Pragmatic Issues Research Articles

The Realization of Politeness Strategies in EFL Teacher-Students Classroom Interaction

Politeness is one of the prominent issues in pragmatics. It becomes a major issue in education due to the implementation of curriculum 2013 which emphasized on character education. This study aimed at analyzing the realization of politeness strategies and sociological factors influencing the choice of politeness strategies in EFL Teacher-students classroom interaction at SMP Semesta Bilingual School. This study used qualitative research in the form of classroom discourse analysis. The participants were an EFL teacher and 30 EFL students in two EFL classrooms. The research instruments were made based on Brown and Levinson (1987) framework of politeness strategies. The findings showed that bald on record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off records were realized in the classroom interaction. The teacher dominantly used positive politeness to show solidarity and to maintain a close relationship with the students, bald on records to give a clear and unambiguous instruction, negative politeness to minimize the coercion to the students, and off record to give hints. In addition, the sociological factors, namely distance, power, and degree of imposition influence the choice of politeness strategies. As the conclusion, politeness is important in maintaining relationship and creating a comfortable environment in EFL classroom.

Partículas modais em alemão e seus equivalentes funcionais em português brasileiro: proposta de análise e classificação para o uso

Neste artigo intencionamos realizar uma análise contrastiva de ocorrências de partículas modais (doravante PM) em alemão, catalão, croata, francês e inglês, propondo uma classe de PM para o português brasileiro. Partimos de referencial teórico com base na pragmática e em teorias funcionalistas como suporte. Nosso principal objetivo é defender a existência de PMs no português brasileiro, sendo elas recursos linguístico-discursivos utilizados com a função de modalizar informações não explícitas durante a interação. Nesse sentido, as PMs ativariam pressupostos nas enunciações baseados em significados nucleares. Trata-se de estudo inédito por propor análises de palavras e locuções que ainda não foram classificadas como tal em gramáticas luso-brasileiras, salvo algumas poucas exceções. O presente estudo justifica-se pela dificuldade que essas PM apresentam tanto para o ensino de língua adicional, quanto para a tradução. A investigação e descrição das PMs alemãs e seus equivalentes funcionais em português, podem, portanto, oferecer caminhos para a compreensão de questões pragmáticas importantes para as trocas comunicativas e seus usos em sala de aula. Finalmente, levantamos a hipótese de que, embora exista uma evidente diferença de classificação dessas partículas em muitas línguas, as funções comunicativas das PMs em alemão podem encontrar semelhantes interpretativos e até equivalentes funcionais em português brasileiro.

The Translation of English Financial Humor into Spanish: Cognitive, Linguistic and Pragmatic Issues

This paper addresses the translation of financial humor from English into Spanish. However, from a linguistic and pragmatic angle, both languages appear to be worlds apart in the way they approach this specialist language and discourse. English often resorts to various linguistic and communicative solutions in order to allow non-specialist readers understand the intricacies of abstract professional discourses as is the case with financial language. At the other end, Spanish tends to maintain an academic and professional tone whoever the interlocutors. Consequently, non-specialist Spanish-speaking users find financial terms and procedures intricate and difficult to understand. Humor is commonly and largely used in financial English to ease its conceptual load and favor its conceptual and linguistic understanding. Spanish, at the other extreme, very rarely uses this linguistic solution in professional financial settings.

A university/healthcare institution mentorship programme: Improving transition to practice for students.

This study describes the impact of a university-based mentorship programme that is designed to prepare nursing students for the transition to practice during their last year of classes. Research shows that mentorship is an effective strategy for facilitating the transition to clinical practice. However, there is a lack of programmes that provide mentorship prior to the students' graduation from nursing school. A mixed qualitative and quantitative approach was chosen to describe nursing students' perceptions. Mentees and mentors were invited to complete a survey or participate in an interview (September-November 2018). Nine participants were interviewed and 22 completed the survey. Four themes were found. Students were as follows: Feeling unsure and looking for answers from clinicians and wanted to Learn about practical real-life situations. Their experiences allowed them to Normalize the entry to practice and become more prepared and capable to address pragmatic issues. By bridging the academic and clinical environments, this mentorship programme helped mentees address their concerns and facilitated an easier transition to the workplace after graduation. Nurse managers can advocate for mentorship programmes by partnering with educational institutions. This support can also be continued as new graduates transition into their careers.

SOCJOKULTUROWY ASPEKT POWITAŃ W JĘZYKU SUAHILI

The Socio-Cultural Context of Greetings in Swahili1 Today most linguists agree that language and culture are tightly connected. It is also argued that in order to communicate successfully, we need to achieve a level of socio-cultural competence along with an ability to use the grammar and the lexicon of a particular language. There are many kinds of cultural norms and values that one has to obey, as there may be fundamental communication and discourse differences between one language and another. This paper is primarily concerned with some issues of discourse strategies and pragmatics of African languages. While the study focuses on greeting practices among the Swahili, it also investigates how learners acquire the pragmatics of Swahili greetings in a foreign language context, and how Swahili, as a language of wider communication, is infl uenced by cultural norms and values of its speakers, for whom Swahili is not a primary language.

Using algorithms to initiate needs-based interventions for people on antipsychotic medication: implementation protocol

IntroductionNon-adherence to antipsychotic medications for individuals with serious mental illness increases risk of relapse and hospitalisation. Real time monitoring of adherence would allow for early intervention. AI2 is a both...

EFFECTIVE WAYS OF TEACHING PRAGMATICS: HUMOR IN THE CLASSROOM

Pragmatics takes into account the relations between signs and their users, the speakers. When somebody says “Thanks, I’m not hungry” in response to the statement “You left the door open”, your are making a pragmatic mistake, because in such context “thanks I’m not hungry” is an inappropriate reply for the statement “You left the door open”. So, pragmatics is the dimension of the study of languages that deals with the relation between signs and their users in their concrete contexts of use, in other words, it is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used. Pragmatics includes the study of: (a) how the interpretation and use of utterances depend on knowledge of the real world; (b) how speakers use and understand speech acts; and (c) how the structure of sentences is influenced by the relationship between the speaker and the hearer. Furthermore, within a Systemic-Functional perspective, language is functional (people use language with a purpose), semantic (the purpose is to make meaning and socially interact with other people), semiotic (meaning making by choice) and contextual (pragmatic) as social interaction influences and is influenced by the context in which it is inserted. In this line of reasoning, the objective of this paper is the consideration that in teaching L2 pragmatics the socio-culturally and contextually appropriate (or inappropriate) communication will depend on the teaching of L2 pragmatics in the classroom in certain instances, as there can be many pragmatically appropriate ways to ask for information, to schedule an appointment, etc. With this in mind, our corpus is based on utterances and situations found in teaching English as L2 environment. Our particular the context is one of a regular English class in a private English school in the state of São Paulo, Brazil in which the L2 teacher used the excerpt of the movie Philomena and comic cartoons to teach English. Some results showed that the great majority of students investigated could not make out the humorous scenes of the video scenes and cartoons before their L2 teacher explained the scenes/cartoons to them mainly due to pragmatic issues.

Teaching pragmatics in a foreign language class and its importance in language learning

This article discusses the importance of the role of pragmatics in teaching and learning a foreign language. The issue of teaching pragmatics in a foreign language classroom is relevant today, as the younger generation who is learning a foreign language must be familiar with its language levels and rules of language use in order to learn and communicate successfully in social and academic environment. But often foreign language teachers are unable to present pragmatic ability in the classroom as long as there are shortcomings in how to teach pragmatics or they are not able to put it into practice sufficiently. At a time when the prestige of foreign language teaching and learning is growing, the number of studies on pragmatics teaching is also increasing. It is especially important to develop the skills between the teacher and the student to be able to use it in communication, especially in requesting and inviting.

Pragmatics in eflteaching: avoiding pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication

In teaching process of foreign languages there is a vital role of knowing pragmatics especially in cross cultural communication. teachers should focus on pragmatic awareness of foreign language learners in order not to make false interpretation or face to misunderstandings while communicating with native speakers who have various cultural and social backgrounds. This article states the problematic issues of teaching pragmatics in communicative competence and pragmatic failure of using the target language.

Translation of crisis banking term system from English into Russian

The article presents the consideration of the issues of semantics and pragmatics of crisis banking term system and its translation from English into Russian. The study of crisis banking term system is instigated due to the lack of linguistic works on the comparative analysis of semantic and pragmatic features of the crisis banking vocabulary presented in English and Russian. It has been established that the financial and economic crisis largely predetermined the formation of new terminological units that significantly supplemented the banking term systems of the English and Russian languages. It has been revealed that most of the new terms refer to the newly introduced anti-crisis vocabulary, along with lexemes that denote financial banking technologies aimed at improving the services provided by banks. Moreover, it has been particularly noted that the considerable part of the newly formed terms is obtained as a result of violation of the language norm of the English language, with consequent changes of the meaning, which is observed in the process of translation of the term into Russian. The article provides examples of the "shifts of meanings" in the English and Russian languages that are analyzed and explained. According to the results of the study, it could be stated that, in both English and Russian terminological units, there is a semantic unity, since the lexemic parts of the terminological phrases of the English language are semantically accurately translated into the Russian language.

Sincerely, Anonymous.

This paper provides an account of anonymous speech treated as anonymized speech. It is argued that anonymous speech acts are best defined by reference to intentional acts of blocking a speaker's identification as opposed to the various epistemic effects that imperfectly correlate with these actions. The account is used to examine two important subclasses of anonymized speech: speech using pseudonyms, and speech anonymized in a specifically communicative manner. Several pragmatic and ethical issues with anonymized speech are considered.

Alfred Schutz’s Life-World and Intersubjectivity

Alfred Schutz’s view of life-world and intersubjectivity are presented. Both concepts were developed in the realm of a social science inspired by Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology. The life-world accounts for the pragmatic issues such as temporal and spatial structures. Intersubjectivity is the basis for living and sharing the understanding of the life-world with others. Both concepts must be acknowledged in order to understand the making and shaping of the social. Lastly, we argue that intersubjectivity is an interactional process that expresses the experiential tension between the individual-subjective and the social-objective, of the social world and an antidote against the objectification of social life.

Shared Hybrid ARQ With Incremental Redundancy (SHARQ IR) in Overloaded MIMO Systems to Support Energy-Efficient Transmissions

Multiple Input and Multiple Output is a technology through which data are transmitted over the channel through multiple antennas. However, during its deployment and implementation, some pragmatic issues arise such as interference, multipath fading and noise leading to potential packet losses and consume substantial energy. To address such issues, Hybrid ARQ transmissions provide effective means for error correction, especially in a noisy wireless channel. More often few bits in packets are found to be in error and it is unnecessary to use the entire MIMO channel for retransmission to correct these errors. Hence, this paper proposes a novel approach, i.e., Shared Hybrid ARQ (SHARQ IR) using the piggyback technique in an overloaded MIMO system where the transmitting antennas are more than the receiving antennas. Additionally, the concept of a simple retransmission method is used to transform an overloaded MIMO system into either the critically loaded or under loaded MIMO systems. Simulation results outperform the contemporary approaches through reduced BER and 20% throughput gain. Such improvements have the potential to support energy-efficient transmissions for encouraging green IoT applications.

Patient-and Family-Centered Care and Patient Safety: reflections upon emerging proximity.

To present reflections upon conceptual and pragmatic relationships between the Patient-and Family-Centered Care and patient safety. A discussion about constructs related to the Patient-and Family-Centered Care and patient safety, which shows their interface with pragmatic issues of clinical nursing practice. Considering patients and families as partners and agents promoting safe care is mandatory for the safety culture. Decreasing errors and adverse health care events can be accomplished by understanding manners to incorporate the principles of Patient-and Family-Centered Care into issues related to patient safety.

Politeness Pressure on Grammar: The Case of First and Second Person Pronouns and Address Terms in Korean

Grammar is constantly emergent as an aggregate whole of discourse tendencies that are present in language use between interlocutors, hence the notion ‘emergent grammar’ (Hopper 1987). These tendencies are formed by diverse discursive needs, including the need to signal politeness, which is assumed to be universal (Brown and Levinson 1987). This need is particularly important in Korean, in which politeness is highly grammaticalized, i.e., the politeness marking is not only a pragmatic but grammatical issue. The two areas where the speaker’s decision is most clearly visible are the choice of sentence-enders, modulated up to six levels, and the choice of personal reference, e.g., pronouns and address terms. This study is a diachronic investigation of the personal reference system in Korean, exploring the effect of pressure of politeness. Despite the high level of grammaticalization of politeness marking, the personal reference system is a highly unstable paradigm, i.e., it has not undergone a high level of ‘paradigmaticization’ (Lehmann 1995 [1982]). Since personal reference terms are highly variable, the speakers often avoid using them for fear of the addressee perceiving that the choice is of insufficient honorification or that the very act of using reference terms is impolite when they could be omitted. Furthermore, personal reference terms with the [+Honorific] feature constantly deteriorate through frequent use. Therefore, a look into Korean reference terms shows that [+Honorific] terms are constantly innovated to upgrade the diminishing honorification effect and the first-person reference terms are constantly innovated to strengthen the [+Humiliative] meaning.

Intensive Care Unit Diaries, Part 2: Impact of Diaries and Follow-up Consultation on Post-Intensive Care Syndrome.

Intensive Care Unit Diaries, Part 2: Impact of Diaries and Follow-up Consultation on Post-Intensive Care Syndrome.

Sustainability and integration – the principal challenges to tourism and tourism research

ABSTRACTWhat are the biggest challenges facing tourism and tourism research? This paper answers this question by canvasing the opinions of recognized experts in the field. The analysis is based on 30 interviews with fellows of the International Academy for the Study of Tourism. Two key thematic issues were identified. First, the pragmatic issue of how to operationalize sustainability and its various sub-elements, such as climate change, overtourism, and tourisation to ensure the long-term future of tourism. Second, the need for further integration between disciplines within the tourism field, between tourism and other fields, and between research and practice.

Hear my screams: An auto-ethnographic account of the police

Other writers, notably police researchers, infrequently discuss the problems and difficulties that they encounter in and outside of fieldwork when doing research on the police. In this article, I piece together some critical and personal reflections of researching the police to provide nuanced information that can help other writers to learn from my own experiences of researching the police and also help them to navigate their own experiences of working with the police for research purposes. These reflections of mine emanate from fieldwork notes and my research diary. I use Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness as a lens to theorise and make sense of such experiences, understanding how my presence gets in the way of the happiness of others because of my affiliation to sexual violence work. By naming a problem, rape as a problem, I became the problem. The article outlines some of the chief ethical, personal and pragmatic issues that can surface when researching the police. For example, I frequently encountered interrogative questions whereby officers questioned my sexuality, asking ‘are you gay?’ I became a nuisance for the police, a problem by highlighting the issue of male rape as a problem given that it challenges the status quo of normative heterosexuality. I argue that, doing research on the police, which can involve sensitive and challenging work that affects one emotionally, socially and physically, impacts not only the officers being interviewed, but also the researchers themselves. The latter group should be identified much more readily than seems to be the case in the social sciences.

Społeczny i empiryczny charakter transcendentalnego antropocentryzmu Immanuela Kanta: problem istoty człowieczeństwa

This paper presents a conceptual-discursive analysis of Immanuel Kant’s texts from the viewpoint of the ontological essence of humanity (the so-called human nature). On the basis of a functional-pragmatic methodology, the author proposes a metalanguage for a pragmatic conceptual analysis of Kant’s philosophical discourse, together with his own idea of a human as a person, human being, individual, character, and bearer of human traits. The paper consists of two parts. Part One presents the principles by which the human personality is structured, as well as the fundamental methodological questions of the essence of humanity. Part Two analyzes Kant’s notion of “human nature” in both the formal aspect and that of systematic localization. It also considers the issues of social pragmatics and the empirical motivation of “human nature,” which arise from a discursive analysis of texts by Kant. The author attempts to demonstrate that Kant was one of the first philosophers to discern the specificity of human nature in social relations of human personality, which he presented neither in a causal-deterministic form (as a spiritual substance handed down from generation to generation) nor an essentialist one (as a timeless transcendental essence), but rather as a function of social experience for a particular human being (both pragmatic-teleological and transcendental-a posteriori).

Задачі та методи аналізу великих даних (огляд)

We review tasks and methods most relevant to Big Data analysis. Emphasis is made on the conceptual and pragmatic issues of the tasks and methods (avoiding unnecessary mathematical details). We suggest that all scope of jobs with Big Data fall into four conceptual modes (types): four modes of large-scale usage of Big Data: 1) intelligent information retrieval; 2) massive (large-scale) conveyed data processing (mining); 3) model inference from data; 4) knowledge extraction from data (regularities detection and structures discovery). The essence of various tasks (clustering, regression, generative model inference, structures discovery etc.) are elucidated. We compare key methods of clustering, regression, classification, deep learning, generative model inference and causal discovery. Cluster analysis may be divided into methods based on mean distance, methods based on local distance and methods based on a model. The targeted (predictive) methods fall into two categories: methods which infer a model; "tied to data" methods which compute prediction directly from data. Common tasks of temporal data analysis are briefly overviewed. Among diverse methods of generative model inference we make focus on causal network learning because models of this class are very expressive, flexible and are able to predict effects of interventions under varying conditions. Independence-based approach to causal network inference from data is characterized. We give a few comments on specificity of task of dynamical causal network inference from timeseries. Challenges of Big Data analysis raised by data multidimensionality, heterogeneity and huge volume are presented. Some statistical issues related to the challenges are summarized. Problems in programming 2019; 3: 58-85