Sociopragmatic Factors Research Articles

Fostering EF/SL learners’ meta-pragmatic awareness of complaints and their interactive effects

This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed or the socio-pragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically. Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches and include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners’ meta-psychological awareness.

Vocative Intonation Preferences are Sensitive to Politeness Factors

Although intonation has been traditionally associated with the expression of attitudes and intentions on the part of the speaker, little is known about whether sociopragmatic factors, such as power or social distance, or situational ones, like physical distance or insistence, can constrain the use and felicity of pitch contours. This article investigates the felicity conditions underlying the choice of three vocative pitch contours in Central Catalan by means of two experiments, namely a production experiment based on the Discourse Completion Task (320 vocative contours produced by 20 speakers), and an acceptability judgment task in which 72 listeners were asked to rate the appropriateness match between a set of vocative contours and a previous discourse context (3,456 responses). The results from the two experiments show that both situational and social politeness factors govern the choice of vocative intonation. Finally, the results are discussed in line with the traditional classification of politeness strategies defined by Brown and Levinson, in the sense that the three intonation contours can be linked to negative, positive, and bald on-record politeness strategies.

Assessing EFL Learners’ Performance of the Conventional Expressions of Complaining and Apologising

Abstract Research conducted in the field of interlanguage pragmatics has suggested that foreign language learners have serious difficulties in reaching an adequate level of pragmatic competence since there are a lot of contextual factors that may influence an appropriate use of the language. This paper investigates learners’ choice of the semantic formula used to express complaints and apologies in situations which varied according to the sociopragmatic factors of social status, social distance and severity of offence. Results show that learners were limited to make themselves clear when expressing an appropriate complaint and apology. These findings are discussed and pedagogical implications suggested.

Native and non-native perceptions of appropriateness in the French second-person pronoun system

ABSTRACTThis article explores perceptions of appropriateness in the French second-person pronoun system in relation to various sociopragmatic factors among native and nonnative speakers of French between the ages of 18 and 29. Participants completed an online survey in which a series of five social-interactive situations were presented. Analysis focused on the similarities and differences among native, near-native, advanced and intermediate speakers in their perceptions of formality, social distance, power/equality and appropriatetu/voususe, as well as correlations between the sociopragmatic factors and selection oftuorvous. Results indicate a high degree of variation within and across participant groups, with nonnatives tending to be more conservative (e.g., more formality, higher frequencies ofvous) in their choices than their native-speaker counterparts. In concluding, the findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications.

Reverse discourse completion task as an assessment tool for intercultural competence

This paper proposes a prototypic assessment tool for intercultural communicative competence. Because traditional discourse completion tasks (DCTs) focus on illocutionary competence rather than sociolinguistic competence, a modified version of a DCT was created to target sociolinguistic competence. The modified DCT employs speech acts as prompts and asks respondents to write about a situation in which a given speech act would be appropriate. This new tool is named a reverse discourse completion task (R-DCT). The task was given to learners of Turkish as a second language. Data from 12 participants were analyzed for their provision of sociopragmatic factors such as power, distance and imposition and also with respect to whether the situation was relevant to a given speech act. Responses from the participants show that R-DCTs can be used to assess intercultural competence as they help reveal respondents’ knowledge of sociolinguistic context in which a given speech act may be appropriate. By removing the need for comparison with native speaker data and the limitations that emerge from the lack of linguistic formula at respondents’ disposal, R-DCT is a promising elicitation task to assess sociolinguistic competence, an integral part of Byram’s (1997) model of intercultural communicative competence.

A diachronic-functional approach to explaining grammatical patterns in code-switching: Postmodification in Cantonese–English noun phrases

One major controversy in the study of code-switching (CS) has been the treatment of structural regularities or patterns. Formal approaches attribute these patterns to syntactic constraints or models that are independent of socio-pragmatic or discourse factors, and hence they fall short of accounting for the variation and diachrony of CS constructions. Functional approaches call for due consideration of inter- and intra-speaker variation and discourse or processing factors, but they do not seem to go very far in pinpointing precisely what factors motivate a particular structural pattern. This paper attempts to integrate these two approaches in examining an emergent pattern in Cantonese–English CS in which postmodifying phrases are attested with English prepositions. The form of the construction may well be captured by some version of the Null Theory, but nonetheless it has little to say about why it is a new and variant pattern in Cantonese–English CS. This paper suggests that the construction is prompted by discourse factors such as salience, information status (i.e. given versus new) and heaviness (of the modifying noun phrase); typological differences (i.e. word order difference between Cantonese and English) and syntactic properties of words (such as prepositions) also have a role to play. Diachronically, this paper suggests that the construction evolves from a continuous English noun phrase with a further switch, which this paper terms “reinsertion”, within this noun phrase. Variants and possible changes of this postmodifier construction are also discussed in the light of “reinsertion” and “schematization”.

Is legal English “going European”? The case of the simple present

AbstractIn many countries in continental Europe the simple present is extensively used in main clauses in legislative texts to express obligation. Several English-speaking legal systems have witnessed an increased usage of the simple present in legal English over the last few decades, largely at the expense of shall. I examine the continuing debate among law scholars and writers of legal drafting manuals over the adoption of the simple present in prescriptive texts in English. I conclude by observing that the decision in some countries to do away with shall would appear to be linked principally to socio-pragmatic factors relating to the way this modal auxiliary is perceived in many parts of the English-speaking world today, that is, as being outdated and smacking of “legalese”, a style of legal writing that plain language exponents have been trying to eliminate.

Perspective and politeness in Finnish Requests

This study makes use of elicited request speech act data in Finnish to view variability of personal perspective and T/V forms across a variety of situations. The speakers exhibited a great deal of congruency when they were scripted as addressing someone familiar, being in a position of equal or higher status than the interlocutor, and when the request was considered a low imposition. In such situations, speakers tended to use a second person perspective, with informal T/V forms. The Finnish T-forms were found to be the default form, showing up in half of the request utterances. The Finnish V-forms showed up in only 10 percent of the requests. A variationist analysis using Varbrul complemented the main findings, but was found to not be a reliable tool for elicited pragmatic data, using sociopragmatic factors as independent variables.

Discursive Illusions in Legislative Discourse: A Socio-Pragmatic Study

This paper takes the position that interpretations of legal discourse are invariably taken in the context of socio-pragmatic realities to which a particular instance of discourse applies. What makes this process even more complicated is the fact that social realities themselves are often negotiated within the mould of one’s subjective conceptualisations of reality. Institutions and organisations, including people in power, often represent socio-political realities from an ideologically fuelled perspective, engendering many ‘illusory’ categories often a result of contested versions of reality. To substantiate this view, we discuss interpretations of a number of interesting contemporary and controversial laws, including America’s Patriot Act and Hong Kong’s proposed Article 23 of the Basic Law. Both laws can be seen as illustrative of the definitional conflict that abstract concepts such as democracy and human rights are subjected to in their own specific socio-political contexts. While America crowns itself with democracy and Hong Kong struggles to achieve it in effective synthesis with its unique political arrangement, the laws produced by both contrasting political systems are unexpectedly similar, aiming for the moderation of basic rights. The actions of both governments set against their beliefs and discourses, and furthermore set against one another and other media voices, particularly those of non-governmental organisations, political activists, and other socio-political groups, demonstrate contestation of realities, giving rise to ‘discursive illusions’, which seem to be interpreted not so much on the basis of their linguistic construction but more on the basis of socio-pragmatic factors, such as trust, belief, transparency, control and power.

Socio-Pragmatics and Attention: Contributions to Gesturally Guided Word Learning in Toddlers

It is clear that gestural cues facilitate early word learning. In hopes of illuminating the relative contributions of attentional and socio-pragmatic factors to the mechanisms by which these cues exert their influence, we taught toddlers novel words with the support of a hierarchy of gestural cues. Twenty-eight- to 31-month-olds heard one of two possible referents labeled with a novel word, while the experimenter gazed at or gazed at and pointed to, touched, or manipulated the target. Learning improved with greater redundancy among cues, with the largest improvement evident when pointing was added to gazing. Looking times revealed that attentional factors accounted for only a small fraction of the variance in performance. Indeed, a significant increase in attention driven by manipulation of the target failed to improve learning. The results therefore suggest a strong role for socio-pragmatic factors in supporting the facilitative effect of gestural cues on word learning.

Gramàtica, interacció i organització informativa en el discurs oral

This article deals with some grammar aspects of oral language, which includes an extense sense of the concept of grammar itself. The linguistic characteristics of orality are studied in relation to the physical, cognitive and sociopragmatic factors that intervene in speech’s production and reception. The specific grammatical elements that are presented, in a panoramic vision, are the tonal unit, basic unit of oral speech; the informative progression and the RUT restriction; the grammatical categories and the verbal style; the role of subordination in clausal composition; and, to conclude, the nature and the function of textual connectors in the organization of oral discourse. On the whole, a contribution to the explanation of the mobile, diverse, polyvalent and complex nature of the oral language is attempted.

Macar Dilinde Edimbilim Araştırmaları Ve Yabancı Dil Olarak Macarca Öğretiminde Önemi

Since the 60s and 70s of the 20th century, some theories have come into existence that changed the traditional linguistics understanding in a great extent and new linguistic trends have come out. Theories which are related with the speech act theory were suggested and developed by J. L. Austin, H. P. Grice and J. R. Searle. According the main inference of the speech act theory, language is not only a kind of tool that helps the reflection of the world but an action as well; by means of language we declare, request, promise, reject etc. Pragmatics in Hungarian Language was presented to the advantage of the language theory and the language philosophy, the theory of communication, the history of language, child language and foreign language education branches. The announcement aims to compare the speech act of asking for pardon, based upon K. Szili’s searches on Hungarian speech acts. The usage of strategies, in addition to its universal features is determined by the rules established by language communities both in Hungarian and Turkish. These rules determine the type of strategy that will be used in accordance with the situation’s socio-pragmatic factors. While Turkish speakers’ strategies are usually affected by the situation’s contextual factors, the Hungarian’s choice of strategy are usually rather in accordance with common factors, especially with the strategies of Illocutionary Force Indicating Device; to inform Turkish students about this phenomenon in Hungarian teaching will be useful.

Literary discourse and the translator's role

Taking the multiple levels of literary discourse with different types of sender and addressee as its starting point, this article discusses the role of the translator as a mediator between the author of the original and the target‐language reader. It argues that the translator is an important discursive participant in the communicative process. Focusing on the relationship between grammatical structure and the semantic and pragmatic structures in literary texts, the author of this article proposes that translation critics should pay attention to the multiple roles of translators in cross‐linguistic and cross‐cultural discourse processes and their substantial contribution to the co‐creation and rewriting of texts. It concludes that translators are, first of all, obliged to target‐language readers and that translation critics should focus on sociopragmatic and sociocultural factors.

Feeling Sponginess: The Importance of Descriptive Gestures in 2- and 3-Year-Old Children's Acquisition of Adjectives

Two experiments compared the role of tactile and deictic gestures in children's acquisition of adjectives. Children were taught novel adjective terms (e.g., spongy) pertaining to a target toy, accompanied for 1 group of children by a relevant descriptive gesture (e.g., squeezing) and by a point gesture for another group. Children then chose a toy from test sets consisting of a matching-property and nonmatching-property toy. The descriptive gesture group children chose the toy with the matching property significantly more often than the point gesture group children. Among point gesture group children, utterances on teaching and test trials suggested greater uncertainty and consideration of nontarget properties. These results underscore the role of nonverbal sociopragmatic factors in early word learning.