Volume 2, Issue 4

1. Introduction The goal of this special issue is to present current research in the pragmatics of different languages from a foreign language perspective. What we mean by a ‘‘foreign language perspective’’ is the analysis and explication of the use of a particular language in a foreign language setting from the perspective of non-native speakers and / or in relation to other languages. The authors in this issue focus on a variety of languages, including Catalan, French, German, Persian, Russian, and Spanish. In their papers, these languages are usually related, compared and / or contrasted with English or other languages from an intercultural or cross-cultural viewpoint.

The aim of this essay is to explore and to illustrate the complementarity of intercultural pragmatics and socio-cultural approaches to developmental research in foreign language settings, including both the telecollaborative classroom and residence abroad. Drawing on socio-cultural theory and language socialization research, we review the complex nature of pragmatic competence and the role that participation in a range of interactive discourse settings may play in its development. The issue of address form use ( tu  vs. vous  in French; and du  vs. Sie  in German) is taken as a particularly revealing example of the complexity involved in developing second language (L2) pragmatic ability. We examine precise ways in which participation in a variety of interactive intercultural discourses serves to enhance learners’ awareness and use of address form choice. We present case studies of learning in two settings: 1) electronically mediated interaction in the telecollaborative language classroom, where peer-to-peer conversation between classes at home and abroad serves to broaden the discourse options of instructed learning; and 2) language learning in residence abroad, where learners may—or may not—engage in a variety of interactive discourse practices. If multivalent participation is a crucial condition for the development of L2 pragmatic competence, the profession should continue to examine the contexts of learning environments in these terms.

The study expands the current research on second language acquisition (SLA) into intercultural pragmatics by introducing data on the development of pragmatic competence by American second language learners of the Russian language. The article discusses learners’ acquisition of pragmalinguistic and socio-linguistic knowledge in its relation to both their advancement in linguistic proficiency and study abroad experience. With pragmatic competence understood as learners’ ability to make their conversational contributions relevant, polite, and effective (House 1996), the article examines the ways in which American learners of Russian craft their apologies within three communicative contexts: a) the context of intimacy (communication with a friend); b) the context of unfamiliarity (communication with a stranger); and c) the context of unequal social status (communication with an authority figure). As the data demonstrate, Russian native speakers opt for distinctively different means in each communicative context, while American learners tend to over-generalize their apologies to friends and carry them over into other communicative contexts. Both an increase in linguistic proficiency and direct exposure to Russian culture enable students to align their apologies more closely with the native speaker (NS) norm. The group that most approximates the Russian norm is the group of learners with low linguistic proficiency and study abroad experience. Increase in proficiency without exposure to the target culture often results in overly polite apologetic behavior and strategy overuse. It is also found that learners with high linguistic proficiency who study abroad exhibit divergent tendencies, and their apologies become more individualized. The observed convergence with, or divergence from, NS pragmatic conventions are seen as the result of both learners’ linguistic and pragmatic development and their self-reflection: learners do not blindly copy the NS norms, they create their own interlanguage and an accompanying identity in the learning process. The article also suggests some directions for future research and for classroom practices that would promote intercultural competence and help American learners of Russian become more effective and successful communicators in their second language.

The present study describes the defining features of Persian genuine and ostensible invitations based on a collection of spontaneous Persian invitations and the results of interview data. The results are compared with the structure of invitations in English reported by Isaacs and Clark (1990). The framework for data collection and data analysis designed by Isaacs and Clark and their results were used in this study. Our results show that the structure of ostensible invitations in Persian is more complex than in English. The features suggested for ostensible invitations in English are present, but these are not sufficient to distinguish ostensible invitations from genuine invitations in Persian. Invitations that meet the criteria for being genuine invitations in English can be classified as ostensible by Persian speakers. In contrast to the claim made by Isaacs and Clark regarding English speakers that ‘‘ostensible invitations are rare in most situations’’ (p. 494), our observations show that Persian speakers use a considerable number of ostensible invitations in their daily activities as a manifestation of ritual politeness ( ta’arof ). The study concludes that enhancing face (Brown & Levinson 1987) for both interlocutors is the main underlying factor in using ostensible invitations in Persian. In Persian, the speaker, in adhering to societal norms, enhances his / her face as well as that of his / her interlocutor by using ostensible invitations in everyday language.

This study examines pragmatic strategies employed by Uruguayan (Montevidean) service providers and customers in 15 authentic telephone calls within an institutional context characteristic of contemporary Uruguay: a caregiver service company. More specifically, it analyzes the strategies deployed by callers in constructing their complaints and those by call-takers in responding to them with special attention to the expression of desahogo , a self-disclosure pragmatic strategy used by callers when they realize that they have been unsuccessful in obtaining their main transactional goal. The desahogo  functions as a verbal avenue through which interlocutors, in this case callers, express frustration about the service received, even if remedial action is unlikely to occur. The findings indicate that the pragmatic strategies observed, and in particular that of desahogo , reflect a broader Uruguayan (Montevidean) socio-cultural reality; one in which venting to a complete stranger appears to be an accepted mode of behavior. In the context of these calls, desahogo is explained by: 1) a shared cultural understanding of the type and amount of personal information considered to be appropriate and / or inappropriate to disclose in task-oriented interactions with complete strangers; and 2) Uruguay’s developing socio-economic infrastructure, which does not yet fully safeguard consumers’ rights.

Evidential expressions are generally treated in the literature as a type of epistemic modality. The speaker estimates the chances that an utterance has of being true and expresses his / her strength of commitment to the truth of the proposition expressed. Strictly speaking, the evidential marking involves the speaker’s or writer’s stance in relation to the source-of-information, whereas epistemic modals express the speaker’s or writer’s attitude regarding the reliability of the information as well as the commitment to the truth of the message. In both cases, there is an extended use of lexical and auxiliary modal verbs, adverbials, and epistemic modifiers (Givón 1982; Anderson 1986; Chafe 1986; Mithun 1986; Mayer 1990). This article approaches the Catalan evidential system in its broadest sense, taking both evidentiality marking and epistemic modality into consideration, and presents Catalan linguistic expressions of attitudes toward knowledge in general (Chafe 1986; Willet 1988). The first section deals with the issue of subjectivity, in relation to speaker’s stance toward knowledge; the second section is devoted to the epistemic value of specific Catalan evidential expressions, following Chafe’s classification. Since this is not a quantitative study, the examples provided aim to illustrate this semantic sub-field in Catalan, a minority language.