Pitchanee Sotthiyothin. A study of pragmatic strategies in Thai and American picture books for children. Doctoral Degree(Linguistics). Mahidol University. Mahidol University Library and Knowledge Center. : Mahidol University, 2018.
A study of pragmatic strategies in Thai and American picture books for children
Abstract:
This dissertation focused on the comparative study of the pragmatic strategies used in children's picture books written by the Thai and American authors. The total of 80 awarding winning children's picture books were used as references, half written by the Thai authors and another half by the Americans. Every reference book is designed for children aged 3-12, written in prose and first published in 1972-2014. The analysis in this research was based on the concept of Speech Act by John L. Austin (1962) and John R. Searle (1969, 1975, 1976) and Cooperative Principle by H. Paul Grice (1975). There were two main aspects of interest: the pragmatic strategies used in conversational utterances between characters and the strategies used by the authors to convey key messages to listeners or readers. In general, the pragmatic strategies used in children's picture books written by the Thai and American authors were found to be rather similar. Both prefer to communicate rather straightforward, which could be easily understood by children, with the use of single-function sentences, direct speech acts, representative type of the illocutionary acts, and utterances conforming to conversational maxim. However, the American authors tend to communicate rather indirectly much more often than the Thai authors. This is true both in the pragmatic strategies used in conversational utterances and the way to convey key messages. This, in turn, requires higher effort on the readers' or listeners' side to understand, compared to those reading the Thai books. These differences may be due to the society, culture, and the education system that encourage children to think and use more imagination