Pragmatics Literature Research Articles

Perceptions of Refusals to Invitations: Exploring the Minds of Foreign Language Learners

Descriptions of speech act realisations of native and non-native speakers abound in the cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics literature. Yet, what is lacking is an analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the production of speech acts. This study examines the cognitive processes and perceptions of learners of Spanish when refusing invitations from a person of equal and higher status. Twenty male native speakers (NSs) of US English who were advanced learners of Spanish as a foreign language participated in two refusal interactions with two NSs of Spanish. The perception data were collected through retrospective verbal reports immediately after the role-play task. Results showed that these reports were instrumental in gathering relevant information about learners' cognitive processes with regard to: (1) cognition (attention to information during the planning and execution of a refusal), in particular attention to politeness, discourse, grammar and vocabulary; (2) the selection of the language of thought (English and Spanish) for conveying pragmatic intent; and (3) the perception of insistence after refusing an invitation. The study aims at informing researchers and teachers of the kinds of language-learning (metacognitive) and language-use (retrieval and cover strategies) strategies that learners use to communicate pragmatic intent.

Pragmatic cooperation revisited: Resistance and non-cooperation as a discursive strategy in asymmetrical discourses

It is widely assumed in the pragmatics literature that human communication is rational and logical. It is commonly described as a cooperative endeavour where speakers are oriented towards a common purpose or goal, which is to make the interaction succeed, even though this may sometimes appear not to be the case. This article offers a critical discussion of Gricean cooperation. It analyses examples of student–teacher dialogues which show that non-cooperation and non-accommodation may be employed as the preferred discourse strategy, and that the aim of communication may be to miscommunicate rather than to communicate successfully. It is suggested that ‘meaning’ in language only makes sense in the light of the social and psychological conditions under which language is produced, and that the notion of cooperation should be analyzed in terms of what people want to obtain by their communication. Communication accommodation theory and the notion of resistance are proposed as more appropriate explanatory frameworks to achieve this end.

Perceptions of Refusals to Invitations: Exploring the Minds of Foreign Language Learners

Descriptions of speech act realisations of native and non-native speakers abound in the cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics literature. Yet, what is lacking is an analysis of the cognitive processes involved in the production of speech acts. This study examines the cognitive processes and perceptions of learners of Spanish when refusing invitations from a person of equal and higher status. Twenty male native speakers (NSs) of US English who were advanced learners of Spanish as a foreign language participated in two refusal interactions with two NSs of Spanish. The perception data were collected through retrospective verbal reports immediately after the role-play task. Results showed that these reports were instrumental in gathering relevant information about learners' cognitive processes with regard to: (1) cognition (attention to information during the planning and execution of a refusal), in particular attention to politeness, discourse, grammar and vocabulary; (2) the selection of the language of thought (English and Spanish) for conveying pragmatic intent; and (3) the perception of insistence after refusing an invitation. The study aims at informing researchers and teachers of the kinds of language-learning (metacognitive) and language-use (retrieval and cover strategies) strategies that learners use to communicate pragmatic intent.

Verbal information transmission without communicative intention

Language use and communication cannot be equated entirely, since verbal communication is not the only form of language use. There are several other kinds of language use including the use of language to inform, think, memorize, learn, take notes, play, sing for fun or in psycholinguistic experiments, as has been exemplified and argued for in some grammatical and pragmatics traditions. The present paper attempts to characterize a non-communicative form of language use, namely, informative language use. First, with the help of re-analyses of various example types previously analyzed from different perspectives in the pragmatics literature, the paper illustrates the real, independent existence of informative language use. Second, relying on these re-analyses of examples, and also applying a definition of ostensive-inferential communication, informative language use and communicative language use are distinguished. Third, the paper characterizes informative language use in detail and demonstrates what similarities and differences informative versus communicative forms of language use have. The conclusion of the research presented here is, on the one hand, that people's verbal behavior cannot be evaluated independently of their intentions, and, on the other hand, that utterances in a verbal interaction should be analyzed individually, and relying on the speakers' intentions that can be identified only by considering various linguistic and non-linguistic factors. For example, one and the same utterance can be treated as a manifestation of communicative language use toward an addressee and at the same time, as a manifestation of informative language use toward another person. It should also be emphasized that making a distinction between the informative and communicative forms of language use, first, has indisputable advantages in explaining the phenomena in language use, and second, results in a more comprehensive modeling of pragmatic competence.

Criticizing in an L2: Pragmatic strategies used by Vietnamese EFL learners

Criticizing has been a rather under-represented speech act in interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) literature. Native speakers (NSs) find this speech act challenging, often needing to pre-plan how to perform it (Murphy & Neu 1996). Thus, it can be expected that second-language (L2) learners will also experience considerable difficulty. This paper reports a study of the pragmatic strategies used by Vietnamese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) when criticizing in English with a view to shedding light on the pragmatic properties of this under-researched act. Interlanguage data were collected from 36 adult learners via a peer-feedback task, a written questionnaire, and a retrospective interview. First and second language baseline data were collected from two respective groups of 12 Vietnamese NSs and 12 NSs of Australian English, via the same peer-feedback task and questionnaire. Results showed that the English language learners criticized in significantly different ways from the Australian NSs in terms of their preference for realization strategies, their choice of semantic formulae, and their choice and frequency of use of mitigating devices. A number of interplaying factors might explain these differences: learners' limited L2 linguistic competence and lack of fluency, which seemed to load their processing capability under communicative pressure, their lack of L2 pragmatic knowledge, and the influence of L1 pragmatics.

Conversational displays of mediator neutrality in a court-based program

This study examines conversational interaction in order to describe the conversational features of mediator neutrality in a court-based community mediation program. Data for the study were video recordings of actual mediation sessions with participants who were volunteer mediators and disputants who filed small claims cases. Conversation methods for maintaining neutrality included self-labeling, unbiased paraphrasing, perspective display invitations, footing, and replies to disputant information seeking attempts. These conversational structures display neutrality in that they neither affiliate nor disaffiliate with either disputant. Through an examination of mediator neutrality, this work contributes in potentially important ways to the pragmatics literature and to theorizing about neutrality by examining neutrality as an interactive phenomenon.

Maintaining neutrality in dispute mediation: managing disagreement while managing not to disagree

Dispute mediators are active but neutral facilitators of discussion. Their job is inevitably marked by the need to manage multiple competing demands. These competing demands are a paradigm case of the kind of situation that the pragmatics literature has identified as giving rise to the production of various complex, nonstraightforward ways of talking. This paper shows three tactics mediators use to manage their multiple competing demands: indirect advocacy, framing of advocacy, and equivocal advocacy. These tactics serve as functional substitutes for more simple and straightforward moves of direction, correction, disagreement, argument, and the like. In this way, mediators manage disputes while maintaining an appearance of neutrality.

Debates and Decisions: On a Rationale of Argumentation Rules

We view a debate as a mechanism by which an uninformed decision maker (the listener) extracts information from two informed debaters, who hold contradicting positions regarding the right decision. During the debate, the debaters raise arguments and, based on these arguments, the listener reaches a conclusion. Using a simple example, we investigate the mechanism design problem of constructing rules of debate that maximize the probability that the listener reaches the right conclusion, subject to constraints on the form and length of the debate. It is shown that optimal debate rules have the property that the conclusion drawn by the listener is not necessarily the same as the conclusion he would have drawn, had he interpreted the information, revealed to him or her during the debate, literally. The optimal design of debate rules requires that the information elicited from a counterargument depends on the argument it counterargues. We also link our discussion with the pragmatics literature. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D78.

Analyzing the Communicative Functions of Aberrant Behavior

This paper presents some issues related to the assessment of possible communicative functions of aberrant behavior. These issues are addressed in terms of both the behavioral and the pragmatics literature, with the suggestion that the latter can be drawn upon to support and enhance the information derived from traditional functional analyses of behavior. Included are an assessment strategy and tool that can be used to formulate and test hypotheses about functions of behavior.