Not everyone can use pragmatic competence to maintain a conversa tion as a cooperative venture, and comparatively few attempts have been made to account for the development of the linguistic abilities that one may need to have in order to exhibit such competence. Yet many pragmatic components of language are probably acquired in learning sequences which correspond to successive stages in the development of children. In this article, the author (summarizes cur rent linguistic theory in the area of pragmatics,) reviews the empirical evidence which suggests that the acquisition of pragmatics is a developmental process and comes to the conclusion that teachers could and should include pragmatic components in the language cur riculum.
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