Abstract
This study analyzes the naturally occurring English word sorry in adult learners' talk in a language classroom and examines its role as a marker for self-negation from the perspective of pragmatic negation. The database for this study consists of 40 hours of video recordings of online tutorials for learning Chinese as a second language at a university in Hong Kong. The detailed analysis shows that to address various types of problematic utterances they make, learners do not always use an explicit negation operator such as no to negate their prior utterances but instead use sorry as an alternative. Rather than being used as a negation of a truth-functional operator for propositions, sorry is prominently used by learners as a device for objecting to a prior utterance in conversational implicature or other aspects of language use related to pragmatic negation. The findings also show that sorry plays a dual role by negating the prior utterance and predicting the next utterance, which may be either by the speaker or by the hearer, for correction. The reason for sorry being used as a marker for negation is discussed, and the study suggests that as sorry is perceived and understood maturely by speakers and hearers in context, it realizes the function of pragmatic negation.
Highlights
Previous studies have examined linguistic negation by analysis of natural language
Sorry can be used as a truth-functional operator for propositions, as demonstrated in Excerpts 2 and 3, it is prominently used by speaker-learners as a device for objecting to a previous utterance in conversational implicature or other aspects of the use of language, as demonstrated by Excerpts 4-8
The instances of sorry used in the context of language classroom, as analyzed, have two pragmatic meanings
Summary
Previous studies have examined linguistic negation by analysis of natural language. There are two distinct uses of natural language negation – internal and external or marked. This study analyzes the function and meaning of sorry used by language learners in a classroom from a pragmatic perspective. It focuses on sorry as a marker of self-negative evaluation and negation for an utterance, which serves pragmatic purposes. Using conversation analysis (CA), the study classifies the resources by which sorry plays a role in the expression of negative evaluation or negation into pragmatics and phenomena belonging to discourse semantics. This study attempts to contribute to the application of pragmatics and semantics for discourse analysis, it is based on data captured in the context of L2 Chinese classroom. As the study focuses on the English word sorry used by learners in the language classroom, whereas the language being learned is not a matter of concern regarding the use of sorry, we use the term ‘speaker-learner’ rather than ‘L2 learner’, to emphasize the position of the learner as a speaker, for analyzing and discussing related utterances
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