Pragmatic Tasks Research Articles

Guidelines for effective community transformation from a practical theological perspective: An African case study

This article reports on the pragmatic task that formed the conclusion and flagship part of a master’s degree (MTh) research study into the effectiveness of the transformational task of the church in the Sesheke area. The methodological approach in the research has been according to Osmer’s four tasks of practical theological interpretation, namely the descriptive-empirical, interpretive, normative, and pragmatic tasks. Each of these tasks has been used to address a specific stage of the study. A separate preceding article by the same authors focused on the first task, while this article addresses the fourth. The Pastors’ Fellowship, referred to as the Sesheke Church in this article, has accepted their biblical mandate to engage in community transformation activities aimed at alleviating the plight of the poor and less-privileged people in society. The overall outcome of the research has shown that the Sesheke Church has failed at its transformational task for several reasons, as will be briefly discussed in this article. Therefore, the pragmatic task has endeavoured to formulate practical guidelines to enhance the effectiveness of the Sesheke Church’s task. The authors believe that this article will contribute to the discourse of practical theology regarding community transformation from the unique context of the Sesheke Church’s transformational task and the respective guidelines for effective community transformation. Burns and Grove state that understanding the meaning of a phenomenon in its context makes it easier to understand similar phenomena in other contexts.

Do executive function and theory of mind predict pragmatic abilities following traumatic brain injury? An analysis of sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts

Quality of life and social integration are strongly influenced by the ability to communicate and previous research has shown that pragmatic ability can be specifically impaired in individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In addition, TBI usually results in damage to the frontotemporal lobes with a consequent impairment of cognitive functions, i.e., attention, memory, executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM). The role of the underlying cognitive deficits in determining the communicative-pragmatic difficulties of an individual with TBI is not yet completely clear.This study examined the relationship between the ability to understand and produce various kinds of communicative acts, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic) and the above-mentioned cognitive and ToM abilities following TBI. Thirty-five individuals with TBI and thirty-five healthy controls were given tasks assessing their ability to comprehend and produce sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts belonging to the linguistic and extralinguistic scales of the Assessment Battery for Communication (ABaCo), together with a series of EF and ToM tasks.The results showed that, when compared to healthy individuals, participants with TBI performed poorly overall in the comprehension and production of all the pragmatic phenomena investigated, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts), and they also exhibited impaired performance at the level of all the cognitive functions examined. Individuals with TBI also showed a decreasing trend in performance in dealing with sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts, on both the comprehension and production subscales of the linguistic and extralinguistic scales. Furthermore, a hierarchical regression analysis revealed that – in patients with TBI but not in the controls – EF had a significant effect on the comprehension of linguistic and extralinguistic irony only, while the percentage of explained variance increased with the inclusion of theory of mind. Indeed, ToM had a significant role in determining patients’ performance in the extralinguistic production of sincere and deceitful communicative acts, linguistic and extralinguistic comprehension of deceit and the linguistic production of irony. However, with regard to the performance of patients with TBI in the various pragmatic tasks investigated, (i.e., sincere, deceitful and ironic communicative acts), EF was able to explain the pattern of patients’ scores in the linguistic and extralinguistic comprehension but not in production ability. Furthermore, ToM seemed not to be able to explain the decreasing trend in the performance of patients in managing the various kinds of communicative acts investigated.

Лингвокультурологическая стратегия формирования полилингвальной и поликультурной личности инофона на завершающем этапе обучения РКИ

The article proposes a modern integrative methodological/methodical approach to training of a qualified foreign specialist in the course of Russian as a foreign language, which combines solution of professional and pragmatic tasks and linguoculturally motivated pedagogical tactics and is implemented in the education package “Lessons of the Russian” developed by the authors for foreign non-philologist students. The basis of the described pedagogical discourse is a multilevel strategy of educating a creative multilingual and multicultural personality of a student through formation of linguistic and cultural competence in connection with professional verbal competence. At the final stage of prolonged training this strategy is focuses on the organic connection between language units and cultural material and is based on a system of concepts as a set of nationally determined, specific and valuable phenomena conveyed by various linguistic tools. This creates conditions for erasing the boundary between educational and natural communication, the acquisition by foreigners of necessary communicative experience for productive social, scientific and professional activities through necessary communication experience in the language of study and a deeper understanding of specifics of Russian national linguistic culture as an integral part of the global paradigm of values.

Pragmatic competence of heritage learners of Chinese and its relationship to social contact

AbstractThis study aimed to investigate: (1) Chinese heritage learners’ (CHLs) pragmatic competence in comparison to foreign language learners of Chinese (CFLs) and (2) the relationship between CHLs’ pragmatic competence and their language contact in a range of social settings. Focal linguistic forms included sentence final particles (SFPs) and formulaic expressions (FORs). Sixty Chinese language learners in the intermediate- and advanced-level classes (31 CHLs and 29 CFLs) participated in the study. Participants completed a computerized listening comprehension task, a written production task, and a language contact questionnaire. Findings showed that CHLs outperformed CFLs in both comprehension and production of Chinese sentence final particles and formulaic expressions. The analysis of language contact questionnaire revealed that learners who reported a greater amount of interactive language contact achieved higher scores on the pragmatic tasks, regardless of the constructs and skill domains assessed.

Communication in Multiple Sclerosis: Pragmatic Deficit and its Relation with Cognition and Social Cognition

Cognitive functions have been largely investigated in multiple sclerosis. Less attention has been paid to social communication abilities, despite their presumptive affect on quality of life. We run the first comprehensive assessment of pragmatic skills in multiple sclerosis, evaluating also the relationship between pragmatics and other cognitive domains. Forty-two multiple sclerosis patients and 42 controls were tested for pragmatic abilities, neuro-cognition, social cognition, depression, and fatigue. Patients performed poorly in most pragmatic tasks compared to controls. Globally, 55% of patients performed below the 5th percentile in the total pragmatic score. Notably, pragmatic skills did not differ between cognitively impaired and unimpaired patients. However, an association was found between pragmatics and verbal fluency, as measured in the Word List Generation. Finally, we observed an association of pragmatic abilities with social cognition, and a trend with psychosocial functioning. Overall, the study shows a diffuse pragmatic impairment in multiple sclerosis, not associated with the patient's global neuropsychological profile. By contrast, our findings suggest a close relation between pragmatics and specific cognitive aspects such as executive functions, and between pragmatics and social cognition. This study underlines the need of looking beyond classical cognitive performance, to consider underestimated communicative disturbances of high clinical relevance.

Ways of Forming Expressive Vocabulary of Youth Sociolect (As Exemplified in French Language)

The article is devoted to the study of French youth discourse, which is characterized by a high degree of emotiveness with a pejorative connotation. The categories of emotiveness, expressivity and evaluation are considered to be interrelated that provides the ability of a lexical unit to participate in a communicative act as a means of conveying speaker's subjectivity and facilitates the implementation of pragmatic tasks. Special attention is paid to the description of the main means of development of expressive lexis that allows expressing a certain attitude to the reality by the linguistic juvenile community. It gives a detailed analysis of lexical-morphological means of juvenile lexis creation, including suffixes, apocopic units, reduplication and verlan. It is reported that lexical-semantic means of expressivity include those units that appeared as a result of a metaphorical and metonymic reinterpretation of general literary words. It is stressed that in the youth speech practically all lexis means only those concepts that are relevant to the users, it is not associated with the most essential phenomena of society's life. Finally, it is concluded that the elements of modern youth speech affect the development of the language of the whole French society.

Sincere, Deceitful, and Ironic Communicative Acts and the Role of the Theory of Mind in Childhood

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationship among age, first- and second-order Theory of Mind and the increasing ability of children to understand and produce different kinds of communicative acts – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts – expressed through linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. To communicate means to modify an interlocutor’s mental states (Grice, 1989), and pragmatics studies the inferential processes that are necessary to fill the gap, which often exists in human communication, between the literal meaning of a speaker’s utterance and what the speaker intends to communicate to the interlocutor. We administered brief video-clip stories showing different kinds of pragmatic phenomena – sincere, ironic, and deceitful communicative acts - and first- and second-order ToM tasks, to 120 children, ranging in age from 3 to 8 years. The results showed the existence of a trend of difficulty in children’s ability to deal with both linguistic and extralinguistic pragmatic tasks, from the simplest to the most difficult: sincere, deceitful, and ironic communicative acts. A hierarchical regression analysis indicated that age plays a significant role in explaining children’s performance on each pragmatic task. Furthermore, the hierarchical regression analysis revealed that first-order ToM has a causal role in explaining children’s performance in handling sincere and deceitful speech acts, but not irony. We did not detect any specific role for second-order ToM. Finally, ToM only partially explains the observed increasing trend of difficulty in children’s pragmatic performance: the variance in pragmatic performance explained by ToM increases between sincere and deceitful communicative acts, but not between deceit and irony. The role of inferential ability in explaining the improvement in children’s performance across the pragmatic tasks investigated is discussed.

The Relationship between Iranian EFL Learners’ Use and Preferences of Language Learning Strategies and Their Meta-Knowledge and Tasks of Pragmatic Competence

The present study investigated the relationship between Iranian EFL learners’ use and preferences of language learning strategies and their meta-knowledge and the tasks of pragmatic competence. Quick Oxford Placement Test, version 2 (2004) was administered and 120 upper-intermediate EFL university students majoring in English translation and TEFL were recruited from the available branches of the Islamic Azad University, Fars province. Likewise, a questionnaire entitled Iranian EFL learners’ meta-knowledge and pragmatic tasks (2016) was used to explore EFL learners’ meta-knowledge and tasks of pragmatic competence and the mean score was calculated. Then, Oxford Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (1990) was used to analyze EFL learners’ use and preferences of language learning strategies and the mean score was calculated. Also, to examine any possible relationship between EFL learners’ use and preferences of language learning strategies and their meta-knowledge and pragmatic tasks, some correlations were run. The results of data analyses showed that Iranian EFL learners were moderate in meta-knowledge and tasks of pragmatic competence and in their use of language learning strategies in general. More detailed analyses of the data ranked the order of the applications of the strategies as: social strategies, meta-cognitive strategies, cognitive strategies, memory strategies, compensation strategies and affective strategies from the most to the least frequent strategies applied by the participants of the study. There was a significant medium positive relationship between meta-knowledge and tasks of pragmatic competence and meta-cognitive strategy. However, there were slight but significant positive relationships between meta-knowledge and tasks of pragmatic competence and compensation and affective strategies and no relationships between meta-knowledge and tasks of pragmatic competence and social, affective and compensation strategies.

Task-Based Approach as an Effective Tool in Developing Pragmatic Competence

The challenge of realizing the value of pragmatic competence development in the current curriculum has been a long struggle in most language classes across the globe. This struggle initiated few researches from scholars on language learning who specifically explored the role classroom approaches in pragmatic development, but still less attention is given to these approaches. The study aimed to find out the relative effectiveness of task-based approach in developing the pragmatic competence of college students. It employed the experimental type of research called pretest-post-test non-equivalent group design. The respondents were the first year college students enrolled in a writing subject. The data were collected using a researcher-made pragmatic competence test anchored on Bowers, Huisingh, and LoGiudice's Pragmatic Tasks Framework (2005). Results showed that the experimental group after being taught with task-based approach improved their pragmatic task competence in making inferences, sequencing, decoding implied meaning, supplying appropriate maxims, considering politeness, summarizing, and providing solutions to language problems. It can be posited that tasks as center of language teaching would develop and enhance the language learners' pragmatic competence. The study recommends the use of task-based approach to innovate language instruction and enhance students' potentials in pragmatic development.

Социальная сема как компонент значения в названиях интернет-сообществ

The designations “groups” and “communities” are examined as those given to associations of communicants on the Internet. The author states that the names of these associations have certain pragmatic tasks, since they are attracting the attention of Internet users and work on the expansion of groups. It is proved that the solution of such problems led to social semes in the names of unions. The author believes that the onomastic linguistic material (proper nouns) is also the part of social vocabulary. Social lexis refers to many words and expressions that serve as the designations of objects and phenomena of the life of society and a man because of his social characteristics - status, roles, etc. The relevance of the study is justified by the fact that there are no ideographic description of the social vocabulary in the Russian language and the concept of such a description. Analysis of the composition ofthe names of Internet communities allows to draw some conclusions regarding the features of group Internet communication. It is shown that the names of Internet communities are their hallmarks, that indicate the range of interests of participants of virtual communication in each group and the perception of social realities. The classification of categories depending on the method of education is given. It is concluded that many of the names include lexemes that characterize man from the standpoint of his social function.

Learner–Learner Interaction During Collaborative Pragmatic Tasks: The Role of Cognitive and Pragmatic Task Demands

AbstractPrevious task complexity studies have suggested that learners produce more negotiation of meaning opportunities during complex tasks than simple tasks (Robinson, 2011). The present study builds on the existing task complexity literature by examining the impact of task complexity and pragmatic situational demands on the number of learning opportunities for request‐making expressions. Forty‐nine Korean junior high school learners of English as a foreign language were randomly assigned to participate in either simple‐ or complex‐ collaborative pair writing tasks, which included different levels of pragmatic situational demands. The interactions were transcribed and analyzed for the frequency of pragmatic related episodes (PREs; Kim & Taguchi, 2015) as well as the number of turns within each PRE. The results showed that task complexity played an important role in facilitating PREs by targeting sociopragmatic factors and not pragmalinguistic forms, regardless of the level of pragmatic task demands. Results are discussed in light of promoting interaction‐driven learning opportunities for pragmatics using collaborative tasks.

Communication and pragmatic breakdowns in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients

While there is increasing attention toward cognitive changes in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), the domain of pragmatics, defined as the ability to integrate language and context to engage in successful communication, remains unexplored. Here we tested pragmatic abilities in 33 non-demented ALS patients and 33 healthy controls matched for age and education through 6 different tasks, ranging from discourse organization to the comprehension of figurative language, further grouped in three composite measures for pragmatic production, pragmatic comprehension and global pragmatic abilities. For a subgroup of patients, assessment included executive functions and social cognition skills. ALS patients were impaired on all pragmatic tasks relative to controls, with 45% of the patients performing below cut-off in at least one pragmatic task, and 36% impaired on the global pragmatic score. Pragmatic breakdowns were more common than executive deficit as defined by the consensus criteria, and approximately as prevalent as deficits in social cognition. Multiple regression analyses support the idea of an interplay of executive and social cognition abilities in determining the pragmatic performance, although all these domains show some degree of independence. These findings shed light on pragmatic impairment as a relevant dimension of ALS, which deserves further consideration in defining the cognitive profile of the disease, given its vital role for communication and social interaction in daily life.

Pragmatic Abilities in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

Pragmatic Abilities in Patients with Traumatic Brain Injury

THE PROBLEM OF THE NEW VULNERABILITIES OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIETY

In article the author analyzes the new vulnerabilities which have arisen as a result of the formation of the complex socium in modern Russian society. It is shown that these vulnerabilities bear with themselves new risks for the functioning of the society and its members. The author argues that self-sufficiency of the Russian society is in real danger. The following vulnerabilities are specifically considered: the dysfunctions of the self-sufficiency of the society; the uncontrollable openness generating specific risks; the complex socium comprising the immanent potential of accidents; the process of complication of the risks; social and cultural dynamics of civilizations, the nature of their interactions; the vulnerabilities for the human capital. The solution of the arisen problems the author seems on the ways of the formation of non-linear and humanistic thinking as an intellectual basis of the Russian cosmopolitan human capital. This thinking proceeds from the acceleration and the complication of the sociocultural dynamics, the interdependent integrity of the mankind. The increasing requirements to the qualitative characteristics of the human capital induce to that at its formation were put and decided not only pragmatic tasks, the aims of the accumulation of the humanistic potential in the human capital. Respectively, the formation of the general strategy of the new stage in development of Russia has to assume the active interaction of political elite with scientific community from which, in turn, the new theoretical and methodological tools, capable to cope with the arisen problems are demanded.

Scalar Implicatures in Child Language: Give Children a Chance

Children's pragmatic competence in deriving conversational implicatures (and scalar implicatures in particular) offers an intriguing standpoint to explore how developmental, methodological, and purely theoretical perspectives interact and feed each other. In this paper, we focus mainly on developmental and methodological issues, showing that children from age 6 on are adult-like in deriving the scalar implicature related to the scalar quantifier some (i.e. they interpret some as some but not all), while children at age 4 and 5 only sometimes reject underinformative-some in a classical Truth Value Judgment Task (Experiment 1). They do so despite their excellent performance in pragmatic tasks that evaluate their competence with the rules of talk exchange, such as the Conversational Violations Test (Experiment 4) and the Felicity Judgment Task (Experiment 5). To give children a better chance to reject underinformative-some when all is at stake, we manipulated the experimental design and materials in three different ways: 1) in Experiment 2, we tested the partitive alcuni dei (some of) instead of the bare quantifier qualche (some); 2) in Experiment 3, we attempted to prime the scale <some, all> by asking children to judge a correct statement with all before the critical underinformative statement with some; 3) in Experiment 6, we aimed at making children more aware of the ambiguity of some, between its basic meaning (at least some, possibly all) and its strengthened meaning (some but not all). A surprising improvement is recorded in the last experiment, in which the rejection of underinformative-some by 5-year-old children rose to 72.5% (it was 42% in Experiment 1). We suggest that the children's low performance with scalar inference might be linked to the interplay of different factors as in the development of other general cognitive abilities, such as the ability to change one's strategy (Shallice, 1982) or to shift one's perspective (Gopnik & Rosati, 2001), the maturation of the lexicon (Barner & Bachrach, 2010), and especially their great sensitivity to the task, methodology and materials used to test their pragmatic abilities.

What Did Stinchcombe Really Mean? Designing Research to Test the Liability of Newness among New Ventures

Despite decades of research since Stinchcombe’s original essay on the liability of newness, questions remain regarding the forms and the causes of emerging organizations’ liabilities. Stinchcombe argued that newly-founded organizations face complex challenges that limit their viability, including managing relationships among strangers, assembling required resources quickly, and coping with difficult environments. In the 1980s researchers began investigating whether the liability of newness really was, in fact, a universal principle. However, we believe that researchers have never properly tested Stinchcombe’s original propositions because they have mostly focused on registered new firms rather than emergent ones. Lacking a clear theoretical framework that explains emerging organizations’ liabilities, the field of entrepreneurship has ignored Stinchcombe’s emphasis on emerging organizations. Research on emerging organizations needs to pay more attention to the pragmatic tasks that nascent entrepreneurs cope with and the activities that they undertake to accomplish these tasks. In addition to a systematic conceptual framework, future research on the “liability of newness” also requires a suitable research design and appropriate statistical procedures. Were investigators to follow the suggestions we have offered, we believe that scholars would gain a better understanding of the conditions under which some emerging organizations are more likely than others to survive.

Knowledge games, truthfulness and organ transplants regulation

In this article, I examine how different relations to knowledge are enacted among experts working in the governance of kidney transplants. Using fieldwork material gathered in transplant hospitals and bureaus, I analyse how legal knowledge transacts with expert and lay knowledge in the context of very pragmatic tasks: detecting the ‘intentions’ and the ‘altruistic motivations’ of those donating a kidney to someone in need. My focus is on the management and circulation of knowledge, rather than on the object of knowledge – transplants. Here, the law assigns its regulatory power to experts, and the committees of experts in turn create renewed opportunities for the use of legal forms. The assemblage of expert and lay knowledge – for example, medical, rabbinical, psychological – does not necessarily provide the law with a clearer view of the scope it has to cover, but I explain how it provides legal forms and idioms with an occasion to expand. Further, this legally managed multidisciplinarity sometimes incites experts to literally withdraw from their own expert knowledge and science, and to rely on their understanding of legal forms and lawyerly jargon. What happens when legal knowledge gets into non-legal settings and into the hands of non-legal people?

Practical theology: A current international perspective

Drawing on Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigms, this article explored two levels at which paradigms influence contemporary practical theology. The first level is reflective practice, where pastors and academics carry out the descriptive-empirical, interpretive, normative and pragmatic tasks of practical theological reflection on particular contexts. The second level is metatheoretical, where practical theologians make decisions about how they view the theory– praxis relationship, interdisciplinary work, the relative weight of Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience and the theological rationale that justifies their approach. The article concluded by raising two challenges to the current paradigms of practical theology: the relationship between Christian particularity and the common good, and the wound of reason.

Pragmatic Impairments

AbstractDrawing on two recent books, this article addresses the question: "What, properly speaking, is a pragmatic impairment?" It considers three answers, namely (a) that it involves clinical deficiency in the pragmatics module, (b) that it merely requires reduced performance on pragmatic tasks due to some medical condition, and (c) that pragmatic impairment is a deficit in specifically pragmatic abilities. Though the advantages and disadvantages of the three options are considered, no definitive conclusion is proposed.

Knowledge Games, Truthfulness, and Organ Transplants Regulation

In this paper, I examine how different relations to knowledge are enacted among experts working in the governance of kidney transplants. Using fieldwork material gathered in transplant hospital and bureaus, I analyse how legal knowledge transacts with expert and lay knowledge in the context of very pragmatic tasks: detect the intention to donate and the altruistic motivations of those who procure a kidney to someone in need. My focus is on the management and circulation of knowledge, rather than on the object of knowledge - transplants. Here, the law assigns its regulatory power onto experts, and the committees of experts in turn create renewed opportunities for the use of legal forms. The assemblage of expert and lay knowledge – e.g. medical, rabbinical, psychological – does not necessarily provide the law with a clearer view of the scope it has to cover, but I explain how it provides legal forms and idioms with an occasion to expand. Further, this legally managed multidisciplinarity sometimes incites experts to literally withdraw from their own expert knowledge and science, and to rely on their understanding on legal forms and lawyerly jargon. What happens when legal knowledge gets into nonlegal settings and into the hands of nonlegal people?