Pragmatic Behaviour Research Articles

From everyday exposure to pragmatic mastery

Abstract In this paper, we review recent findings on the development of communicative behaviour of monolingual and bilingual toddlers and preschoolers. We describe how the unique experience of growing up with two (or more) languages affects children’s everyday experiences and the pragmatics of their communicative behaviour. Deriving from this literature, we introduce a novel perspective on children’s development of communicative behaviour (COMmmunicative-Experience, COME), discussing potential mechanisms behind this pragmatic behaviour. It assumes that children experience communicative situations of varying efficiency and that these experiences shape their communicative behaviour: The more experiences children have with non-effective communicative situations, the larger their communicative repertoire becomes and the more flexibly this repertoire can be applied in a given situation. Notably, the COME perspective is not limited to bilingual communicative development but can be applied to a variety of other pragmatic contexts. Therefore, we broaden the discussion by identifying open questions for future research.

Ideas, Politics, and The Making of Muslim Democracy: An Historical Trajectory in Indonesia

Debates regarding the compatibility of Islam and democracy have thrived, with a focus on political moderation and post-Islamism to explain changes among Islamist groups. However, there’s been little exploration into the historical evolution of their ideologies and political preferences in religious politics. This study examines the role of ideas and politics within Muslim organizations, political parties, and the state in Indonesia. It emphasizes the mechanisms behind both ideology and political motivations, showing how political Islam adopted pragmatic behaviour before entering democratic politics. The interaction between the ideological renewals of Muslim thinkers in the 1970s and changes in the state’s institutional arrangement under the New Order drove Islamic transformation. Political institutions shape Islamic political ideas and their manifestation, influencing cultural identity, political mobilization, and negotiation of group claims. Muslim leadership acts as agents in defining religious interests based on institutional markers.

Multilingual cyberpragmatics in instructional settings. Exploring gender and age effects in Catalan, Spanish and English email requests

ABSTRACT The present study focuses on email communication in the multilingual university setting. Previous studies dealing with similar settings point to the lack of politeness markers in students’ email messages [Bjorge, A. (2007). Power distance in English lingua franca email communication. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 17(1), 60–80], requests tend to be more direct and they may not match with the degree of imposition or social distance involved. Students’ lack of netiquette and the lack of physical presence on the Internet may influence their pragmatic behaviour. In addition to that, other studies [Barón, J., & Ortega, M. (2018). Investigating age differences in e-mail pragmatic performance. System, 78, 148–178] point to age effects and further confirm the preference for direct pragmatic forms. Nevertheless, very few studies have adopted a multilingual perspective. For this reason, we have examined 250 email requests to faculty. Openings and requests produced in Catalan, Spanish or English were analysed. Our main goal was to confirm whether students’ requests would devoid politeness markers and whether openings would show a lack of netiquette. We were also interested in identifying age and gender effects and in finding out if the pragmatic forms chosen would be in line with the politeness orientation of the language involved. Results are in line with previous studies but they also contradict them adding interesting information on the way multilingualism is displayed in email interaction.

Pragmatic behaviour: pragmatism as a philosophy for behavioural economics

Behavioral economics offers an account of actual human behavior. Contrasting with the conventional normative approach to rationality, rational choice theory, describes the deviations from optimal decision making. These are attributed to failures in two systems, one in charge of automatic behavior (System 1) and the other responsible for reflective one (System 2). As important as this is, an elaboration of the interaction between them seems to be lacking. Philosophical pragmatism can contribute to address this want. It provides an evolutionary explanation of how people act accounting for the continuity of behavior including habitual and reflective action. The former is captured by habits and the latter directed towards objects. Additionally, it proposes a dialogical self, consisting of an interaction between the 'I', denoting impulse, and the 'me', referring to reflective action. As such, pragmatism can provide fertile ground on which to cultivate behavioral insights.

Different Fates of Architectures

This paper aims to problematize the issue of reuse and reoccupation of architectures and building materials in the Near East. So far, the vast majority of research and published work dealing with this topic (not only in the field of Islamic Archaeology and Art History) have focused on the monumental complexes of urban centres. In this framework, the concept of spolia has been at the centre of a long and still heated transdisciplinary debate. Vernacular architecture and rural contexts have, for the most part, been neglected. Frequent episodes of reoccupation of earlier structures, even if thoroughly described in archaeological reports are almost automatically branded as the result of pragmatic behaviour of local communities benefitting from the availability of abundant building materials from ruined structures. However, the vast number of ways in which reuse and reoccupation might have occurred is often overlooked. Even conceding that most of the evidence is likely due to some form or other of “pragmatism,” the different ways in which these appear need to be more fully explained and interpreted. This paper, which builds on existing scholarship of reuse and reoccupation, argues for a rethinking of the methodology. Other experiences, most notably those investigating the late Antique and early Medieval western Mediterranean, provide a useful point of reference for where to start the discussion. This paper will demonstrate how extending the perspective from the single building to the broader context, including the surrounding landscape, is ultimately the only way to fully comprehend the archaeological evidence and possibly better understand and explain the different “fates” of architectures.

How Good Are Native Speakers at Evaluating Pragmatic Competence? Native Speaker Assessments of Learner Status and Appropriate Pragmatic Behaviour in English

Cet article rend compte d’une étude de perception. Des locuteurs natifs (anglais et allemands ayant l’anglais comme L2) doivent identifier le statut d'apprenant ou de locuteur natif de l’auteur d’une demande. Les données suggèrent que le taux de réussite pour distinguer un locuteur natif d’un apprenant grâce à la performance linguistique relève presque du hasard. L’identification d’un locuteur comme locuteur natif est incontestablement liée à la compréhensibilité, l'authenticité perçue ainsi qu’à l'absence d'erreurs formelles. Sur la base de ces résultats, nous questionnons la capacité des locuteurs natifs à évaluer intuitivement le comportement communicatif ressemblant à celui d’un locuteur natif au-delà des aspects formels. Ensuite, nous abordons l’importance qu’ont ces résultats par rapport aux démarches d’inclusion de la compétence pragmatique dans les tests de langue et la certification linguistique.

Pragmatic failure revisited: Jaworski’s (1994) study in a new light

In the current conditions of globalization and the use of English as a lingua franca (ELF), the notions of pragmatic competence and appropriateness as well as pragmatic failure become of paramount importance to the language learners and instructors. The current article discusses these questions through an approximate replication of Jaworski’s (1994) study of pragmatic failure in responses to English greetings by Polish English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. The need for the replication arises from the lack of studies addressing pragmatic failure of EFL learners and the need to approach pragmatic behaviour of EFL learners in the conditions of ELF. The replication duplicates the methods of data collection and analysis of the original study but alters the native language (L1) of the participants and expands the study through the analysis of responses and the ratings. The data consists of Russian EFL learners’ responses to the “How are you?” greeting question in the examination context. The results showed that Russian EFL learners achieve pragmatical success: the majority of the responses was rated as appropriate by the English native speakers. It is concluded that the original study’s concern with teaching pragmatics should be applied and investigated in greater details focusing on ELF. Additionally, the notions of pragmatic competence and pragmatic failure need to be reevaluated and applied in the context of ELF.

Admonishing

Abstract This paper examines the pragmatic properties of what we define as a ritual act of ‘admonishing’. We argue that admonishing represents a historically embedded realisation type of the speech act Suggest. We explore admonishing in ancient Chinese political and governance texts dated before the 2nd century BC. The results of our analysis show that admonishing often not only affords but even triggers paradoxical pragmatic behaviour. This paradox stems from the fact that, in many historical linguacultures like the ancient Chinese, admonishing was directed at a recipient, most typically a ruler, who was more highly ranked than the admonisher himself. While this context normally precluded threatening the recipient’s face, admonishing was realised in a ritual frame in which such a face threat was deindividuated. In pragmatics, a research gap exists in the study of the historical act of admonishing, and so the current study fills a knowledge gap.

Usos ideológicos de elementos prestados del euskera en la creación de palabras en español en el lenguaje periodístico

Neology is a natural process in the diachronic evolution of language, which founds a very fruitful gap in the language of journalism. This paper presents an analysis of the morphological, semantic and pragmatic behaviour of some linguistic elements coming from the Basque language, which have been documented in an ad hoc corpus from the Spanish press. The initial hypothesis is that formants from this language are used to activate mental frames that connect neologisms with terrorist violence in the recipients. This type of neology is especially prolific because it seeks concrete pragmatic effects, whether as part of the journalist style or of the media. We have reviewed the digital newspaper library of eleven newspapers in order to study the function of three formants: borroka, batasuno and –(t)arra. The conclusion is that the starting hypothesis on the use of elements of Basque to create tendentious neologisms is fulfilled.

The Words that Count

Computer assisted discourse studies (CADS) undoubtedly offers great prospects in our attempts to observe and understand the use and social effects of language in context, but it does so with a caveat: we need to be constantly aware of our significant (and often implicit) assumptions when attempting to reach beyond electronically analysed masses of text into assessments of pragmatic (and so social) behaviour. This paper aims to remind us of the need for reflection on our most basic assumptions as we begin to make use of more complex and refined procedures and start to make more ambitious claims about what various corpora can show us. It is argued that concepts such as the word, tokens, types and frequency require constant re-evaluation, in particular when we are using data that have been extracted from their original textual (and so contextualized) sources in the creation of corpora. It is hoped that a small contribution can be made to the debate about the empirical approach to understanding language, perhaps in terms of methodologies to be utilized, the potential extent and limits of CADS, or in terms of presenting or interpreting the results and conclusions of published studies.

Pragmatism in professional practice

AbstractIn recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in the American philosophy of pragmatism. The paper reviews the application of pragmatisms in five selected areas of professional practice: technology, law, politics, medical and social work, and education. Each area is examined for evidence that the ideas of pragmatism have been taken up academically in the research literature. The literature is then examined for evidence that the academic work has permeated the actions of professionals. Each of the chosen practice areas is clearly dominated by pragmatic, instrumental activities. Despite this and a good deal of discussion in the academic literature, there is only limited evidence that professionals, in so far as they exhibit pragmatist behaviour, make any explicit connection with the philosophy of pragmatism. The early pragmatists argued that pragmatic behaviour arises from man's need to solve problems quickly, using his limited understanding of the situation, in order to survive and flourish: no philosophy had been required to guide such behaviour. Today, philosophy is often consulted on questions of ethical and moral dilemmas in most practice areas, but the philosophy of pragmatism may well not feature in such discussions. Experience in operational research (OR) practice is reviewed and compared with that in the five other practice areas. From the reviews, a list of the habits and orientations is synthesized, habits and orientations that could be taken to characterize pragmatism in professional practice.

Towards a Learner-Centred Approach to Design Role-Play Instruments for ILP Studies: A Study Based On Complaints

Role-play tasks have been widely used in pragmatic research to explore spoken interaction. This instrument consists of situational scenarios purposefully designed to make participants elicit specific pragmatic data in controlled situations (Kasper & Youn 2017, Félix-Brasdefer 2018). Notwithstanding the widespread use of role-plays, some drawbacks have been identified concerning design (Hudson et al. 1995, Trosborg 1995, Youn 2015) and real-life consequences (Al-Gahtani & Roever 2012). Against this backdrop, this study presents a learner-centred approach to design situational scenarios based on participants’ examples of complaint situations. Specifically, an exemplar generation task and a likelihood questionnaire (Jianda 2006a, 2006b) were used to elaborate the role-play task. The study reports on the implementation of the learner-centred approach and its effectiveness to construct a role-play task. Furthermore, using retrospective verbal reports, this study discusses whether participants’ engagement in the design of the role-play task encouraged them to act out the situations, as they would do it in real-life contexts. The study evidences the usefulness of adopting a learner-centred approach to design the role-play task. In terms of performance, it seems that, in general, the participants would exhibit similar pragmatic behaviour in a real context. However, they were aware of the lack of real consequences role-play tasks carry.

Perceptions of address practices in Italian interregional encounters. A case study of restaurant encounters

Italian regions constitute distinct cultural and linguistic entities, each with their own language varieties. Address forms are reported to be used with different frequencies and connotations in the various regions, not only in local Italo-Romance dialects but also in regional varieties of Italian. As part of a large-scale study on address in Italy with a focus on restaurant encounters, this article investigates perceptions of address practices when individuals relocate to or simply visit other regions of Italy. Upon enquiring about regional differences in the ways waiters and customers address each other, it has emerged that: a) many speakers do perceive regional differences in address practices; b) being addressed by waiters with unexpected forms in interregional encounters can result in positive or negative reactions; and c) reflecting on the perceived pragmatic behaviour by waiters can sometimes lead speakers to formulate representations of regional cultures and identities. Regional pragmatic variation in Italian presents itself as a promising field of research, the results of which would improve our current knowledge of regional varieties of Italian and perceptions thereof.

Linguistic and Pragmatic Failure of Arab Learners in Direct Polite Requests and Invitations: A Cross-cultural Study

In a cross-cultural context, the speakers' cultural disposition, linguistic codes, and social identity may influence their pragmatic behaviour; thus, lead to communication breakdowns. This paper studies the cross-cultural pragmatic failure in polite requests among Arab participants from different cultural backgrounds, and reattempts to test[ validate] the universality of Speech Act Theory, and Theory of Politeness. To that end, 96 situations have been collected from 16 Arab participants divided into two groups to examine the polite strategies they use in request and invitation situations. The results of the qualitative data analysis have shown that almost all participants favour conventionally direct strategies in requests and invitations to express politeness and hospitality. As for the Arab students who are UK citizens, the results indicated that they have a tendency to use more indirect strategies in different situations. However, this indirectness was perceived as lack of hospitality in invitations, and lack of pragmatic clarity in requests by the first group. The results of the data analysis show that there is no one formula of how politeness can be perceived by different cultures, and that the differences stem out from different socio-cultural norms. The findings also provide worthwhile insights into theoretical issues concerning Arabic communicative acts, as well as the relation between the universal pragmatic features, and culture-specific theoretical differences.

Diachronic patterns of usage of no doubt in the English Historical Book Collection (EEBO, ECCO and EVANS)

Abstract This study offers a collocate analysis of the modal marker no doubt (ND) in the EEBO, ECCO and EVANS combined corpora using Sketch Engine. The purpose is to determine the diachronic patterns of usage of ND, and secondly to compare results with the conclusions of existing diachronic pragmatic studies of modal markers. The first step identified five patterns of behaviour based on AM score in decreasing order of frequency: 1 – NDB (no doubt but); 2 – TISND (there is no doubt); 3 – MND (make no doubt); 4 – (ND (parenthetical use); 5 – Ndont (no doubt on’t). The second step consisting in partitioning of the corpus following Hilpert and Gries (2016) produced 3 distinct periods based on EHBO data (1580-1669, 1670-1759, 1760-1799). The findings showed that the relative usage of ND for each period remained remarkably consistent, especially the persistence of non-grammaticalized behaviours MND and TISN. The two major disparities, concerning NDont and parenthetical (ND, were shown to be of likely significance for the changing pragmatic behaviour of ND, which further diachronic study may be able to ascertain.

Socio-pragmatic Deficiency in E.Requests

<p>The speech act of request is face-threatening by nature and an inappropriate request can cause offence to the hearer, particularly when s/he has higher authority (Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011). E-mail is frequently used to facilitate communication between student and professor in Iraq. Iraqi EFL (English as a foreign language) learners face pragmatic difficulty in making proper requests to individuals of higher authority via e-mail. Some studies have been conducted on Arab EFL learners to uncover the pragmatic behaviour of these learners in real-life requests using elicited data. This research fills a gap in Inter-language Pragmatics (ILP) literature in that it investigates the use of academic request in three diverse imposition levels (low, medium, and high) by Iraqi EFL learners when they communicate with their professors via e-mail. This study uses authentic data consists of 200 e-mails related to academic requests sent by Iraqi EFL learners to their professors. Besides, the study uses the CCSARP (cross-cultural speech act realisation project) originally proposed by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989) and modified later by Biesenbach-Lucas (2007). Qualitative and quantitative analyses are used to analyse the data. The findings reveal that Iraqi EFL learners primarily use direct strategy in all types of request impositions by e-mail. These learners have socio-pragmatic deficiency in high imposition requests; that is, they are mainly direct with their professors in requests call for conventional indirectness to be acceptable pragmatically.</p>

Language performance of hearing aid and cochlear implant adult users

This study aimed to describe the pragmatic behaviours of persons with adult-onset hearing loss (AHL) and to compare the behaviours underlying conversational abilities of hearing aid (HA) users to those of cochlear implant (CI) recipients using the Pragmatic Protocol described by Prutting and Kirchner (1987). The Pragmatic Protocol comprises 30 parameters that are organized in three aspects: verbal, paralinguistic and non-verbal dimensions. Thirty-five hearing aid users and 25 cochlear implant recipients were videotaped in a naturalistic setting during conversation with a partner. Fourteen (41%) of the HA users displayed normative pragmatic behaviour, in contrast to the CI recipients, among whom only 4 (16%) showed normative pragmatic behaviour, a significant difference (t=2.25, df=57, p =0.014. 1-tailed). When comparison was restricted to participants that displayed pragmatic inappropriateness, the two groups showed a similar pattern of inappropriate behaviour. Inappropriateness was observed in Vocal intensity (49%), Repair/revision (37%), Vocal quality (31%), intelligibility (27%), Feedback to speaker (25%), Pause time (24%) and Interruption/overlap (20%). Although the HA and the CI groups showed a similar pragmatic profile, there were quantitative and some qualitative differences between the two groups. Pragmatic behaviour was more appropriate in the HA group than in the CI user group. The pragmatic profile indicated that the adults with AHL show a wide variety of appropriate pragmatic behaviours and a specific profile of inappropriate pragmatic behaviours. The profile was centred on the paralinguistic and interactive pragmatic parameters, while the verbal and nonverbal aspects were found appropriate.

A corpus-based approach to contemporary Irish writing: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s use of «like» as a discourse marker

This paper analyses in quantitative and qualitative terms the representation of the discourse marker <em>like</em> in contemporary Irish English writing. A common feature of contemporary spoken English, the discourse marker <em>like</em> seems to have made its way into the English spoken in Ireland, as portrayed by contemporary Irish authors such as Paul Howard. Howard, whose narrative can be taken as an example of <em>oral writing</em>, has been acclaimed by critics as having an exceptionally fine ear for Dublin English, but what is this acclamation based on? The paper argues that the findings of corpus stylistics (comparative frequencies, distributions, etc.) document in a more systematic way what literary critics and readers may intuitively deduce. By analysing the syntactic and pragmatic behaviour of <em>like</em> in Howard’s fictional discourse, this paper aims to show the value of the combination of computer methodology and literary interpretation in evaluating the representation of fictional dialect.

Comportements d’automédication et infirmières Recherche qualitative exploratoire

In everyday life, self-medication is a usual mean of self-care either with drugs or alternative medicines that calls for attention from health psychologists. The aim of this qualitative study is to explore and understand self-medication among experts in the health and illness world. Semi-structured interviews with nurses have been analysed using Grounded Theory model. Results show that self-medication is a pragmatic behaviour embedded in the history of the individual, sensitive to his socioeconomic and professional context. As experts for their own health, nurses’ strategies to deal with their minor ailments raise the question of “pharmacologisation” of everyday life.

How Do Adults Use Repetition? A Comparison of Conversations with Young Children and with Multiply-Handicapped Adolescents

The aim of this research is to compare the types and functions of repetitions in two different corpora, one constituted of verbal interactions between adults and multiply-handicapped adolescents, the other between adults and young children of the same mental age as the adolescents. Our overall aim is to observe whether the communicative (linguistic and pragmatic) behaviour of adults varies according to the interlocutor and, if it does vary, in what ways. The main results show that adults do not use repetition strategy with the same aims according to the interlocutor. When interacting with a child, repetitions form part of a strategy of linguistic 'tutoring' which allow the child to take on board progressively more complex linguistic constructions; it also enriches exchanges from a pragmatic point of view. On the other hand, when adults communicate with multiply-handicapped adolescents, their main aim is the maintaining of dialogue.