Children’s picture books through the lens of pragmatics

Abstract

This research focuses on the comparative study of pragmatic strategies used in children’s picture books written by Thai and American authors in two aspects: conversational utterances between characters and strategies to convey key messages. A total of 80 awarding-winning books are used as references, half written by Thais and the other half by Americans. The analysis is based on the concept of speech act by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969, 1975, 1976). In general, the pragmatic strategies in use are found to be similar. Both prefer to communicate straightforwardly, which
enables children to understand easily. However, the differences lie in the details. In most areas, the Americans tend to communicate indirectly more often, leaving room for self-interpretation and further imagination. This, in turn, requires higher effort to understand, compared to those reading the Thai books. This is really apparent, especially in the method to convey key messages, where the Thais and Americans prefer completely different strategies. These differences may be due to upbringing, society, culture, and the education system that encourage children to think and use
more imagination.