Syrian service encounters

The present study investigates the relationship between pragmatics, as the study of the intended meaning of the speaker, and translation, as the process of transferring texts from a source language to a target language. It shows how pragmatic meaning is outstanding in the process of translation, particularly the translation of speech acts in Arabic religious texts. It is an attempt to highlight the role of pragmatics in translating speech acts and to show how syntax and semantics are not enough to preserve the real intended meaning. Moreover, it demonstrates that translating religious texts is not only a matter of following the common linguistic categories of morphology, syntax, lexis, and semantics, but it is also a matter of pragmatic meaning where the intended meaning in a particular context is an essential factor that preserves real meaning. Thus, the aim is to address an important level of translation, namely the pragmatic level. In accordance with this aim, it is hypothesized that translating Arabic religious texts involves problems at the pragmatic level where there are hurdles that should be overcome in the area of speech acts. These include the following as far as the topic and the data of the study are concerned: (1) the illocutionary force of some utterances is mistranslated, (2) no clear distinction is drawn between isolated and group speech acts, and (3) a speech act of one class is translated as another speech act belonging to another class; in other words, there is sometimes indeterminacy in translating speech acts and this indeterminacy can be resolved by reference to the global organization of the text. To this end, extracts from some translated Arabic religious texts are selected and the problems, as regard speech acts, are specified and analyzed. Then, the extracts are translated according to the suggested pragmatic approach which is more essential than the semantic approach.

This paper explores persuasion, as a speech act, in the novels of the English comic writer P.G. Wodehouse. Persuasion, as a topic for enquiry within linguistics, has been extensively studied, in a variety of social contexts (e.g. Sandell 1977; Jowett and O'Donnell 1992; Messaris 1997; Nash 1989; Hyland 1998; Halmari and Virtanen 2005; Charteris-Black 2006; Tardy 2011). All these studies are either general accounts of persuasion, or else describe its presence as a pragmatic focus in a specific social context, invoking diverse (pragma)-linguistic features to explain its operation. What seems, as yet, relatively under-explored, is its operation in everyday conversational interaction, and this paper represents a move in this direction, though the distinction between authentic and literary data is recognised. It uses an analytical methodology based on Speech Act Theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and Dialogical Pragmatics (Kecskes 2016) to explore instances in the novels in which Bertie Wooster, Wodehouse's principal character, is persuaded to do various things. What emerges, although not a picture of authentic verbal persuasion as it would occur in actual interaction, but a facsimile that may shed light on some of the discursive processes involved. It is suggested, in fact that, at the level of pragmatics, the processes involved in authentic and literary speech acts are not as different as they are sometimes taken to be.

This paper presents a data-based comparative study of polite behaviour in French and Arabic (Syrian) service encounters. It focuses on the use of conversational routines and rituals, which are not only an important component of interactions in any service encounter, but also a prominent characteristic of Arabic interaction. The first part of the paper is devoted to a presentation of these two notions. The methodological problems raised by contrastive data analysis are then discussed, especially that of choosing comparable situations for conducting fieldwork, and of establishing a linguistic grid of reference for the contrastive analysis. The results of the study presented in part four lead to a discussion of what appear to be specific features of polite behaviour in the French and Syrian corpora. The corpora are composed of interactions audio-recorded in small shops.

ABSTRACTDivergent practices for displaying respect in face-to-face interaction are an ongoing cause of tension in the US between immigrant Korean retailers and their African American customers. Communicative practices in service encounters involving Korean customers contrast sharply with those involving African American customers in 25 liquor store encounters that were videotaped and transcribed for analysis. The relative restraint of immigrant Korean storekeepers in these encounters is perceived by many African Americans as a sign of racism, while the relatively personable involvement of African Americans is perceived by many storekeepers as disrespectful imposition. These contrasting interactional practices reflect differing concepts of the relationship between customer and storekeeper, and different ideas about the speech activities that are appropriate in service encounters. (Intercultural communication, respect, service encounters, African Americans, Koreans)

This study investigated the bi‐directionality of language transfer (first language [L1] to second language [L2] and L2 to L1) at the pragmatic level with a focus on the speech act of request. The L2 participants were Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) learners at the intermediate and advanced levels. Data were collected via discourse completion tests and coded according to the Cross‐Cultural Speech Act Realization Project coding scheme (Blum‐Kulka, House, & Kasper, 1989). The results indicated that EFL learners at both levels used conventionally indirect strategies significantly less often than English native speakers in making English requests but more often than Chinese native speakers did when requesting in Chinese. Moreover, within‐group comparisons indicated that both groups of EFL learners, especially the advanced learners, exhibited a differentiated pattern of requesting behavior in their 2 languages; they adopted conventionally indirect strategies significantly more often in English than in Chinese, and the advanced learners also used more supportive moves in English than in Chinese. Taken together, this study showed that bi‐directional transfer can occur at the pragmatic level in foreign language learners.

This chapter focuses on the syntax of particles of direct address because they spell out the structure of the speech act (SA) phrase and provide a configuration for assessing the relation between VocPs and the utterance. It proposes a formal analysis for Romanian pragmatic particles, as items that spell-out SA heads. It then extends the analysis to Greek equivalent particles. In the analysis of particles, the chapter makes use of the terms hortatives and injunctives in order to indicate the semantic modality of the illocutionary force that is mapped to the speech act head. The theoretical stand the authors take is the extension of the left periphery of clauses above the level of discourse pragmatics, with a field that encodes the conversational pragmatics; that is, the illocutionary force that comes from injunctive and hortative modality is mapped to syntax in the SA head. Keywords: Greek equivalent particles; pragmatic function; Romanian pragmatic particles; Speech Act (SA) heads

This chapter first describes the various sentence moods, and then explains the interrogative sentence type in Tshangla. It presents that the sentence moods operate at the level of the proposition, i.e. at the semantic level, rather than at the level of the speech act, i.e. the pragmatic level. This evidence comes from the interaction between the imperative sentence mood and indirect quotes. The chapter also presents a brief discussion of the interaction between interrogative and the sentence moods, where evidence is shown to suggest that the interrogative and declarative sentence types represent distinct speech acts, while the sentence moods do not represent distinct speech acts, but rather modify the proposition at the propositional-semantic level.Keywords: declarative sentence type; interrogative sentence type; sentence moods; speech act; Tshangla

Just about the only desire shared by members of the Tyrone family in Long Day's Journey Into Night is the desire for a peaceful family life. Although each is acutely aware of how he or she threatens that peace, and each is alert to the threats posed by the others, the four are united in the effort to remain a family in spite of their collective destructiveness. The most strenuous efforts to preserve Tyrone family happiness come from Mary, who tries using performative language to assuage any threats to a happy family. So when Tyrone's insecurity and anger begin to flare, she tells her husband, “You mustn't be so touchy”; when concern grows over Jamie's vices, she says, “He'll turn out all right in the end, you wait and see.”1 She repeatedly downplays the severity of Edmund's illness by calling it just “a bad summer cold,” and she avoids questions of her sobriety constantly with utterances like “I'm quite all right, dear” (720, 741). Although each Tyrone is deeply flawed, Mary will brook no confrontation with the forces endangering family peace.Such a drive to avoidance is understandable from Mary, who is expected to act as matriarch of a contentious family striving to keep the tattered threads of Tyrone happiness together. This task's difficulty grows when compounded by her battles with addiction, guilt, and crippling fear that the worst is true of Edmund's health. She seems to recognize how little can be done to repair the deep fissures weakening her family's foundation, and so she turns to language in hopes of patching those fissures long enough to ignore their threat. When we consider all that Mary has suffered through since abandoning the convent for James Tyrone—the death of a young child, a painful pregnancy and resultant morphine addiction, an attempted suicide, and now the threat of losing Edmund to the same disease that took her father—it becomes difficult to fault her for whatever strategy she chooses to battle her and the family's psychological demons. Peace and calm are Mary's goals, and we should understand that desperation motivates her to whatever means she deems necessary to maintain a sense of serenity among her family, even if that serenity is falsely constructed through language.Eugene O'Neill and Long Day's Journey, however, are far from cooperative. Through a pattern of language and avoidance, the play indicts Mary as the catalyst of its tragedy. Placed by the Tyrone men's shunning of responsibility in the unenviable position of tending to her family's unity, Mary acts exclusively through language, responding to her challenges only with utterances that describe a peaceful family—one in which Edmund is not gravely ill and all the Tyrone men get along, for example—but she does nothing to support that condition. Ordinary language philosophy shows us that a speech act is a more extended process than uttering words without ethos or a commitment to support their performative work, and because Mary has neither she never succeeds in wiping away family problems with language. Since her family leans so much upon her for support, Mary's ineffectual speech acts have the disastrous consequences of triggering this play's tragedy, the final collapse of the Tyrone family.The Tyrone men are foolish for putting their frail wife and mother in a position of such responsibility, and so blame for the conditions of this tragedy ought to be spread among its characters. Moreover, each man has habits that are destructive to himself and the family, and it is proper to censure their vices and lack of accountability. But Long Day's Journey places the bulk of responsibility for the Tyrone family on Mary, asking her to nurse all its ills. Her failure thus makes her the agent of this tragedy, the force triggering its downturn. The men place their family on the precipice of tragedy with their unreasonable expectations of Mary, but she pushes the Tyrones and the play over the edge with her failures of ordinary language.This is at once an unsympathetic and a recuperative reading of Mary Tyrone. While treating her as culpable for her family's collapse and the play's woeful conclusion, I locate in her human agency powerful enough to cause tragedy. None of the Tyrone men are agential enough for their actions to have repercussions as severe as Mary's; each passes the buck to the other and ultimately to Mary. O'Neill himself does the same, placing this tattered family's burden on the shoulders of its frail mother figure (further weakening his own defense against the charge of misogyny).2 In the face of all this, however, Mary takes action through language. Although her utterances are ultimately destructive, she is the only Tyrone to respond to the family's troubles.Although Mary engenders the tragedy of Long Day's Journey with her failures of performative language, she reveals in the process a depth and complexity to her humanity unseen in any of the play's other characters. This play's tragedy is provoked not by the work of fate or merciless existence, but by the repercussions of the ordinary faults of an everyday human. Long Day's Journey thus reveals a tragic humanism, an ethos that finds the human struggling against and failing to overcome the faults of ordinary human existence. Mary's struggle is harrowing and perhaps hopeless, but the responsibility for the effects of that struggle rests ultimately with her, an ordinary human within a limited social sphere.Analyzing Long Day's Journey through Mary's crisis of agency—she must act, but her actions cause destruction—allows us to identify in this play both a paradigm of O'Neill's humanist aesthetic and an influential precedent for the humanism of later American drama. Many of O'Neill's most notable characters—from Ella Downey and Yank, through Lavinia Mannon and Ephraim Cabot, to Larry Slade and Con Medley—struggle in their attempts to avoid the effects of their ordinary human agency. This trend reveals a persistent tragic humanism that indicts many O'Neillian characters as direct contributors to their own suffering. Moreover, understanding how O'Neill characterizes Mary's crisis allows us to recognize the foundation for an ensuing tradition of American drama attuning itself to the work of human characters. The focus on repercussions of everyday human agency found in the work of playwrights like Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, and others adopts and builds upon O'Neill's tragic humanism. Later playwrights' evolution away from O'Neill's classically inflected concern for the human in light of metaphysical forces and into an interest in the human vis-à-vis social and political frameworks intensifies American drama's examination of the repercussions of humanity's actions upon itself. Ever skeptical of the suggestion that society could strip the human of basic agency, American playwrights work often with O'Neill's model of great human suffering beginning with ordinary human action.By addressing her family's challenges with language aimed at wiping all problems away, Mary treats her utterances as speech acts, expecting them to exert a performative force in the social context of her home. In reality, although her language has agency, its effect is to create a phantom construct of Tyrone family stability rather than to mend the threats to actual stability. Her words are limited in their effectiveness because they are fundamentally ordinary, restricted in power by their speaker's inability to support their work. Stanley Cavell argues that ordinary language “limit[s] the (inevitable) extension of the voice, which will always escape me and forever find its way back to me.”3 Cavell establishes this concept of a limited space between speaker and utterance in responding to Jacques Derrida's critique of J. L. Austin's speech act theory. Austin's set of lectures collected as How to Do Things with Words opens with the assertion that there exists a type of utterance, the saying of which “is not to describe my doing of what I should be said in so uttering to be doing or to state that I am doing it: it is to do it.” He goes on to dub this sort of utterance a performative, then spends much of the subsequent lectures identifying the problems and limitations of the concept. Most famously, he claims, “Surely the words must be spoken ‘seriously’ and so as to be taken ‘seriously’? This is, though vague, true enough in general—it is an important commonplace in discussing the purport of any utterance whatsoever. I must not be joking, for example, nor writing a poem.”4 For Austin, performative speech acts that are uttered while joking or in the improper circumstances, for example, do not succeed in performing the action of their design and are therefore infelicitous, a term Austin offers along with felicitous in place of false and true for categorizing the outcome of performatives.Derrida's deconstruction of How to Do Things with Words picks up on this point, faulting Austin for advancing “the teleological jurisdiction of an entire field whose organizing center remains intention.” According to Derrida, failing to recognize “that the possibility of the negative (in this case, of infelicities) is in fact a structural possibility, that failure is an essential risk of the operations under consideration” makes Austin's argument “untenable.”5 For Austin, one must have the proper authority to perform a speech act felicitously—in certain circumstances, for instance, a speaker must be a ship's captain and not its purser for the utterance of “I now pronounce you husband and wife” to create a marriage felicitously—but according to Derrida such a condition transfers power from words to the intention of their speaker, and intention is never verifiable or even assessable.Derrida's critique is most important here because Cavell's riposte helpfully clarifies Austin's argument, illuminating the operation of speech acts in ordinary society and in Long Day's Journey. According to Cavell, Austin's insistence on proper circumstances “seems the reverse of making intention the organizing center of the analysis of performatives, since in a sense in certain major categories of performatives it shows intention to be inessential to whether a performative is in effect.” A ship's purser could have every intention of felicitously marrying a couple, but no amount of earnestness will allow his utterance to do so. Similarly, a ship's captain who utters the conventional words of marriage in the conventional circumstances engenders marriage, regardless of his intentions. Cavell writes: “I read Austin not as denying that I have to abandon my words, create so many orphans, but as affirming that I am abandoned to them, as to thieves or conspirators, taking my breath away.” “As if that price of having once spoken,” he continues, “is to have spoken forever, to have taken on the responsibility for speaking further, the responsibility of responsiveness, of answerability, to make yourself intelligible.”6 Cavell shows that the social performance of an Austinian speech act is more than the pronouncement of language that effects change; it is the rupture of that language into its myriad effects, all of which are tethered to the speaker. To enter into the social context of language is to take on a great ethical burden, and intention might be one of any number of conditions contributing to the felicity or infelicity of a speech act, but it is certainly a minor factor, relegated well below the social circumstances of the speaker, audience, and utterance.When Cavell speaks of words abandoning a speaker but forever finding their way back, he is defining a referential framework in which an utterance remains marked by and in reference to its speaker. That speaker and his or her social conditions (e.g., authority, ethos) contribute to the performativity of the speech act but do not determine felicity in an omnipotent, authorial sense. Instead, a combination of the social conditions of the speaker, the circumstance of the utterance, the nature of the audience, and any number of other factors determine felicity or infelicity. Most important, though, regardless of whether a speech act turns out to be felicitous or infelicitous, language always acts, affecting some kind of change. Even ultimately infelicitous language will act within the context in which it is uttered, creating a condition of responsibility for its speaker. A speech act changes the circumstances of a social sphere, and the effects of that utterance point always back to its speaker. Words rupture context, but they do so as a result of an agential speaker, one bearing as a result what Cavell calls “the responsibility of responsiveness,” the necessity to be accountable for the effects of language.This concept denies any notion of divorce between speaker and utterance. Although Mary attempts to deploy performative language to fix her family's problems, her words are merely tools that rely upon their user for support. Devoid almost entirely of ethos within the rhetorical situation of the Tyrone home, Mary cannot support proclamations of conditions like Edmund not being gravely ill or Jamie's vices not being destructive with anything more than hollow language, and so her speech acts are doomed to infelicity.If Mary were to have any hope of mending her family's ills with language, she would need to support her language's many ruptures with action or explanation. This task is greatly complicated by her family's implicit demands that she remain a soothing, calm, and above all sober center for their family unity. When she claims that Edmund is only suffering from a cold, for example, she does not rupture context in such a way that makes everybody somehow overlook the clear severity of his illness; rather, her language suggests that Mary is not overly fearful about her son's health and therefore will not turn again to morphine. In order for her to support her “summer cold” speech acts—in order to embrace Cavell's notion of “the responsibility of responsiveness”—she would need to embody all the calm and sobriety implicit in those utterances' performances. The Tyrone men quickly realize that this is not the case, but they allow the charade of felicity for her speech acts to go on unchecked so that they may continue to pretend as a group that all is well with the family. Enabled by her family, Mary thus uses language to build a façade of family peace and happiness, but as the play progresses and the façade grows more elaborate, Mary becomes unable to support its weight.Approaching Long Day's Journey through an examination of Mary's contribution to its tragedy opens new terrain for understanding both the play and character. Rather than treating Mary as either a passive victim of circumstance or one among a bevy of destructive forces in the Tyrone home, we will be able to understand the complexity of her impact on the play by recognizing the daunting position from which Mary is compelled to act. As a result, we can see this play as a condemnation of the family structure that would go to great lengths to shun individual and collective responsibility. Existing treatments of Mary's influence on the play's tragedy tend to follow one of three tracks. First, some critics indict Mary for triggering tragedy by making an active choice to return to morphine. Although these arguments offer any number of explanations for her choice—from James Tyrone's cheapness to Mary's disgust with herself—they are notable for allowing Mary no excuse for her decision. Laurin Porter, for example, argues that “Mary takes morphine again, the play suggests, because of the likelihood that her favorite son Edmund has contracted consumption…. To escape the pain this fear brings, a pain she cannot bear, Mary withdraws, via morphine, into a happier past.”7 Approaches like this preserve a certain level of agency for Mary, but regularly overlook the extent to which Mary has become victim of her addiction and, as a result, devalue the powerful forces triggering her relapse. Factors like Edmund's health and her family burden are less challenges that Mary avoids through morphine than they are instigators of addiction.A second approach overcorrects this method by evacuating Mary of agency completely, excusing her from responsibility on the grounds that O'Neill has created a dramatic space too harsh and oppressive for human choice. While acknowledging that “Mary seems the most reprehensible Tyrone,” Barbara Voglino, for instance, argues that “if none of the Tyrones can bear life and all seek to withdraw from it, perhaps Mary's retreat into the fog of morphine is less reprehensible and even necessary.”8 This approach follows a Nietzschean poetics: it suggests that Mary stands facing the Dionysic abyss and has no choice but to wallow in morphine, as each Tyrone man must wallow in his particular This is too to how the Tyrones face their To that these are to forces is to that actions like Tyrone his for or Mary the convent are and that the characters bear no for their While all the Tyrones are by powerful psychological and social this approach too much to the characters offer to their than blame on the play's characters or its oppressive the approach to Long Day's Journey the of the family charade that the play's As “the that have created and the morphine performance of health as an act that “is a not only of but of This approach on how the Tyrones create and to the condition of their family tragedy in their of false While in identifying the conditions that the action of the this approach does not do enough to identify the of the family's As O'Neill that this particular with is than Although Mary's as of a the is on the and even the of this The long of the play's focus is the final of the family, so a of their to the play must focus on its on the of each of these I am in how the factors at work on Mary make her the of the family and then in how she ultimately to support its Mary the final collapse of the Tyrone family, but that is not to that she is entirely to blame for this tragedy. Instead, Mary is a catalyst for the play's tragedy, the blame for which can be among the entire family. The factors that place Mary in a position of responsibility for her family's from her own psychological and guilt, to the more powerful influence of the Tyrone men's implicit demands for her to the most of O'Neill's argues Mary's and of her that of which and and of her for is the who most the process by which the Tyrone men place their mother figure in a position of responsibility from which Mary then the family “Mary Tyrone is neither mother nor she continues, in this much of the tragedy of the Tyrone family. The men that she be a mother in all of the but she cannot and will not that I am that the of this tragedy is Mary's to the position in which her family places her, but I am that language this Mary to the demands of her family with speech acts that she has no to support, and this process is complicated by the Tyrone men allowing Mary's hollow performative language to construct and false family In the end, Mary's ethical burden of language too and her to from the ordinary social of the play denies the family its support and its tragedy of the Tyrone family long the play but the tragedy of Long Day's Journey has a the family's on Mary to its falsely constructed The men realize that their charade upon Mary the of wife and a that this on Mary's becomes clear from the As as she the Tyrone for Mary's that Edmund is suffering a summer a you any The one to avoid is saying anything that would get her more over While it is clear that he about his and their effect on her he later reveals the of his so well in the since she home. grows and a to not because Mary has but because has a that he has the same The men's most of Mary is neither health nor but to be a foundation upon which they may build their own and as much later to his Mary's is “I I so begin to if the I the men's of concern for Mary are with her to be and but they are more in how that health and happiness will This makes Tyrone's a for this tragedy. is little among and Mary that Tyrone to his addiction by treating her with “that of a and then with the Edmund makes this charge most in the “I well not to I who for a when she so I never have morphine Instead, you her in the of a who his and took the way While it may be true that Edmund is how would he have any of the other than to have it from his mother or perhaps from is certainly true that he is here a he with his and this anger on how Tyrone to his addiction, his in a with Mary's guilt, the death of the painful of and Edmund's illness as factors to the The of the however, not from the fact that Mary is an but rather from how she and the of the family that on this particular long Tyrone's is a for the family's anger because he it them, but that anger is fundamentally Mary and the ultimately Tyrone for contributing to the of the upon they all must rely for their This anger the pattern of among the family and the Tyrone men's need for Mary to be their the face of such desperation and daunting Mary could to critics who that she chooses morphine over with her problems find this to be the But there is an important between the men's implicit demands and Mary's her attempts to create and happiness with performative language. Mary's utterances like is just a can perform in their creating a condition of family and happiness Mary attempts to her family that Edmund is not facing a health threat and that she is not about her son to such an extent that might cause her to to her morphine and speech acts felicity would that the family happiness so by the Tyrones is within an ordinary does not take long for the Tyrone men to but they are only too to play along, allowing Mary's language to false family Mary this strategy with less and less the and her morphine as challenges to the felicity of her performative language becomes a of her speech it an effect she in order to be able to to the charade she is the of the Mary such speech acts at three of the family's Edmund's and her own with three the construct of family happiness, and so Mary's efforts to assuage these through language are attempts to support that The of is a for Mary through the “You mustn't he the should have more at I have ought to be his is ought to more consideration” “You with such all the not to In these she to the among the Tyrone men and preserve the of Tyrone is constantly to out of the and Edmund seems more with his than his so the among the Tyrone men threatens to the stability and happiness of their home. Mary thus through language not to mend the between and but to to the family's collective Mary could the Tyrone though language, but most would that the is Her about Edmund's health and her own are is right, is and no amount of is to that is the of Mary to the Tyrone family is that Mary is about her son and has to back into the fog of morphine Mary in her attempts to preserve family stability with language, and the Tyrone men continue their attempts to preserve her agency for as long as they to recognize her language's inability to Edmund or preserve her but they are far more in the As long as they can pretend that she is sober and that her speech acts are they can consider her their foundation, and so they do all they can to preserve her in the state that is most for in the the men fear that painful over Edmund's health will cause her addiction to flare, and so all their of concern for Mary's health must be as concern that she not relapse. A this and many of the family's most nothing takes away like a bad summer only So yourself get I be all right in a if he takes of if she to the but But it does a he should have to be right it is bad her a But you mustn't it Mary. to of not nothing to be makes you a the a I Tyrone attempts a sort of “Mary He has just her and and now he to her from concern for For her Mary that Edmund is not that she is not about her and that her health is none of these speech acts are powerful enough to the which they they support the of family happiness, contributing to the that Mary is not about Edmund's ill health and therefore not in of the

It is a great pleasure to offer this tribute to Professor Leslie M. Beebe and to help celebrate her vital contribution to the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (CCP). There is no denying that Professor Beebe stands as a distinguished scholar in the field. Anyone who wishes to conduct research on second language (L2) pragmatics would not be able to begin without learning of or citing her work. Among her contributions to the field, I would first like to ponder her groundbreaking call for serious attention to L2 pragmatics as early as the mid-1980s, a time when pragmatics was a neglected area in second language acquisition (SLA) research and L2 pedagogy. In a number of scholarly papers and at conferences, she suggested that “the social rules of speaking” are “basics, not frosting on the cake” (Beebe, 1995, p. 4). Professor Beebe is acknowledged among SLA researchers as one of the earliest linguists who was deeply concerned with cross-cultural misunderstandings (which often lead to unfortunate and offensive cultural stereotyping) resulting from a lack of pragmatic competence. Also of great importance to the field was Professor Beebe’s contribution to establishing a solid link between pragmatics and SLA by introducing the concept of pragmatic transfer. In the late 1980s, by showing that L2 learners often refer back to rules of speaking from their first language (L1), she successfully demonstrated cross-linguistic influence at the level of pragmatics (Beebe & Takahashi, 1989a; Beebe & Takahashi, 1989b; Beebe, Takahashi, & Ulis-Weltz, 1990). Motivated by her seminal work, the research focus of L2 pragmatics began shifting from CCP to interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), moving beyond the comparison of L1 and L2 pragmatic conventions towards the understanding of the developmental stages that L2 learners go through. Since that time, pragmatics has rapidly grown into a legitimate area of research in the study of SLA. It is now widely accepted that pragmatics is indispensable in helping researchers to understand how L2 learners acquire and use the target language in a meaningful and appropriate manner. Professor Beebe’s knowledge of and enthusiasm for language-and-culture (Byram & Morgan, 1994) has immensely influenced both my coursework and dissertation study. Thanks to her, I gained an appreciation for the way that cultural and social motivations can provide an important basis for understanding linguistic behavior. This recognition has led me to write my dissertation on cross-cultural conversations. In one of the chapters in my dissertation, I strive to explain cross-cultural differences and the interactional consequences of these differences in accomplishing the speech act of disagreement. In doing so, I focus on specific and observable linguistic behavior, specifically, the use of discourse markers (DMs) by Korean L2 learners and native speakers of American English in everyday, face-to-face conversation. In a preliminary analysis of my data, I found a noticeable cross-cultural difference in the use of the DM but. In fact, it is a widely accepted view that East Asian cultures are oriented toward avoiding nonalignment with others. However, as Beebe and Takahashi (1989b) aptly point out, it is too simplistic and risky to determine cultural constraints on language use in polarizing terms (e.g., positive politeness vs. negative politeness, and direct language vs. indirect language). Warning against a dichotomous approach to cross-cultural communication, the researchers underscore contextual dimensions in

Dans cet article, nous avons étendu la recherche dans le domaine du tabou linguistique et nous avons rendu plus clairs certains aspects liés à ce sujet, aspects identifiés et présentés, partiellement, dans l’une de nos études précédentes. Pour illustrer notre description théorique, nous avons choisi des exemples appartenant au discours politique et social de la langue roumaine de l’époque communiste, de la langue roumaine actuelle, mais aussi au vocabulaire international. Nous avons proposé deux critères théoriques de classification du tabou linguistique. L’un d’eux est de nature fonctionnelle et il reflète la relation entre la cause et l’effet impliqués dans la création du tabou. L’autre est un critère pragmatique et il repose sur le principe que le tabou linguistique pourrait être considéré comme un acte de discours qui exprime la relation entre son succès et son échec. Nous avons également identifié certaines caractéristiques paradoxales du tabou. En conséquence, nous avons remarqué qu’un langage d’interdiction (ne pas dire x) génère souvent, en contrepartie, des mots et des phrases chargés stylistiquement. D’un côté, là où il était censé être un manque, le vocabulaire s’enrichit de nouveaux mots ou de paraphrases. D’un autre côté, au niveau pragmatique, le succès total de l’acte d’interdiction implique le silence. Or, par excellence, le tabou linguistique se manifeste comme une forme lexicale.

This study examined the importance of instructing pragmatic competence. The research assessed the pragmatic competence levels of Iraqi EFL female students when producing the speech act of advice. The current study was conducted at the Department of the English Language, College of Education for Women, University of Baghdad, Iraq, 2024/2025. The participants of this study were two groups, a beginner group and an advanced group; each group contained 30 female students. The primary purpose of the study was to compare the advising speech act as performed by Iraqi EFL female advanced students with a high level of proficiency and Iraqi EFL female beginner students with a low proficiency level. This study demonstrates the significance of explicit pragmatic education in EFL classes, indicating that focused teaching of speech acts may reduce negative transfer from the native language and enhance intercultural communication performance. Therefore, the study examined the ability of Iraqi EFL female users to use appropriate pragmatic expressions when giving advice as well as the observable variations in the level of (in)directness between the two groups. The data-collection tool was the Discourse Completion Task. The statistical program, SPSS, analyzed these data. The findings of this study revealed that, at earlier stages of EFL learning, Iraqi EFL students’ perception of directness when giving advice is influenced by Arabic (L1) as their proficiency develops.

In the context of electronic commerce B2C, two different service encounters can take place: 1) service encounters without incidents during which customers get the service for themselves and without the presence of employees and 2) service encounters with incidents with interpersonal and non-interpersonal interactions. The model proposed is based on the service quality-satisfaction-loyalty intention chain and it is evaluated through a sample of 718 online shoppers. The results obtained reflect that 1) the type of the service encounter has a moderating effect in these relationships. In this sense, the effects are stronger when incidents take place and are satisfactorily resolved; 2) regardless of the type of service encounter, reliability is the most important dimension in the assessing of a Website’s service quality, followed by the recovery of the electronic service when the service encounter takes place with incidents; 3) furthermore, consumers who have had no incident during the service encounter perceive a greater service quality, show higher levels of satisfaction and loyalty intentions toward the Website than those who have had a problem during the service provision.Keywords: Electronic Service Quality; Online Shopping Behavior; Satisfaction; Loyalty Intentions.

Background and Aim: The purposes of this research were to analyze direct and indirect speech acts in the dialogues of the character “Su Mingyu” from the Chinese series “都挺好 (All is Well)” within Chinese sociocultural contexts, applying Searle's (1969, 1979) conceptual framework. The study aims to understand how speech acts function within Chinese cultural contexts and highlight the importance of pragmatic competence in Chinese language teaching. This study fills in a big gap in the current literature by focusing on the practical problems and teaching methods that Thai students face. Thai students often have trouble because their culture has different rules about how to be direct and polite in communication. Materials and Methods: This qualitative study collected data from dialogues in episodes 37-46 of the Chinese series “都挺好 (All is Well)”, which were identified as the most popular episodes according to www.baidu.com rankings in 2019. The research employed content analysis methodology to examine the speech acts in Su Mingyu's dialogues. The data were analyzed and categorized based on Searle's speech act theory and presented using frequency and percentage calculations to identify patterns in speech act usage. Results: The findings revealed that Su Mingyu predominantly employed direct speech acts in 321 instances (67.15%), while indirect speech acts appeared in 157 instances (32.84%). Among direct speech acts, Representatives were the most common type, followed by Directives and Expressives. In general, emotionally delicate situations or those requiring face-saving techniques call for the use of indirect speech acts. Chinese cultural values, such as a significant value on harmony and interpersonal relationships in communication, show up in these speech act patterns. Conclusion: The research shows the significance it is to teaching Chinese in a way that assists learners in developing pragmatic competence so they can communicate correctly in different cultural settings and avoid misunderstandings when talking to people from other cultures. A study of Su Mingyu's speech patterns shows how Chinese speakers use cultural norms to decide when to be direct and when to be indirect, especially when they need to protect their faces or are feeling sensitive. By including cultural pragmatics in their teaching methods, teachers can greatly improve their Chinese language lessons by understanding these complex patterns. The paper provides teacher and curriculum designers with practical examples of how to implement these concepts in the classroom.

Parsing Pragmatics

This study examines service encounters in Saudi Arabia from a pragmatic perspective. Its aim is to investigate the possible impact of perceived cultural distance between customers and service providers on pragmatic choices. It specifically examines how Saudi customers construct their service encounters when talking to service providers of the same (versus different) cultural/ethnic background in terms of discourse structure; strategies of request and internal modifications, and stylistic strategies. Three cafés with service providers of three different ethnic/cultural backgrounds are chosen. One has Saudi service providers, the second café has Arab (non-Saudi) service providers, and the third café has non-Arab service providers. Forty socially minimal service encounter interactions that take place in each café are observed and manually recorded. The study uses the framework of ‘rapport management’ by Spencer-Oatey (2002) as its approach for data analysis. The findings indicate that there are differences among the three sets of data in terms of discourse structure, the realization of the speech act of request, and the stylistic aspect of interactions. According to the special nature of service encounters, customers’ pragmatic choices are explained in terms of expressing certain degrees of social distance rather than politeness. More specifically, the closer cultural distance between customers and service providers, the more pragmatic strategies functioning to achieve more closeness and solidarity are employed.