Volume 11, Issue 2

The pragmatic functions of pitch at tone unit boundaries are studied in L2 Spanish spoken by Swedish learners, as compared to L1 Swedish and L1 Spanish. The data are recordings of a task in which the subjects – 10 learners of Spanish and 13 native controls – make a restaurant booking on the phone in Spanish, and the Swedish subjects also perform this task in their L1. The tone unit boundary rises and falls produced have been analyzed with special focus on rises and their accompanying vowel duration patterns. The turn-regulating functions of signaling turn-continuation vs. transition-relevance are contrasted with intersubjectivity-regulating signals, namely (non-)prompts for information and (non-)prompts for interpersonal acceptance. Since open-ended yes/no-questions are signaled by rises in Spanish, though not in Swedish, and since declaratives carrying a positive politeness value tend to end in rises (the “ tail flick ”) in Swedish, though not in Spanish, various types of potential negative transfer could be predicted for Swedish learners' L2 Spanish. It is shown that L1 Spanish speakers consistently use moderate rises for turn-keeping and high rises for information-seeking, and that this pattern has no equivalence in the L2 Spanish data. Conversely, rises in L2 Spanish frequently occur where L1 Spanish speakers prefer falls. These rises, interpreted as “ tail flicks ,” also occur in L1 Swedish, but they are far more frequent in the L2 Spanish data. Thus, clear transfer patterns are found, which are further reinforced by insecurity effects due to L2 speaking.

Multicultural classrooms provide the intercultural pragmatist with a breeding ground to get firsthand information on intercultural communication. In such a context, if English is used as a lingua franca, these classrooms also become an ideal setting to observe the pragmatics of this relatively unknown variety. The present article aims to analyze qualitatively a sample of data produced by a multicultural group of masters students in which English is used as the lingua franca. More specifically, I intend to answer the following research question: In a multicultural class where English is the medium of instruction and students' peer to peer communication, whose pragmatic “rules” are followed? In other words, do these speakers stick to their own cultural pragmatic rules or follow nativelike ones? More specifically, I focus on the speech act of disagreement given its face-threatening nature and its disruptive potential if carried out in what interlocutors might perceive as the “wrong” way. Disagreement was also chosen given the relative paucity of studies on this speech act – as opposed, for example, others like requests or compliments. For this purpose, the 10 students – from very different cultural backgrounds – were asked to carry out a group assignment. Their negotiation and discussion process, however, was computer-mediated via the use of forums rather than face-to-face. This allowed the researcher to collect naturally occurring, spontaneous data in a relatively easy way (without the need for transcription). It also gave the students the opportunity to interact in a more democratic way. In fact, by being an asynchronous discussion online, they did not have to fight for the conversational turn, but all of them had the chance to contribute to the discussion at their own pace. The sample so collected consists of 15,598 words. The limitation of the sample calls for a qualitative rather than a quantitative approach but is valuable insofar as it represents naturally occurring data. Disagreement expressions were classified according to two main categories: strong and mitigated disagreement (following Kreutel 2007; Pomerantz 1984 and Rees-Miller 2000). Inspection of the data reveals that students on the whole show a tendency to avoid strong disagreement whilst favoring mitigated disagreement of different sorts (e.g., use of hedges, asking for clarification, giving explanations, etc.). Moreover, students with high linguistic proficiency displayed a wider range of strategies, following a more nativelike pattern – specifically; they seemed to follow the pragmatic rules of British English. On the other hand, students whose linguistic proficiency was lower also showed a tendency to avoid strong disagreement but were much more limited with regard to their mitigating strategies, favoring the nonnative overuse of expressions of regret and hedges. Other variables, such as familiarity with their partners and their linguistic proficiency, as well as the nature of the task at hand, also played a central role in the students' choice of the common rules of a native variety.

I think (ITH) is commonly used in communication. Existing studies of its pragmatic functions focus on individual functions, but their interconnection has received little attention. This study looks into ITH functions from the refreshing perspective of language elasticity (Zhang 2011). Drawn on naturally occurring data of institutional and often tension-prone discourse involving Australian customs officers and passengers, the study shows a rare and rich insight into strategically elastic use of ITH. The local and global elasticity manifests as multi-trajectory and overlapping, with a non-linear nature. In responding to different communicative goals, the stretching trajectories move from the basic evaluative function (foregrounded in this study), upward to emphatic ITH (intensifying), downward to tentative and mitigating ITH (weakening), and sideways to discursive ITH (evolving). ITH functions are fluid, overlapping, complementary, and therefore co-exist. The implications of this study are that the elastic language warrants a non-discrete approach; we do not have to give up on “problematic” cases in identifying linguistic categories, the principle of elasticity may embrace these intriguing and exciting cases. The conceptualization of elasticity is probably an integral part of any adequate language research.

This paper examines the role that pragmatics plays in language learners' practices of mediating between their own cultural understandings and those of the target culture. It will examine learners' experiences of cultural differences in language use and the ways in which learners develop insights into the culturally determined nature of language in use. It investigates the ways in which learners articulate their awareness of the meaningfulness of pragmatic differences in contexts in which language use shows cultural variation – speech acts, social deixis, politeness, etc. The paper examines ways in which language learners construct awareness of cultural variation in pragmatics both for themselves and for their interlocutors. In both mediation for self and mediation for others, there is a similar process of developing an interpretation of cultural behavior that takes into account both a culture internal perspective and a culture external perspective. The analysis details how language learners use pragmatics as a starting point for intercultural mediation and shows how analysis of language in use can provide an entry point into understandings of culture, and of the connection between language and culture. The behavior described is fundamentally an intercultural one. It is not simply the possession of knowledge about another culture as this is manifested in pragmatic differences but rather the ability to reflect on pragmatics differences as culturally meaningful to formulate positions between cultures as a mechanism to develop and express understandings of another culture. Learners demonstrate that intercultural mediation involves awareness of one's own cultural practices and expectations in relation to the aspect of language use being mediated as well as their knowledge of the target culture.

Xiong (2012) presents a pragmatic as well as a semantic account of the CHI + NON-FOOD NP expression in Chinese, an apparently unconventional yet highly productive construction formed by a most frequently used verb CHI ‘eat.’ In this paper we take issue with various points of Xiong s analysis, demonstrating that contrary to a number of his claims, (1) the non-canonical construction is not unique to Chinese, but quite common to Southeast Asian languages such as Vietnamese and Thai; (2) it is indeed the case that the more frequently a verb is used, the more likely its meanings are varied; (3) the verb CHI ‘eat’ is not originally from (kou-) chi ‘stammer or stutter’ in Old Chinese, i.e., the former does not evolve from the latter, for they are merely homonymous; (4) it does not make much sense to stress the difference in meaning between CHI + SHITANG ‘eat dining hall’ and CHI SHITANG DE FAN ‘eat food in the dining hall,’ as the two constructions do share the basic meaning of ‘have meals in the dining hall,’ as evidenced by the corpus data; (5) the formation of CHI SHITANG should be motivated by the principle of economy and the rule of analogy, rather than otherwise.