Discourse Completion Task Research Articles

Genus und Sexus im Konflikt.

The specialty of hybrid nouns is their different agreement according to certain features of the agreement target. They result from a conflict within in the gender assignment system. For example, the German noun Mädchen (semi-transparent diminutive for denoting a girl) is grammatical neuter but it refers to a female person. In German, nouns denoting females are feminine but diminutives are neuter. Since both rules apply, you can refer to Mädchen with a neuter (es) but also with a feminine pronoun (sie).
 There are different factors which influence the agreement pattern: the linear distance between noun and pronoun and the type of agreement target. So far there are only few studies on the influence of possible non-grammatical factors such as the age of the referent. In this paper, I elaborate on those factors and present the results of a discourse completion task focusing on the influence of a sexualized context.

Motzen und Moral

SummaryThe paper analyses complaining behaviour at the workplace across several languages (French, German in Austria and in Germany, Polish and Russian). As speech acts, complaints deal with socially unacceptable actions that are brought up as problematic issues retrospectively. This may include critical evaluative assessment or the request for compensation. Data have been collected using an online discourse completion task (DCT) including discourse scenarios in which the power distance between the participants as well as the weight of the transgression/misconduct varied. The results show that complaining strategies vary along several dimensions (e. g. mention of transgression +/-, justification of complaint +/-, way in which a solution or compensation is requested). The observed differences in complaining strategies can be interpreted in terms of culture-specific ways in which the relationship at the workplace is conceived of. Despite the general restrictions of DCT as a method of data collection, we suggest utilizing data and results derived from their analysis in the context of courses of intercultural business communication and of business language courses.

Bidialectal Practices and L2 Arabic Pragmatic Development in a Short-Term Study Abroad

AbstractThe current study takes a bidialectal perspective for the conceptualization of pragmatic competence and its development through illuminating the need for the field to move forward and overcome the standard language ideology in research on L2 pragmatic competence. To this end, it brings bidialectal practices to the forefront to investigate L2 Arabic pragmatic development in a short-term study abroad programme. In particular, bidialectal practices, or the ability to use one or more spoken varieties alongside Modern Standard Arabic, are explored in this study in relation to appropriateness and pragmatic strategies in the production of apologies, refusals, and requests. A spoken discourse completion task that included scenarios with varied power and social distance combinations were utilized to collect data from 36 participants (21 L2 Arabic learners and 15 L1 Arabic speakers) in an eight-week study abroad sojourn. Findings indicated an overall improvement of pragmatic competence over the period of eight weeks. Specifically, significant developments were demonstrated in appropriateness scores and learners’ use of bidialectal practices in pragmatic strategies. Moreover, the qualitative analysis of strategies development identified areas in which learners converged towards or diverged from L1 speaker norms. Methodologically, the study shows that utilizing bidialectal practices to measure L2 Arabic pragmatic competence development is key to understanding learners’ developmental trajectories.

Social contact and speech act strategies in a Chinese study abroad context

Abstract This study examined the relationship between reported amounts of social contact and speech act strategies among 70 learners of Chinese enrolled in a study abroad program in Beijing. The participants completed a computer-delivered spoken discourse completion task (spoken DCT) eliciting three speech acts: requests, refusals, and compliment responses. Speech act strategies were compared between two groups of learners who reported different amounts of social contact (high and low social contact) as assessed via a self-report survey. Results showed that both high and low social contact groups favored using similar strategies to achieve the three speech acts. However, the high social contact group produced speech acts in a more sophisticated way: with a wider variety of request strategies, multiple refusal strategies used in combination and more deflecting strategies in compliment responses, compared with the low social contact group. The findings suggest that social contact helped learners expand their pragmalinguistic repertoire and employ more varied speech act strategies.

Terms of Address: A Contrastive Investigation of Ongoing Changes in British, American and Indian English and in German

Abstract Address terms are closely related to the conceptualisation of hierarchical relations in a speech community, so, since – at least in Western societies – tendencies towards a flattening of hierarchies have been noted (cf. Mair, 2006), we expect changes in this domain. Some evidence has been produced for German, American and British English, but empirical insights on address choice in Indian English are lacking to date. As it tends to be a conservative variety (cf. e.g. Collins, 2012), we might expect resistance to change. The study makes a novel use of discourse completion tasks to investigate ongoing change using an ‘apparent-time’ approach. Our findings support the view of Indian English as conservative and of American English as changing most clearly towards informalisation, visible in the increasing use of informal attention getters (hey!). However, evidence of recent change is otherwise not as pronounced as expected and actually absent regarding pronoun choice in German.

İLTİFAT YANITLARININ FARKLI SÖYLEM DURUMLARINA GÖRE TOPLUMSAL CİNSİYETE BAĞLI FARKLILAŞMASI

This study aims at investigating compliment responses of female and male Turkish university students in different compliment situations. The data were collected through a written discourse completion task under four situational settings: appearance, performance, character, and possession. 100 undergraduate students (50 males and 50 females) participated in the study. Holmes’s (1988a, 1988b) macro and micro categories were adapted and developed to analyze the compliment responses of the participants. The responses of both groups obtained from the discourse completion task were compared qualitatively and quantitatively. Results indicated that the general pattern for participants is Accept, Evade and Reject strategies at the macro level and Appreciation Token and Shift Credit at the micro level. Some statistically significant differences between the responses of females and males were identified. Both at the macro and micro levels, how females and males respond to the compliments vary with respect to the situational context they receive the compliment. Under specific situations participants tend to reply similarly which help us to come up with an ethnographic account of CRs.

Students’ apologizing in Arabic and English: An interlanguage pragmatic case study at an Islamic boarding school in Indonesia

It is hard to select and produce appropriate semantic formulas of apologizing for paying off violation of social norms to restore harmony. It seems that it is even harder to realize such processes of selection and production in a non-native language. The study is of three folds; namely, it examines the realization of the apology strategies by students of a senior Boarding School in Arabic and English as a non-native language, the effects on the contextual factors (external vs. internal) on the students’ apologizing, and the pragmatic transfer. The participants were 101 male and 101 female students, recruited to fill in a Discourse Completion Task (DCT), which consisted of eight situations about the flouting of the politeness rules in the context of the Islamic boarding school, by drawing upon the five semantic formulas of apologizing from Blum-Kulka and Olshtain (1983) of Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) for analyzing the data. The findings show that the students used identical semantic formulas in both languages. They prefer to use the “expression of regret” and “promise for forbearance” strategies. The findings also reveal that the internal and external factors affected the students’ selection and production of the apology strategies in both languages. In addition, the students’ pragmatic transfer occurred in linguistic areas, namely overgeneralization, inappropriateness, grammatical contrast, and conceptual transfer from L1 to L2, which are categorized into two types, namely, micro-negative transfer and macro-negative transfer. To conclude, these results indicate the students’ on-record-negative politeness attitudes towards the offended parties, which are determined by the contextual factors and the students’ lack of grammatical competence.

The Sociopragmatic and Pragmalinguistic Strategies in L2 Pragmatic Competence: A Case of Pakistani ESL Learners

ABSTRACT This study contributes to the existing literature on teaching ESL by investigating Pakistani learners’ responses to the apology speech acts. The study considered the two primary aspects of pragmatic competence: pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic. A multimethod data collection approach – a discourse completion task and a scaled-response questionnaire – was employed to elicit performance and perception data from 150 participants divided into three groups. Findings indicate that Pakistani ESL learners mostly produced the semantic content consisting of cultural-specific and language-specific patterns of apology responses. There also occurred pragmatics transfer in the use of apology responses of Pakistani ESL learners. Findings suggest the inclusion of sociopragmatic competence into the ESL curriculum.

Article in Translation: Chinese compliment responses in triadic contexts

Current studies on compliment responses are largely confined to the dyadic model of communication, without taking into consideration the influence of third parties present. The most commonly used methods of data collection in compliment response research are discourse completion tasks (DCT), role play, etc., the objectivity and accuracy of which remain unconfirmed. With the method of natural conversation recording and targeted elicitation, this article collects 233 cases of female college students' compliment responses in both dyadic and triadic contexts in Beijing and analyzes the data in the model of “acceptance-mitigation-evasion-rejection”. The results show that the frequency of accepting compliments among Chinese college students has increased greatly compared to the findings of Chen (1993), indicating noticeable Western influence on Chinese compliment response strategies. However, there is a significant difference between the acceptance ratio in dyadic and triadic contexts. In dyadic communication, the compliment receivers generally prefer the acceptance strategy, while in triadic contexts, they choose evasion and rejection. This finding indicates that the westernization of compliment response strategies in Chinese culture is a gradual and heterogeneous process and the Self-denigration Maxim still plays an important role in the culture at a deeper level. This study also indicates that the use of DCT tends to raise the ratio of acceptance strategy in general in Chinese compliment response research.

Linguistic politeness of Pakistani English and British English speakers: Culture and gender perspectives

This study examines sociocultural, pragmatic, and gender differences between native speakers of British English (BritE) and Pakistani English speakers (PakE) in expressing apology responses (ARs). Based on a discourse completion task (DCT) using data from 60 speakers of both cultures, the study focuses on the variations in the use of apology response strategies in three severe and three non-severe situations. The findings show that the two groups use a variety of politeness strategies in expressing apology responses. The majority of BritE speakers tend to use ARs with the relatively strong hearer-oriented strategies (Acceptance). PakE ARs, on the other hand, seem to be dominated by the frequent use of Acknowledgment, with speaker-oriented strategies. Similarly, BritE speakers tend to use more indirect (Evasion) strategies as compared to PakE speakers. These results have proven that both male and female English-using Pakistanis are amazingly obvious and direct in their apology responses. Furthermore, the findings do not show quite pronounced gender differences both within and between the two cultures in terms of the strategy use and expressions.

Investigating EFL speakers’ gratitude strategies: Interlanguage pragmatics

Gratitude strategies used by EFL speakers have always been the focus of interest by researchers who observed the presence of pragmatic transfer strategies by which speakers express their gratitude. We have seen that several adapted versions of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) by Eisenstein and Bodman (1986) are constructed based on the original version and largely applied to the participants from various backgrounds. A similar methodology is used in this study and we investigated the gratitude strategies of participants, including 80 EFL learners in Turkey and 70 non-native European speakers of English at tertiary-level. We also interviewed with 44 Turkish speaking participants and used two sampling methodologies to identify the participants that could promote the data obtained from the DCTs. Our research entailed quantitative and qualitative data examined through content analysis. Primary findings indicated strong divergences and weak similarities between both speaker groups who resorted to the speech act of thanking compared to non-native European speakers who also differed in thanking strategies. Finally, we have been provided with valuable indications for the constituent parts of the language teaching that neglect the instructional side on the pragmatic use of language for gratitude and other speech acts.

Effects of peer collaboration on EFL learners’ comprehension of conversational implicatures

This study investigated the effects of peer collaboration on EFL learners’ comprehension of conversational implicatures by comparing their performances and verbalizations between individual and collaborative work on a multiple-choice discourse completion task (MDCT). Thirty-three Taiwanese EFL learners (11 individuals and 11 pairs) were asked to report their cognitive processes while performing the MDCT. The verbal protocols were transcribed and analyzed in terms of the strategies found in pragmatic-related episodes (PREs). The results indicated no significant difference in the scores of the MDCT between the individual and collaborative groups, but showed that the two groups tended to use different strategies to infer the implicatures. In addition, pair collaboration led to more negotiation and scaffolding, which facilitated the learners’ pragmatic development in implicatures. This study concludes with pedagogical implications for pragmatic teaching and learning.

The use of refusal strategies in interlanguage speech act performance of Korean and Norwegian users of English

The present paper describes a contrastive study of interlanguage refusal strategies employed by Korean and Norwegian learners of English as an additional language. The data were collected from multilingual first-year students at an American university in South Korea and in an English-medium program at a Norwegian university by means of an online open discourse completion task and analyzed using the coding categories based on Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Welts (1990), and Salazar Campillo, Safont-Jordà, and Codina Espurz (2009). The data were analyzed to compare the average frequencies of refusal strategies used by the two groups, and the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies that they employed. Independent samples t-tests revealed significant differences in the use of direct and indirect strategies with small effect sizes. The differences in the use of adjunct strategies were not statistically significant, and the effect sizes were negligible. Descriptive statistics of the differences in the types of direct, indirect, and adjunct strategies also revealed interesting patterns. The findings suggest that multilinguals’ pragmatic performance is a complex phenomenon that cannot be explained by the differences in cultural and pragmatic norms of their first language alone.

The encoding of epistemic operations in two Romance languages: The interplay between intonation and discourse markers

For years, linguists have noted that intonation patterns and discourse markers encode similar pragmatic meanings across languages. The present study investigates whether a functional compensatory distribution can be documented across languages by focusing on the expression of epistemic commitment in two Romance languages which have been reported to have either a rich or a very reduced inventory of intonational patterns (e.g., Catalan vs. Friulian). A total of 30 speakers (15 per language) participated in an oral Discourse Completion Task designed to elicit assertions with three degrees of speaker commitment. The results showed that while Catalan used specific intonation patterns for the expression of low and intensified commitment statements, Friulian speakers used only one type of pitch contour to express both types of epistemic commitment. In contrast, Friulian speakers made more frequent use of a more varied set of epistemic discourse markers for the two types of biased statements than their Catalan-speaking peers. This result suggests that a trade-off strategy can be observed between intonation and discourse markers across these two languages. This ultimately shows the need to integrate the study of intonational meaning with other parts of the grammar inside a more unified approach in comparative analyses of language.

A Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Study of Invitation Strategies As Produced by Indonesian and Yemeni EFL Language Learners

Based on cross-cultural pragmatic research perspectives, the present study aimed at comparing the attainment of speech acts of invitation between Indonesian and Yemeni EFL learners. The study participants were 30 undergraduate students from Airlangga University, Indonesia, and 30 undergraduate students from Sana’a University, Yemen. All of the participants were different in terms of their cultural background. The data were gathered by using Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and then analyzed on the bases of Bruder and Tillitt (1999), Al-Khatib (2006), and Suzuki (2009) compilations of invitation strategies. The findings of the study displayed some similarities and differences in terms of invitation making. Some invitation strategies seemed to be culturally specific to one culture and others are universal across the two cultures. In this regard, Indonesian EFL learners preferred to be indirect in the use of speech acts while invitation making with the high preference to use Yes/No questions, asking for willingness and Wh. questions strategies. They believe that the use of such strategies helps them to add some polite expressions that they use in their daily conversation while using their first language. In contrast, Yemeni EFL learners favored being direct in the use of the speech act of invitation, with the highest percentage of imperative strategy followed by Yes/ No questions strategy. This might show a portion of the effect of their first language on their answers. They also know that direct invitations are mostly accepted in their culture. Besides, the findings of the study revealed that Indonesian and Yemeni EFL learners translated the utterances in their mother tongue into the target language without considering the variations between the two languages in patterns of sentences and the order of words. Implications of the study are supplied too.

Criticism in the Javanese Arek Cultural Community

Abstract This article studies the speech act criticism and its function as a means of social control in the Javanese Arek Cultural Community (JACC) in East Java, Indonesia. Its goal is to understand how criticism is expressed in various contexts based on ±Power (±P), ± social Distance (±D), ±Public (±Pu), and to understand the criticism strategies appropriate for use in these contexts. The data was collected through Discourse Completion Tasks and interviews. The results show that the contexts for expressing criticism in the JACC are determined by parameter ±D. Based on this parameter, it can be discovered which contexts tend to be preferred and less preferred. In the use of strategy, the Indirect Criticism (IC) is more commonly used than the Direct Criticism (DC). Nevertheless, in preferred contexts, the DC is still regarded as something that is natural and customary.

The production and perception of Turkish evidentiality markers by Turkish-German returnees

AbstractThe study contributes to research on the development of the heritage language after return to the country of origin and examines whether the ultimate attainment of the heritage grammar after many years of residing in the country of origin brings returnees to a level compatible with that of monolinguals. We focus on the production and perception of evidentiality markers in the heritage Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals who returned to Turkey after finishing a German high school and have been residing in Turkey for more than 11 years. Two production tasks (a narrative task and a discourse completion task), as well as a grammaticality judgement task were used in the study. The data analysis revealed that the production and perception of evidentiality by the returnee participants diverged from those of the monolingual control group. The divergence manifested itself in ungrammatical uses of evidentiality markers in the context of the indirect evidentiality and less sensitivity to grammatical and ungrammatical items comprising direct and indirect evidentiality markers. The findings of the study suggest that after many years of residing in Turkey the language behaviour of the returnee participants still possesses features that are typical for heritage speakers.

Explicit instruction for the development of L2 Spanish pragmatic ability during study abroad

This study investigates the effects of pragmatic instruction and short-term study abroad (SA) on the development of apologies in second language (L2) Spanish. Students who spent four weeks in different SA programs in Spain were randomly assigned either to an experimental group (n = 9) or a control group (n = 9). Native Spanish speakers from Spain were recruited to provide baseline comparison data. Prior to departure, the experimental group received explicit pragmatic instruction on how to formulate apologies in Spanish. During SA, they performed two task scenarios designed to promote their pragmatic competence. The control group did not receive pragmatic instruction, nor did they perform the tasks. Before departure and during the final week of the program, both groups completed an oral discourse completion task (ODCT) consisting of five apology scenarios. The ODCT data and appropriateness ratings indicate that the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group in three areas of pragmatic development: appropriateness, strategy use, and speech rate. Findings suggest that explicit pragmatic instruction both before and during SA contributes to participants’ L2 pragmatic competence.

The effect of Bloom-based activities and Vygotskian scaffolding on Iranian EFL learners’ use of the speech act of request

The purpose of this study was to determine if Bloom-based Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP) instruction could enhance EFL learners’ use of the speech act of request. Based on their OQPT scores, 43 students were assigned to a control group (n=23) and a treatment group (n=20). A written discourse completion task (WDCT) was developed to measure participants’ use of the speech act of request before and after the intervention. The results pointed to a significant difference between the performance of the treatment group in which Bloom-based treatment supported by Vygotskian scaffolding was employed and the control group which received no explicit ILP instruction. The treatment group also yielded significant gains from the pretest to posttest and to delayed posttest, while no significant improvement was observed in the performance of the control group. In-depth examination of the participants’ WDCT performance indicated that the four pragmatics factors (correct use of speech acts, type of expressions, amount of information, and degree of politeness) measured in this study, improved significantly, but differentially, from the pretest to delayed posttest. Comparison of the pretest and posttest data suggested that the component of degree of politeness enjoyed the highest degree of gain followed by amount of information, correct use of speech acts and type of expression.

Pragmatıc Dıscourse of Pagaralamnese Imperatıve Polıteness And Its Englısh Meanıng Based Translatıon

The current study is focused on the imperative politeness used by Pagaralamnese.The objective of this study was to find out the categories of imperative politeness in Pagaralamnese and its cultural translation into English. The method usedwas a qualitative ethnography of communication and the instruments utilyzed were wdct( written discourse completion task) and an interview. There were five respondents of Pagaralamnese. The interactive model was used in analyzing the data. The findings showed that there were six types of taboo words in Pagaralamnesenamely imperative politeness of warning, request, order, prohibition, suggestion., expectation.This article deals with discourses of imperative politeness found in various places in Indonesia. By using data collected from five respondents from Pagaralam city with socio pragmatic approach. Thoughsomereseachers claim that politenese expressions were translated in a certain lexicon withouth context , the fact that politeness expressions should be translated in a context or in a pragmatic way. In addition, it is strongly recommended to translate politeness expressions in a cultural context