The Pragmatic Acquisition of the First Language by a Three-Year-Old Child

The research was aimed at finding out the pragmatic acquisition of the first language by a three-year-old child. The objectives of this descriptive qualitative
research were to: (1) find out the pragmatic aspects that was acquired by a three�year-old child in the first language, (2) to find out the way of how pragmatic acquisition realized by a three-year-old child in the first language, and (3) to find out the reason why the pragmatic acquisition realized in the ways it is. The data were obtained from a girl, a three-year-old Indonesian child. This study was located at PSP, North Sumatera. In collecting the data, this study used naturalistic method by observing, recording, taking notes and interviewing. The data are obtained by recorded the utterances of the child by the daily conversation with her family. The technique of data analysis used in this study was descriptive technique, and the data were described through the process of transcribing the data
and reducing the data by the process of selecting, focusing, simplifying and transforming the transcripts of the data, after that, displaying the data and at last
drawing the conclusions. The findings indicates that the subject of this study had acquired pragmatic acquisition were the aspects of pragmatic acquired are greeting, informing, rejecting, requesting, promising, defending, demanding and asking. While the most dominant of pragmatic aspect was informing aspect. The way of a three-year-old child acquired the pragmatic aspect by the process of turn taking and adjacency pairs. And the dominant process of adjacency pairs was question and answer. The conversations were analyzed with the six contexts categories; they were home, playing, relaxing, phoning, selling and watching. Then, based on the context and interviewing the family, it was found that the
reason why of acquiring pragmatic with her ways and the informing aspect could be the highest frequency were because the child focused to the things in the child’s mind and imitated how the adult around her communicated. While the factor that influenced the pragmatic acquisition were social and perceptual factor.