This study aims at examining the request behaviour of Cantonese speaking children, focusing on one pre-school girl. Previous studies have tended to concentrate on children's request production in European languages such as English and Italian. Using recordings of conversations between a Cantonese girl and an adult, an analysis of the girl's requests was carried out. The focus is on the child's request forms as well as the request sequences.

A video camera was used in data collection. This helps to capture both the girl's verbal and non-verbal behaviours. Recording sessions were carried out when the girl and the investigator were playing some toys or drawing pictures. The videotapes collected for this study were transcribed by the investigator, who was also a participant in the recordings. The recordings and their transcriptions serve as the basis of this study.

Detailed, line-by-line analysis of the data has yielded the following findings. A range of request forms has been found and they are grouped according to their linguistic structures: (1) object names; (2) imperatives; (3) 'I want' formats (declaratives); and (4) 'Can you' and 'Can I' formats (interrogatives). The request forms have been found to progress from simple and direct ones to complex and indirect ones. It was also found that some devices were used to reduce the bluntness of requests. For example, sentence particles were used to soften a request. With different request forms available to the child, her selection of forms seems to depend on several kinds of knowledge and assumptions: information about the addressee, the nature of the thing or action being requested, and knowledge from earlier events are all taken into account.

An examination of request sequences shows the child's ability to handle requests in a turn-by-turn manner. Request sequences develop from simple to complex ones over time. At her later developmental stages, requests normally take more than one turn. Sequences are longer and their sequential structures become more complex. It was found that pre-requests and re-requests were used at the later stages. The child can make an effort to pursue her requests when faced with non-granting. Looking into the ways she negotiates or reasons with the addressee, we found that the addressee's preferences, wishes and desires are taken into consideration. Her ability to sustain a lengthy conversation reveals to us that she can make correct interpretations of the addressee's utterances, which are not explicit all the time. This reflects her ability to make increasingly sophisticated inferences in the course of request making. It was found that the girl was progressively more able to select different request forms to suit different settings so as to maximize her chances of success. Both her pragmatic and conversational skills become more and more sophisticated over time.