A PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE PRE-LINGUISTIC JARGONS OF SELECTED NIGERIAN CHILDREN

This study titled A Pragmatic Analysis of the Pre-Linguistic Jargons of Selected Nigerian Children attempts to fill the wide gap that exists in the literature on Child Language Acquisition and Development with a view to bringing to limelight what Nigerian children do during their Pre-linguistic stage; a stage in the early part of the child's life before the actual production of words, that is between 0-12 months. The data for the analysis was collected based on two techniques. That is, through a diary and handset (video) recording. These two forms of recordings complement each other such that where one form failed, the other took over. The forms were used for the documentation of whatever feature(s) the researcher analyzed, using thirty minutes to one hour once a week or forth nightly to observe the pragmatic and phonological features of six Nigerian children. The approach, where two theories were proposed and used as the theoretical framework for the analysis of the data was adopted. The two theories are: Halliday's (1975) communicative functions and Crystal's (1975) pre-speech development. After the analysis, findings reveal that'the children use more of Halliday's interactional function than any of the four other functions. Findings further reveal that the children that were studied use more of vowel sounds than any other sound(s) put together. The researcher highlights one of the problems he encountered in studying children who are in their pre linguistic stage and concludes that the challenge is surmountable. The researcher recommends among many others that scholars should study other aspects of language developments, such as: lexical, grammatical, semantic, sociolinguistic developments and other aspects of children developments.