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

Abstract

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).

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