Pragmatics across Languages and Cultures (eBook)

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Anna Trosborg, University of Aarhus, Denmark.

Preface to the handbook series 6
Acknowledgements 10
Table of Contents 12
Introduction 16
I. Contrastive, Cross-cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics 56
1. Cultural scripts and intercultural communication 58
2. Compliment and compliment response research: A cross-cultural survey 94
3. Telephone conversation openings across languages, cultures and settings 118
4. Intercultural (im)politeness and the micro-macro issue 154
5. Pragmatics East and West: Similar or different? 182
6. Intercultural competence and pragmatics research: Examining the interface through studies of intercultural business discourse 204
II. Interlanguage Pragmatics 232
7. Exploring the pragmatics of interlanguage pragmatics: Definition by design 234
8. Theoretical and methodological approaches in interlanguage pragmatics 276
9. Pragmatic challenges for second language learners 302
10. The acquisition of terms of address in a second language 324
11. Longitudinal studies in interlanguage pragmatics 348
12. The Pragmatics of English as a lingua franca 378
III. Teaching and Testing of Second/ Foreign Language Pragmatics 404
13. Assessing learnability in second language pragmatics 406
14. The teaching of speech acts in second and foreign language instructional contexts 438
15. Correcting others and self-correcting in business and professional discourse and textbooks. 458
16. Testing interlanguage pragmatic knowledge 482
17. Pragmatics and research into corporate communication 504
18. Credibility in corporate discourse 528
19. Corporate crisis communication across cultures 558
20. The pragmatics of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) across cultures 586
21. Corporate culture in a global age: Starbucks’ “Social Responsibility” and the merging of corporate and personal interests 612
About the Authors 644
Index 654

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"In general, however, the handbook succeeds in providing a thorough and welcomed overview of many established and emergent issues in the field of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics within the last two decades. It is therefore highly valuable for both the interests of advanced scholars and for classroom teaching. Many of the topics of research, like pragmatic issues in the study of corporate risk communication, are relatively new and there will certainly be more to come in the next decade or two. Consequently, the state of the art given in handbooks should not be regarded as a static and final conclusion, but rather as a promise of future, dynamic research."
Susanne Mühleisen in: Linguist List 24.739

7. Exploring the pragmatics of interlanguage pragmatics: Definition by design (p. 219-220)


Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig


1. Definitions of interlanguage pragmatics


In this handbook series, pragmatics is understood in a broad sense as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behavior. These aspects include patterns of linguistic action, language functions, types of inferences, principles of communication, frames of knowledge, attitude, and belief, as well as organizational principles of text and discourse. Pragmatics deals with meaning-in-context, which for analytical purposes can be viewed from different perspectives (the speaker’s, recipient’s, analyst’s, etc.). It bridges the gap between the system side of language and the use side, and relates both of them at the same time.

Interlanguage pragmatics brings the study of acquisition to this mix of structure and use.1 The principle participants are learners or speakers of second or foreign languages.2 Interlanguage pragmatics is often defined as the study of nonnative speakers’ use and acquisition of L2 pragmatics knowledge (Kasper 1996: 145). However, the study of interlanguage pragmatics has not typically been as broad as the areas outlined by the definition of pragmatics used in the handbook.

The study of pragmatics has not always been conceptualized as broadly, either. Levinson (1983) observed that the study of pragmatics traditionally encompassed at least five main areas: Deixis, conversational implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. Within second language studies, work in pragmatics has often been narrower than in the field of pragmatics at large, including the investigation of speech acts and to a lesser extent conversational structure and conversational implicature. It is also broader, investigating areas traditionally considered to be sociolinguistics, such as address terms, for example (Stalnaker 1972). In fact, the line between sociolinguistics and pragmatics was not clear in the early days of interlanguage pragmatics research. Reports on speech acts often appeared under the banner of sociolinguistics in venues such as the TESOL Sociolinguistics Colloquium, where much new work was presented, and in published volumes, such as Sociolinguistics and second language acquisition (Wolfson and Judd 1983).

The dominant area of investigation within interlanguage pragmatics has been the speech act. The dominance of this area of investigation can be seen in the boundaries set by Kasper and Dahl in their 1991 methodological review:

Interlanguage pragmatics will be defined in a narrow sense, referring to nonnative speakers’ (NNSs’) comprehension and production of speech acts, and how their L2-related speech act knowledge is acquired. Studies addressing conversational management, discourse organization, or sociolinguistic aspects of language use such as choice of address terms will be outside the scope of this article (Kasper and Dahl 1991: 216).

Narrowing the focus to speech acts allowed Kasper and Dahl to review the best represented area of investigation, and thus to compare approaches to data collection across many studies.

The following year brings a broader definition of interlanguage pragmatics which includes politeness in addition to illocutionary force, a concept central to the speech act framework (Kasper 1992):
Typical issues addressed in data-based [interlanguage pragmatics] studies are whether NNS differ from NS in the 1) range and 2) contextual distribution of 3) strategies and 4) linguistic forms used to convey 5) illocutionary meaning and 6) politeness-precisely the kinds of issues raised in comparative studies of different communities … Interlanguage pragmatics has predominantly been the sociolinguistic, and to a much lesser extent a psycholinguistic [or acquisitional] study of NNS’ linguistic action. (p. 205)