Pragmatic Variation in First and Second Language Contexts

Departing from Schneider and Barron (2008), representing the emerging field of Variational Pragmatics, this volume examines pragmatic variation focusing on methods utilized to collect and analyze data in a variety of first (L1) and second (L2) language contexts. The objectives are to: (1) examine variation in such areas of pragmatics as speech acts, conventional expressions, metapragmatics, stance, frames, mitigation, communicative action, (im)politeness, and implicature; and (2) critically review central methodological concerns relevant for research in pragmatic variation, such as coding, ethical issues, qualitative and quantitative methods, and individual variation. Theoretical frameworks vary from variationist and interactional sociolinguistics, to variational pragmatics. This collection contains eleven chapters by leading scholars, including two state-of-the art chapters on key methodological issues of pragmatic variation study. Given the theoretical perspectives, methodological focus, and analyses, the book will be of interest to those who study pragmatics, discourse analysis, second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics, and language variation.

Richard Cameron, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA:
Drawing on an impressive array of research methods, the 12 experts in this remarkable book push the fields of Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics in directions both qualitative and quantitative. How? In Pragmatics, the speaker is often depicted as fully rational yet living in an asocial world where the only tasks of communication are cognitive. Speakers deliberately select from sets of linguistic resources, obeying perceived discourse and listener-based constraints so as to best produce intended responses in the listener. If deliberate, no statistical variation should occur. Also, the listener as active socially-situated participant in negotiations of meaning is only vaguely present. Two issues emerge: the social listener as meaning maker and variation either of different forms to create similar meanings or of differing meanings mapped to similar forms. By pushing in these directions, the researchers here creatively push the envelope not only of Pragmatics but also of Variationist Sociolinguistics.