Pragmatic Failure Research Articles

The pragmatics of street hustlers' English in Egypt

ABSTRACT: A frequent source of irritation for tourists or foreign residents in Egypt comes from their interaction with street hustlers of different kinds. Simple, well intentioned greetings or offers of services or even offers of help often give offense inadvertently and are negatively perceived by the visitor. This paper proposes to characterize how some of these hustlers’ routines operate and to provide a pragmatic analysis of what makes them surprising or unusual from an American English speaker's perspective. Results of the study indicate that cross‐cultural pragmatic failure between vendors and foreigners stems from different perceptions about such factors as who may speak and when, the degree of personal involvement, what constitutes an imposition, and such matters as privacy and sincerity.

Hedging in academic writing and EAF textbooks

Academic writing is rich in hedged propositions. By allowing writers to express their uncertainty concerning the factuality of their statements or to indicate deference to their readers, epistemic devices are a significant characteristic of academic writing. While there is clear pedagogical justification for assisting learners to develop an awareness of the significance of hedging and the principles of its correct use, tentative language continues to be an important source of pragmatic failure in the writing of second language science students. This paper discusses the importance, functions, and expression of epistemic modality in scientific discourse in order to evaluate the treatment given to hedging devices in a range of EAP and EST writing textbooks. It is suggested that despite the interest hedging has attracted in the research literature, a number of widely used textbooks display an ignorance of empirical usage, and that pedagogic writing materials would benefit from revisions based on authentic data.

PRAGMATIC FAILURE IN A SECOND LANGUAGE: GREETING RESPONSES IN ENGLISH BY POLISH STUDENTS

When the intended force of the speaker's utterance is not perceived or when it is misrepresented by the hearer, pragmatic failure occurs. Polish students of English fail pragmatically to perceive the formulaic nature of the greeting How are you? and it interpret as a question for information and/or they do not tolerate this formula as an acceptable or sincere greeting. Other problems of students with responding to formulaic greetings in English involve an insufficient degree of automatization of their responses, and inappropriateness of their reactions at the morpho-syntaxic level

The Use of Intonation to Communicate in Pervasive Developmental Disorders

The objective of this paper was to employ a functional linguistic approach to explore pragmatic failure in the spontaneous speech of subjects with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD). Patterns of intonation use were compared among subjects with Asperger's syndrome (AS), high-functioning autism (HFA), and psychiatric out-patient controls (OPC) with a variety of non-specific social problems. Written transcripts and audio-recordings were used to measure rates of various intonation types relative to the amount of speech produced. The major finding of the study was that the HFA subjects less often tend to employ useful patterns of intonation for communication than the AS or OPC groups. This suggests that HFA either send random intonation signals to hearers or else demonstrate systematic misuse of the linguistic system. AS subjects differed little from the controls. The implications of these results for understanding the communicative failure of PDD subjects is discussed.

Learning strategies in second language acquisition By J. Michael O'Malley and Anna Uhl Chamot (review)

416 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) room discourse' (169-88), consider West German pupils of English and their classroom discourse, following the transcript-analytic model of John Sinclair & Malcolm Coulthard 1975 (Towards an analysis ofdiscourse, Oxford University Press). Hüllen & Lorscher demonstrate that there is a hierarchy of illocutions, the levels of which are shown to shift, in teacherpupil interaction, from questions about topic to questions about correctness of form. Gabriele Kasper ('Interactive procedures in interlanguage discourse", 189-230) distinguishes between 'procedural' and 'declarative' knowledge of discourse rules. She builds on the work of Goffman, Schegloff. and House to contrast systematically openings, closings, and the functions of discourse regulation in two distinct environments —educational and noneducational discourse. Philip Riley, in 'Well, don't blame me: On the interpretation of pragmatic errors' (231-50), builds very effectively on the notions of 'pragmalinguistic' and 'sociopragmatic ' failures described by Jenny Thomas ('Cross-cultural pragmatic failure". Applied linguistics 4, 1983). Finally, Mary WildnerBassett examines 'Coexisting discourse worlds and the study of pragmatic aspects of learners' interlanguage' (251-75). Extending Kasper's 1982 analysis of the classroom-constructed 'pidgin' of language learners ('Teaching-induced aspects ofinterlanguage discourse'. Studies in second language acquisition 4), WildnerBassett describes 'discourse world-switching'. There are a few proofing errors, in addition to the delightful claim that America has a 'demoncracy '. A central problem in the book is the lack of a uniform notation for pragmatic transcription (e.g. for indicating sarcastic prosody )—a lack which, lamentably, is an index of the state ofcontrastive pragmatic studies in general . [David W. Murray, Brandéis University.) Learning strategies in second language acquisition. By J. Michael O'Malley and Anna Uhl Chamot. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. 260. Cloth $34.50, paper $12.95. Despite so many shared areas of interest, linguistics and cognitive psychology have to a large extent developed independently of each other. Thus, studies of language learning have often been conducted without reference to what we know about other kinds of human learning. This has been particularly so in the past few years. For instance, a notion such as Chomsky's 'Language Acquisition Device' is notoriously not amenable to analysis. More recently, the 'Natural Approach', so influential in foreignlanguage teaching, sees language acquisition as proceeding unconsciously, given the appropriate environment and input. The somewhat vague terminology—'comprehensible input', 'affective filter'—employed in this perspective throws little light on how learning (acquisition?) actually occurs. Far from accounting for individual differences among language learners, it seems that theorists are often unaware that these differences exist. O'Malley & Chamot reject the tendency exemplified in the Natural Approach and other current models. The authors argue that secondlanguage learning parallels the acquisition of other cognitive skills, and can be accelerated and made more efficient by appropriate teaching and learning strategies. Reviewing the literature of the past fifteen years or so in this area, they find a wide but disparate set of theoretical formulations to account for 'the good language learner'. These include theories of communicative competence and ideas derived from computation and information processing. Their own views are to a large extent based on J. R. Anderson 's information processing theory. Anderson , like so many others, has distinguished between declarative and procedural knowledge, a particularly fruitful distinction when one is thinking about language learning, since language involves knowing how and knowing that. The latter can benefit from explicit instruction, while the former can be built up through practice. O'M&C's goals are to determine what cognitive processes are involved in acquiring these kinds of knowledge, and if possible to design teaching procedures that favor such acquisition. This book might well be added to reading lists for graduate courses in second-language acquisition or applied linguistics. The authors are to be commended for trying to bring to bear a unified theory in a field that has fostered so many disparate and isolated ideas which, though interesting in themselves, have little relationship to each other. O'M&C show a comprehensive grasp of the relevant literature, and are at their strongest when expounding the theoretical background. Their review ofempirical evidence is a little weaker—some of the research reported here is quite slight in terms of numbers BOOK...

Lexical-Grammatical Pragmatic Indicators

Our main aim in this paper is to explore the interlanguage pragmatics of learners of Hebrew and English. We focus on the use of pragmatic indicators, both lexical (please/bevaqaŝa; perhaps/ulay) and grammatical (e.g., the difference between could I borrow and could you lend), with particular reference to deviations from native-speaker norms in the speech of non-native speakers. The analysis follows the analytical framework developed for the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project (CCSARP). Data from two sets are analyzed: (a) native and non-native Hebrew, and (b) native and non-native English (with occasional reference to other CCSARP data sets). The results suggest that non-native speakers' misuse of pragmatic indicators can have serious interactional consequences, ranging from inappropriateness to pragmatic failure.

Too Many Words: Length of Utterance and Pragmatic Failure

This paper investigates the theoretical and applied domains of pragmatic failure. With respect to theory, it further clarifies pragmatic failure both in native and non-native speech, and with respect to the applied domain compares request realizations of native and non-native speakers in terms of length of utterance. In discussing the results of this comparison, a number of hypotheses are put forward concerning the ways in which deviation from native norms of utterance length might be a potential cause for pragmatic failure.The data were collected within the CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Pattern) project involving seven different languages and dialects (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984). The data were collected from both native and non-native speakers of each of the languages. The analysis of responses across several languages revealed a systematic difference in length of utterance used to realize speech acts by non-native speakers as compared to native speakers. The types of pragmatic failure that might be linked to being a non-native speaker are examined, thus continuing a line of research focusing on the pragmatic aspects of interlanguage (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Thomas, 1983; Edmondson et al., 1984).

Understanding Misunderstandings: cross‐cultural pragmatic failure in the language classroom

Summary The article investigates the process of language teaching as one of communication in what is, necessarily, a cross‐cultural context. The potential for misunderstanding in such a situation is high, and the author focuses upon the nature of the errors which can ensue: these are designated ‘pragmatic’, as distinct from ‘grammatical’, errors. He then develops a model whereby pragmatic error may be better understood, by differentiating between different levels of discourse.

Cross-Cultural Discourse as 'Unequal Encounter': Towards a Pragmatic Analysis1

In a previous paper in this journal (Thomas 1983a), I put forward the notion of ‘pragmatic failure’ (which I distinguished from linguistic error) and I discussed some of the underlying reason for the fact that non-native speakers often seem inappropriately over-assertive or domineering when talking English. In a second (unrelated) paper on the language of asymmetrical discourse (see Thomas 1983b), I described a range of pragmatic and discoursal features which recurred with great regularity in the speech of the dominant participant in a variety of ‘unequal encounters’ (i. e. interactions in which one participant is in a position of authority relative to the other, as in police-suspect, teacher-pupil interactions). This paper brings these two strands of research together, in order to demonstrate that one reason for non-native speakers sometimes appearing inappropriately domineering or authoritarian in interactions with English-speaking ‘equals’ is that they are inadvertently employing as ‘communication strategies’ certain linguistic features which, for the native-speaker, tend to be inextricably linked with the language of unequal encounters. I discuss in relation to cross-cultural spoken and written data two such features, and argue that they may well lead to some from of pragmatic failure. They involve the inappropriate use of: (a) IFIDs (Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices); and (b) Metapragmatic Comments, ‘Upshots’, and ‘Reformulations’.

Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure

/ have given the term pragmatic failure' to the inability to understand 'what is meant by what is said'. In this paper I argue that pragmatic failure is an area of cross-cultural communication breakdown which has received very little attention from language teachers. I suggest that there is one area of pragmatic failure ('pragmalinguistic failure') which is fairly easy to overcome. It is simply a question of highly conventionalized usage which can be taught quite straightforwardly as 'part of the grammar'. The second area ('sociopragmatic failure') is much more difficult to deal with, since it involves the student's system of beliefs as much as his/her knowledge of the language. I argue that it is essential to avoid prescriptivism in this very sensitive area of language in use. To do so we must draw on insights from theoretical pragmatics and develop ways of heightening and refining students' metapragmatic awareness, so that they are able to express themselves as they choose.

SUPPORTIVE MOVES IN THE SPEECH ACT OF DIRECT COMPLAINT IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN: A CROSS-CULTURAL AND INTERLANGUAGE PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS

This paper examines the use of supportive moves in the speech act of direct, face-to-face complaints produced by English and Serbian native speakers in their respective mother tongues, highlighting similarities and differences in their performance. The study also explores how advanced Serbian L1 learners of English use supportive moves in complaints performed in English and especially, whether and to what extent they apply the pragmatic rules of their native language (pragmatic transfer) in doing so. Data were collected through discourse completion tasks (DCTs). The performance of all three groups of participants is compared, with special focus on the contextual variables of social power and severity of complaint. The results of the research indicate that the two cultures are similar with respect to the production of direct complaints, as well as that a low level of pragmatic transfer is observable in the complaint production of the English learners’ group. In order to avoid pragmatic failure in communication in the target language in general, L2 learners need to be exposed to explicit instruction regarding both the linguistic and the cultural conventions in the foreign language, supported by authentic and suitable teaching materials.

THE USE OF METADISCOURSE MARKERS IN ESSAYS WRITTEN BY ESP UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

The study deals with metadiscourse markers employed in the essays written by ESP university students of mechanical engineering. The aim was to investigate the frequency of use of metadiscourse markers and to determine their types according to Hyland’s (2005) taxonomy. The corpus consisted of 100 essays dealing with two topics related to mechanical engineering. The research findings indicate that students used interactional metadiscourse categories to a significantly higher extent than interactive metadiscourse categories. The most used markers overall were transitions, followed by engagement markers and hedges. This suggests that students tried to capture the attention of their readers and make them participate in the discussion. Still, some markers were misused or overused, which implies that students need more instruction in the adequate use of markers. It can be concluded that adding explicit instruction in the use of metadiscourse markers to the ESP university curriculum would increase the level of students’ pragmatic competence so as to help them avoid pragmatic failures in writing.