The purpose of this research is to analyse the pragmatic development of language groups at different proficiency levels and to investigate the relationship between interlanguage pragmatics and grammatical competence. For this study, 36 native Spanish speaking EFL learners at different proficiency levels were asked to respond in English to 24 different situations that called for the speech acts of request and apology. Results showed three important aspects. The first finding suggested that basic adult learners possess a pragmatic knowledge in their L1 that allows them to focus on the intended meaning and, in most cases, to assemble an utterance that conveys a pragmatic intention and satisfies the communicative demands of a social situation. The second finding revealed that there are two essential conditions to communicate a linguistic action: the knowledge of the relevant linguistic rules and the knowledge of how to use them appropriately and effectively in a specific context. The findings further suggested that advanced learners possess the grammatical knowledge to produce an illocutionary act, but they need to learn the specific L2 pragmatic conventions that enable them to know when to use these grammatical forms and under which circumstances.
This book provides an engaging introduction to cross-cultural pragmatics. It is essential reading for both academics and students in pragmatics, applied linguistics, language teaching and translation studies. It offers a corpus-based and empirically-derived framework which allows language use to be systematically contrasted across linguacultures.
The first well-researched contrastive pragmatic analysis of requests and apologies in British English and Uruguayan Spanish. It takes the form of a cross-cultural corpus-based analysis using male and female native speakers of each language and systematically alternating the same social variables in both cultures. The data are elicited from a non-prescriptive open role-play yielding requests and apologies. The analysis of the speech acts is based on an adaptation of the categorical scheme developed by Blum-Kulka et al. (1989). The results show that speakers of English and Spanish differ in their choice of (in)directness levels, head-act modifications, and the politeness types of males and females in both cultures. Reference to an extensive bibliography and the thorough discussion of methodological issues concerning speech act studies deserve the attention of students of pragmatics as well as readers interested in cultural matters.
The book is divided into three sections, each prefaced by an introduction by the editors that provides relevant theoretical and methodological background. The first section concerns cognitive approaches to interlanguage pragmatic development. The second addresses interlanguage speech act realization of a variety of speech acts. The final section is devoted to discoursal perspectives on interlanguage.
Irish English, while having been the focus of investigations on a variety of linguistic levels, reveals a dearth of research on the pragmatic level. In the present volume, this imbalance is addressed by providing much-needed empirical data on language use in Ireland in the private, official and public spheres and also by examining the use of Irish English as a reflection of socio-cultural norms of interaction. The contributions cover a wide range of pragmatic phenomena and draw on a number of frameworks of analysis. Despite the wide scope of topics and methodologies, a relatively coherent picture of conventions of language use in Ireland emerges. Indirectness and heterogeneity on the formal level are, for instance, shown to be features of Irish English. This volume is the first book-length treatment of the pragmatics of a national variety of English, or any other language. Indeed, it could be considered a first step towards a new discipline, variational pragmatics, at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology. This book is of primary interest to researchers and students in pragmatics, variational linguistics, Irish English, English as Foreign Language (EFL), cross-cultural communication and discourse analysis. Furthermore, the pragmatic descriptions provided will be of practical use in the increasingly important English as Second Language (ESL) context in Ireland. Finally, it is also of relevance to professionals dealing with Ireland and, indeed, to anyone interested in a deeper understanding of Irish culture.
As a field of inquiry, interlanguage pragmatics reflects the growing interest in recent years in understanding the social and pragmatic aspects of second language acquisition. Interlanguage Pragmatics offers an up-to-date synthesis of current research in the field, documenting from diverse perspectives the development, comprehension, and production of pragmatic knowledge in a second language. The book consists of three sections. The first concerns cognitive approaches to interlanguage pragmatic development; the second, interlanguage speech act realization of a variety of speech acts; and the third, discoursal perspectives on interlanguage. Each section is prefaced by an introduction by the editors which provides relevant theoretical and methodological background. The editors' general introduction offers a critical overview of the issues currently debated. This book is the first to exclusively address the pragmatic dimension in second language acquistion, presenting a state-of-the-art view of the field and outlining directions for future research.
The Longitudinal investigation which provides the basic material for this book consists of a corpus of requests, offers and refusals of offers elicited from Irish learners of German over a ten-month study abroad period using production questionnaires and a variety of metapragmatic instruments.
This collection of papers is designed to establish variational pragmatics. This new field is situated at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology and aims at systematically investigating the effect of macro-social pragmatic variation on language in action. As such, it challenges the widespread assumption in the area of pragmatics that language communities are homogeneous and also addresses the current research gap in sociolinguistics for variation on the pragmatic level. The introductory chapter establishes the rationale for studying variational pragmatics as a separate field of inquiry, systematically sketches the broader theoretical framework and presents a framework for further analysis. The papers which follow are located within this framework. They present empirical variational pragmatic research focusing on regional varieties of pluricentric languages. Speech acts and other discourse phenomena are addressed and analysed in a number of regional varieties of Dutch, English, French, German and Spanish. The seminal nature of this volume, its empirical orientation and the extensive bibliography make this book of interest to both researchers and students in pragmatics and sociolinguistics.
Politeness as practised across 22 European societies, firmly set within critical debates developed since the 1980s, is here presented in ways related to concrete situations in which language-users interact with one another to achieve their goals. Areas covered include types of politeness, forms of address, negotiation and small-talk in various contexts.
