. However, working class children (more 
generally children from families with a positional, 
heirarchical structure) may be expected to assign 
themselves a low status relative to various authori- 
ties and assign interpretations on the basis of 
those status differentials more so than will middle 
class children. Thus, it may be predicted that if 
sentences which are ambiguous representations of 
speech acts were presented to working class and 
middle class children, the former would tend to 
comply, that is to treat the statement as an indirect 
request--while middle class children would tend to 
assent, that is to treat the statement as ability 
or information questions. To illustrate if asked, 
"Can you ~'elJ me what this is?", working class 
children may comply by responding "A pencil~" 
while middle class children may tend to assent 
by responding "Yes, I canl" 
Generally speaking then, the linguistic options are 
presumably much the same for all speakers. The 
social relations assumed and maintained differ-- 
if you have low status you can expect to be given 
commands--if high, to give them. Many of our 
institutional practices can be seen as keeping 
people in their assigned status positions and 
language may be seen as one such means. 
Nice illustrations of these social-linguistic games 
have been presented by Gumperz (Note 2), Ervin- 
Tripp (1977) and Mitchell-Kernan and Kernan (1977). 
Gumperz reports a conversation between a husband 
and wife in which the husband asks "Where's the 
paper?" and the wife, with some annoyance, replies 
117 
"I'ii get it." The first statement may be interpret- 
ed as either a request for locative information or 
an indirect request that she get him the paper. Her 
recognition of that second possibility, that he, even 
if only in the back of his mind, wanted her to get 
him the paper, was the source of annoyance. 
Mitchell-Kernan and Kernan's (1977) example is even 
more apposite. In the course of a group discussion 
between an experimenter-teacher and a group of children 
one child gave an indirect conlnand to the adult who had 
her foot on a chair: "I want that chair~" with which 
the adult complied. Some of the other children gas- 
ped and said "0-o-o-o Claudia, you gon' let her talk 
to you like that?" (p. 205). The social message is 
obvious. You have to have status to give commands 
and the child did not have this status. The child- 
ren were well aware of that aspect of meaning. 
Mitchell-Kernan cites further examples of precisely 
this social game. Some of the children would try 
commands on other children simply to see if the lis- 
tener would comply. If they complied, the child 
issuing the command would have gained proof of his 
greater social status. When they tabulated the 
frequency of various kinds of "directives", ~iitchell- 
Kernan and Kernan found that addressees who were low- 
er in rank than the speaker received over five times 
as many directives as those higher in rank (p. 203). 
They conclude: "Directives and reactions to them 
were constantly used to define, reaffirm, challenge, 
manipulate, and redefine status and rank. At times 
the directives involved actually served the ordinary 
function of directives--that of requesting goods 
or services--while at the same time, because of 
their frequency of occurrence or the particular form 
they took, served to test the addressee's view of 
the statuses involved" (p. 201). Ervin-Tripp (1977) 
too found a particular social distribution of vari- 
ous forms of directives in her studies of how child- 
ren learn to honor various factors such as age, dom- 
inance, task and familiarity in making requests 
(p. 186). 
As these authors point out, directives are used 
only as instrumental means of carrying out prag- 
matic speech acts suitable to particular inter- 
personal and social conditions but also to accom- 
plish certain interpersonal functions--primarily 
establishing and maintaining a social order, a 
status quo. In using these constructions, the child 
is simultaneously learning two interrelated pic- 
tures of reality--the nature of "objective real- 
ity", that is the propositional or knowledge sy- 
stem, and his place in the social order--that is, 
who has a right to make requests, to issue com- 
mands, and to make true descriptions and so on. 
As argued above, this is because every symbolic 
expression has a value on both of these dimen- 
sions. And I have suggested that these two dimen- 
sions are interdependent; descriptions are more apt 
to he assessed exclusively in terms of their truth 
in some social relations than in others. 
Less direct evidence of the uses of status differ- 
entials in the speech patterns comes from studies 
of language in the classroom. Feldman and Wertsch 
(Note l) reported that teachers in the classroom 
rarely used what they called "stance indicators"-- 
verbs such as may, or should, or wish or hope, 
think or believe or qualifiers such as maybe in their 
classrooms but they frequently used them in their 
speech in the lunchroom. That is, teachers in the 
classroom act as spokesmen for the official public 
view and keep their feelings, aspirations and hesi- 
tancies from display. In their classic studies of 
the language in the classroom Bellack, Kliebard, 
Hyman and Smith (1966) found that a predominant form 
of language in the classroom was of the question- 
answer routines known as the "recitation method." 
Interestingly, it was the teachers who asked the 
questions and it was the children who provided the 
answers. It appears that the right to ask questions 
was a high status perrogative. Furthermore, the 
questions were not simply requests for information. 
The teacher already knew the answer--the point of 
the question was to see if the child knew the 
answer. The question serves primarily as a means 
of holding students accountable for the information 
acquired from reading the text. While the utter- 
ances specify true facts, that is, relations between 
symbols and referents, the form that the proposition 
takes again depends upon the social relations bet- 
ween the interlocutors. 
Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) also found that many 
of the interrogative and declarative sentences used 
by teachers in fact served as imperatives. For 
example, the statement "Somebody's talking," "I see 
chewing gum" were not to be taken as true descrip- 
tions but as indirect commands. They called, as 
we prefer to state it, for compliance rather than 
assent. 
Goody (Note 3) in an interesting study of the forms 
of questioning among the Gonja of Ghana, found that 
questions in that society were not merely means of 
securing information but were primarily reflections 
of the status of the interlocutors. Hence, children 
rarely asked questions, not because they had no need 
for information, but rather because asking 
a question of an adult would be to upset the social 
order. Goody comments: "The securing of information 
becomes secondary to considerations of status 
relations" (p. 42, 1975). 
The surface form of an utterance depends upon both 
the propositional structure and on the pragmatic 
function. All sentences appear to do both simul- 
taneously--as we have suggested the symbol simul- 
taneously stands in a specifiable relation to a 
meaning--it represents a proposition--and in a 
specifiable relation to the speaker and his listener. 
Both of these dimensions my be invariant across 
some set of transformations. Different sentences 
may assert the same proposition, as for example 
active and passive sentences or declaratives and 
questions. Presumably, as well, sentences with 
different propositional content may be used to 
construct or maintain the same social relation 
between interlocutors. There is presumably more 
than one way to be obsequious and more than one 
way to be insubordinate. 
Most theories of the pragmatics of language would 
agree, roughly, to this point. However, even if 
they may be differentiated, it is important to 
notice that those two dimensions, the logical and 
the social are not independent. This point may be 
expressed by the question: What are the condi- 
tions under which an utterance can be judged simply 
or exclusively for its truth value or its proposi- 
tional meaning? And what are the conditions under 
which an utterance will be judged as an order, or 
a request for action? Let us distinguish these two 
118 
criteria for interpretation by means of labels: the 
first, the judgment for truth or falsity we may say 
calls for assent; the second, the response to a 
statement as a call for action, we may say calls for 
compliance. My conjecture is that certain social 
and institutional arrangements lead any particular 
utterance to be regarded as a call for assent while 
others, as a call for compliance. Symmetrically, 
certain social conditions are more likely to gener- 
ate assertions and information questions while others 
generate indirect requests and imperatives. 
We have examined these conjectures in two ways. 
First we have examined some transcripts of children's 
discourse and secondly we have designed three small 
experiments to follow up and clarify some of the 
relations we seem to have isolated in the analysis 
of transcripts. 
Nancy Nickerson has recently collected and begun to 
analyze a series of dialogues between pairs of child- 
ren as they played with toys. We are intersted both 
in the quality of oral expression (in an attempt 
to see in what ways oral language competence is re- 
lated to learning to read) and in the use of state- 
ments, questions and commands in cooperating with 
and controlling the behaviour of peers. Although 
that project is at an early stage, I shall present 
one analysis of a transcript in terms of the model 
described above. This dialogue occurred between two 
Nursery School children named Jamie and Lisa who had 
some difficulty arriving at an equitable distribu- 
tion of a limited resource, namely some dominoes. 
Let us see how they use language to negotiate this 
social problem. 
L: Let's make a domino house out of these 
J: Okay 
First, by grabs. 
J: Lookit how many I got .... You took a couple 
of minel 
L: Now you took a couple .... 
Then by commands. 
L: Now you got to give me three backl 
L: Now give me just one more and then 
we got the same 
And then by requestful declaratives. 
J: Now, you got more than me-e 
And denials. 
L: No-o we got the same 
By fact collecting and inferencing. 
L: (Begins to count her dominoes). One, two, 
three, four .... twenty-eight, twenty-nine 
(Then counts Jamie's dominoes). One, two, 
three, four .... eighteen, nineteen...(short 
pause) twenty-nine. 
J: I got nineteen and you got twenty-nine .... 
You got more than me. 
L: No-o (shouting) I COUNTED .... You have the 
same as me .... We got the same. 
J: NO-O-O 
And when negotiations break down and again by grasp- 
ing. 
(There is a shuffle of dominoes across the 
floor.) 
And finally by appeal to authority. 
L: You got much more than me now 
J: No we got the same 
(Paul, a volunteer teacher, enters the room.) 
L: Does he have much more than me? 
P: Not too many more! 
Note first that almost all of these quite different 
utterances are attempts to alter or preserve the 
social arrangement of two children playing together 
and sharing the limited supply of dominoes. "Now 
you got to give me three back," a command, has the 
same pragmatic function as "Now, you got more than 
me," an assertion standing as an indirect request, 
spoken by the same person. And both speakers appear 
to be aware of the social meaning, namely; that 
the listener should hand over one or more of the 
dominoes, even if in one case it is the explicit 
"give me" and in the other, the implicit "you have 
more." Why then do they use one device rather than 
another? 
We may see how the logical and the social meanings 
interact if we score each sentence for both its 
logical or "truth" meaning, the assent criterion, 
and for its social meaning, the complicance 
criterion. For the logical meaning, true may be 
marked with a '~" and false with a "-". For the 
social meaning, the categories are less obvious. 
We let "+" represent the preservation of any current 
social arrangement, i.e., those not requiring compli- 
ance and "-" represent the realignment of any 
social relationship--statements which require com- 
pliance and call for revolutionary activity, so to 
speak. Now let us examine some fragments of this 
dialogue in this framework. 
Criterion 
J: 
L: 
P: 
Sentence 
"you got 
more than 
me. " 
"No, we 
got the 
same." 
"Not too 
many 
more." 
Assent 
Truth 
Gloss Value 
(Give me + 
some) 
(I don't 
have to) 
(Yes, it.'s + 
true she 
has more 
but she 
does not 
have to 
give you 
any). 
Compliance 
Status-Preserving 
Note that Jamie tells the truth with the hope of re- 
aligning the distribution of dominoes. Lisa, techni- 
cally speaking, tells a lie. (Recall that she was 
the one who counted them). But her denial was not 
merely one of falsehood. She knows that if she 
119 
agrees to the truth of Jamie's statement, she will 
have to turn over some of the blocks. That she 
doesn't want to do so, she denies the statement. My 
guess is that that is what all lies are--tampering 
with truth value for social or personal ends. Truth, 
like falsehood is motivated. 
More than that. Lisa is not denying the truth of 
Jamie's statement simply in the service of social 
ends. Rather, i would guess, she does not know any 
means of simultaneously meeting both the social and 
logical criteria. Paul, the teacher 
does. i\]ote his reply when Jamie appeals to him. 
The presupposition of his sentence is that Lisa has 
more. Rather than deny it, he presupposes it and 
uses his sentence to hold that no redistribution is 
required, presumably on the premise that possession 
is nine-tenths of the law. 
1,~at I would like to suggest from this example is 
that truth conditions are not separated from social 
utility. Claims of truth will be advanced primarily 
if the gaining of assent implies compliance with some 
social goal. Symmetrically, denials of truth will 
be offered if the social consequence of assent are 
perceived to be undesirable. 
It is at this point that social relations enter into 
the language. Micro social orders, small scale tran-; 
saetions, like the one mentioned above, involve the 
solution of small-scale interpersonal problems ~zhich 
must be solved either for individual machiavellian 
goals or for shared social goals. The main problem 
is how to secure compliance, agreement or at least 
to prevent the loss of the status quo (An interest- 
ing expression). That may be done by several means, 
direct action, commanding, pleading, or hard negoti- 
ation on a common ground. Facts are one such ground, 
which as we have seen, are overlooked if they are 
embarassing; authority is another such ground, which 
as we have seen, tries to get involved or take sides. 
i 
Disputes in the larger social order appear to be 
solved on somewhat similar means. As Foucault 
(1971) pointed out, different social orders make 
use of different criteria for truth and hence dif- 
ferent grounds for the legitimation of the social 
order. Authority, the father in a patriarchical or- 
der or the priest in an ecclesiastical order, has 
the power to decide in the case of disputes, as judges 
do in our own courts. Hopefully, they have adequate 
recourse to the truth, but poor judgments carry 
just as much weight as good ones. The decisions 
likely to gain the greatest compliance have both. 
It is interesting to recall in this context the 
wisdom of Solomon. One may wonder if Solomon's 
judgments were considered so good because he was 
so wise or because he happened as well, to be king. 
More likely the stories of his wisdom and justice, 
helped to legitimize the authority that was social- 
ly assigned to him. 
In our own society, great weight is assigned to"truth", 
"facts", "sense data" as objective grounds for mak- 
ing scientific, social and political decisions. As 
long as people believe that truth is ohjective, 
it serves as an important means of "legitimizing" 
a social order (Habermas, 1973). Furthermore the 
establishment of institutions like universities de- 
voted to discovering the "truth" independent of its 
social utility, helps to sustain the view that there 
are such facts and that those facts can be used to 
sustain the social order. (Hence, we may count on 
some continued support even if we were (God forbid) 
unsuccessful in finding any such truths.) 
single argument between two four-year-oids may bein- 
sufficient empirical grounds to sustain a general 
social theory, hence, we have attempted to further 
examine some of these expressions and their inter- 
pretations by experimental means. Angela Hildyard 
recently took some of the statements from our tran~ 
cripts and built them into a series of ten stories. 
Here is one of these: 
One Saturday morning Susie and Kevin 
Jones went to the movies. Their mum 
gave them some money to buy some pop- 
corn. Susie bought a large box and 
they shared it out. When Kevin looked 
at Susie's share he didn't feel too 
happy. "You've got more than me" he 
said. 
The stories describing social predicaments of this 
sort were each followed by a recall test, e.g., 
What did they buy to eat? What did Kevin say? 
The most interesting results came from Kingergarten 
and Grade 2 children's reply to the second questio~ 
lO0 
90 
80 
7O 
.~ 60 
,-I 
m 
5o 
~ 40 
30 
2O 
l0 
0 
/ / 
// 
/ / 
// 
// 
// 
// 
// 
// 
\[\] Jr. Itindergarten 
(4 years) 
\[~ Grade 2 
(7 years) 
Direct 
and 
Indirect 
Requests 
Verbatim Verbatim 
Recall Recall 
(plus (without 
knowledge knowledge 
of of 
indirect indirect 
request) request) 
No 
Response 
Figure 2. The recall of declarative 
statements as given (verbati~ 
and as direct and indirect 
requests by Junior Kinder- 
garten and Grade 2 children. 
Junior kindergarten children (Aged 4 and 5 years), 
when asked what Kevin had said would frequently 
answer with a request or a command, "Can I have 
some?" or "Give me some popcorn." By the second 
120 
grade (Aged 7 and 8), children tended to recall the 
statement verbatim: "You have more than me". When 
further queried as to why he said that, they replied, 
"Because he wanted more". These results are shown in 
Figure 2. The implication of these findings is that 
almost all of the children interpreted the statement, 
"You have more than me" not simply as a true state- 
ment but rather as an indirect request and that inter- 
pretation biased the recall of the younger subjects. 
Older subjects remembered both what was intended 
by the sentence and the means the speaker used, here 
a declarative, true statement, to achieve it. That 
is, the sentence was not interpreted and evaluated 
strictly or even primarily on truth criteria but on 
social ones. And the younger the children, the 
stronger the tendency to treat the sentence as a call 
for compliance and hence to report it as such. 
These findings are similar to those we have obtained 
earlier in our studies of recall and inference from 
stories with children of different a~es in which we 
showed that recall tends to be of "what was meant" 
rather than "what was said" and that with age (and 
schooling) children come to be able to differentiate 
the two (Hildyard and Olson, in press). 
In a further study, ilildyard read the stories, exclud- 
ing the last line, to Kindergarten (age 5) and Grade 2 
(Age 7) children, and adults and asked them to imagine 
what the victim said--in the above story, for example, 
"What do you think Kevin said to Susie?" There 
were two important additional factors. First, the 
child may be either demanding a right--it may be that 
he is asking for his own sock back--or a favor--he 
may be asking for something that actually belongs to 
the other child. Further they could be asking these 
rights or favors of low status individuals, young 
children, or high status individuals, parents and 
teachers. There were 16 subjects at each grade level 
and there were three stories of each type. 
Again, I shall mention only the most interesting 
results. First, favors were much more likely to 
be signalled by a conventionalized request than were 
rights. Over all age levels and item types, the 
favor items were marked by requests 77% of the time 
while rights were so marked only 45% of the time. 
How rights were signalled varied with the age of the 
subjects. The youngest subjects use direct commands 
to their peers and conventionalized requests to 
their parents and teachers. Thus they may say, 
"Give me my sock" to a peer and '~ay I have my gold 
star" (which had been promised) to the teacher. 
Adult subjects, while they use requests for favors, 
rarely use commands in attempts at obtaining their 
rights and tend rather to use declaratives "You have 
my sock", and questions, "Do you know where my sock 
is?" Adults use this device 33% of the time while 
children of both ages use it about 15% of the time. 
Adults, in obtaining their rights also use "legiti~ 
mized requests", requests accompanied by reasons 
more so than do the children. These results are 
presented in Table i. 
Note that in all of these cases, subjects aspired 
to the same goal--either through their direct mean- 
ing or in their indirect meanings they conveyed the 
same illocutionary force. Yet the utterance used 
to express that intention took a different form de- 
pending upon the social relations between the 
participants. Primary among those factors is the 
status relations between them--commands may be is- 
Table i 
The use of various forms of directives as a function 
of the type of request, rights vs. favors, 
and the status relations involved 
i 
Kindergarten Grade 2 Adult Total 
N=I6 N=I6 N=I6 
Use of 
Convention- 
alized Requests 
Favors 86 86 58 
Rights 59 49 27 
Use of 
Commands 
Favors 5 2 i0 
Rights 19 6 14 
Deciaratives 
and Questions 
Favors 7 5 14 
Rights 13 18 33 
Legitimized 
Requests 
Favors i 6 ii 
Rights 5 24 19 
Threats, 
Negotiations, 
Appeals 
Favors 0 0 7 
Rights 0 3 6 
77% 
45% 
6% 
13% 
9% 
21% 
6% 
16% 
3% 
3% 
sued to lower status individuals, requests must be 
issued to superiors even if you are only asking for 
your rights. Secondly, the presumed rights, the 
status quo, determines the form in which that illo- 
cutionary force will be expressed. Favors are 
largely expressed through requests, although 
adults also frequently add reasons, while rights may 
be expressed through commands, occasionally through 
threats, or through the provision of reasons (De- 
claratives and Questions). Ervin-Tripp (1977) has 
recently cited similar results from an unpublished 
study by Sharon James. 
In a third study, Beverly Wolfus gave Kindergarten 
and Grade 2 children a series of direct co,ands 
such as (Tell me what this is~ Put the penny in 
the glassY) and ambiguous ability requests (Can 
you turn over the cup? Could you tell me the name 
of this?), while pointing to a cup or other objects 
and observed how children interpreted and responded 
to them. She was particularly interested in 
whether the children opted for the direct expressed 
meaning or the indirect pragmatic meaning of the 
ambiguous expressions. Thus "Tell me if you can put 
the penny in the glass" could be answered by assent, 
"Yes I can"--the direct meaning--or by compliance, 
by actually putting the penny in the glass--the 
indirect, or pragmatic meaning. When issued direct 
commands, both age groups complied extremely con- 
sistently. Told "Open the book", everyone opened 
the book. To "Tell me what this is" every one 
said, "A pen". 
121 
The differences in the responses to ambiguous ques- 
tions and statements for the two age groups were 
striking. These differences occurred in response 
to the questions and statements which were ambiguous 
between a propositional and a pragmatic interpreta- 
tion, that is ambiguous in their call for assent as 
opposed to compliance. To the statement "Can you 
turn over the cup?" older children would say "Yes", 
that is; assent, younger children would silently turn 
it over, that is, comply. To "Tell me if you can 
put the penny in the glass", older children would 
assent by saying "Yes" or "I can", younger children 
would comply by putting the penny in the cup. To 
"Do you know what this is?" while pointing at a 
penny or a cup, older children would assent by re- 
plying "Yes", young children would comply by reply- 
ing "Penny" or "Cup". To the statement, "The book 
is closed", young children would, more often than 
older children, silently open it, older children 
would not but rather await further information. 
These results are shown in Table 2. 
Table 2 
Assent versus compliance in Kindergarten and 
Grade 2 children's interpretation of sentences 
Assent Compliance Both 
Put the top on the pen. 
Kindergarten 100% 
Grade 2 100% 
Tell me what this is. 
Kindergarten 100% 
Grade 2 100% 
Tell me if you can X. 
Kindergarten 8% 83% 8% 
Grade 2 69% 29% 2% 
Tell me if you know how 
to X. 
Kindergarten 13% 64% 8% 
Grade 2 66% 27% 8% 
Do you know what this 
is? 
Kindergarten 5% 88% 8% 
Grade 2 30% 67% 3% 
Can you turn over the 
cup? 
Kindergarten 8% 64% 24% 
Grade 2 64% 19% 18% 
Do you know how to X? 
Kindergarten 25% ii% 64% 
Grade 2 91% 3% 5% 
The book is closed. 
Kindergarten 73% 20% 
Grade 2 92% 8% 
7% 
Overall, these data show that the younger children 
took every utterance in terms of its expressed or 
implied illocutionary force and complied with it, 
while older children tended to differentiate the 
direct meaning from its indirect illocutionary 
force and respond to the direct meaning. Ervin- 
Tripp (1977), observed a similar affect. When told 
to "Say why don't you stand up" the child said 
"Stand upS" and stood up--that is, he complied. 
Again this indicates that the meaning of the state- 
ment is, at least at the beginning, not simply its 
truth value, although that meaning may be calculated 
as part of its more pragmatic meaning. Rather, the 
sentences are scanned, as it were, for their impli- 
cations for action, and that is what the youngest 
children tend to opt for. Further we can see some 
indication of the transition from compliance to 
assent in the Kindergarten children in the item 
"Do you know how to X?" Here these young subjects 
would first assent and then comply 64% of the time. 
Again, with age or schooling, children begin to 
differentiate the propositional from the pragmatic 
meaning and to be able to respond to either of them. 
However, it appears that this propositional meaning 
is not primary but rather specialized out of a 
primary undifferentiated social pragmatic meaning. 
Note that one of the factors that appears to give 
those simple declarative sentences a powerful il- 
locutionary force for the youngest children is that 
they are spoken by an adult in a school context. 
The child assumes that the adult is not just stating 
or asserting some thing "The book is open" but in- 
directly requesting that something be done about 
it. Given a high status individual in a hierarchi- 
cally structured institutional context, the child 
assumes that any utterance requires compliance not 
assent. 
Let us return, in conclusion, to some of the gener- 
al issues raised at the outset. I have argued that 
all utterances serve both objective (truth) functions 
and social (compliance) functions and that these 
are not independent. Many examples from the studies 
showed that the form which a directive takes de- 
pends upon the status relations between the inter- 
locutors. This is clearly the case for imperatives 
and requests--requests are more likely for privi- 
ledges and imperatives for rights. Requests are 
more likely to higher status individuals and imper- 
atives to lower status individuals. Imperatives 
occur more frequently when children address lower 
status individuals and rationalized questions, de- 
claratives and requests occur more frequently 
in the language of adults. Further the evidence 
showed that almost any form of utterance from a 
high status individual including a declarative 
sentence such as "The book is open" tended to be 
interpreted as an indirect imperative when spoken 
to a lower status individual. That is, the state- 
ment called for compliance rather than assent. 
Our question at this point is whether or not status 
differences, differences in the social relations 
between speakers affect the interpretation of 
statements with the putative status of true des- 
criptions. Generally, are claims of truth inde- 
pendent of claims of status? 
As I have suggested, putative true statements call 
for assent (or falsification) while putative imper- 
atives call for compliance (or defiance). But, 
as we have seen, if a true description is given by 
a high status individual, a lower status individual 
may respond with compliance rather than assent. 
Can the two criteria be specialized? Can state- 
122 
ments ever be constructed such that they call for 
assent and not compliance? If not why are there 
such things as assertions? The fact that some state- 
ments can be assented to indicate that the truth 
functions can be isolated at least somewhat from 
their more general social functions. Even in that 
case however, the true statements would be generat- 
ed (or denied) when they have social utility, much 
as Lisa denied Jamie's statement that she had more. 
The alternative, however, that the meaning of a 
sentence is purely subjective, that is whatever you 
can get a listener to comply with, is even more pre- 
carious. As Harr~ (1974) pointed out this is a 
territory suited only for the bravest machiavelians 
--to assume the status to make demands and declara- 
tions and to continue to do so until someone refu- 
ses to comply. 
A more promising approach would be to argue that the 
meanings of utterances can gain their agreement 
from speakers on the two bases we have discussed 
and that these two bases are in continuous inter- 
action. One may get agreement, either assent or 
compliance, simply because of the status relations 
involved. One is in a position to cormnand or to 
declare that such and such is the case and the 
other, agreeing to that higher status, receives 
those commands and declarations and assents or com- 
plies with them. The bulk of social negotiations 
proceed on this basis. But if there is a collapse 
of the social order, or a condition of general 
equality, no one person is in a position to demand 
either assent or compliance. Then the ground for 
the adjudication of disputesor more simply for 
the negotiation of meaning falls on to the objec- 
tive, descriptive, or logical dimension of meaning. 
It is, presumably, easier to gain assent than to 
gain compliance; hence the importance of truth in 
any social order. And in the microsocial order, 
negotiations are carried out by any means available, 
but as Friere (1972) has suggested, genuine con- 
versation is possible only between equals. 
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Goody, E. Towards a theory of questions. Draft 
of the Malinowski Lecture, London School of 
Economics, 1975. 
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124 
