Volume 6, Issue 1

This paper introduces a more nuanced view of face and facework than the commonly used frameworks in interlanguage pragmatics. It argues that ILP not only prioritizes research on the expression of politeness in the L2 and the acquisition of politeness strategies, but that the field also does that in an extremely decontextualized manner that takes little account of the situatedness of linguistic discourse. Moreover, the paper suggests that existing accounts of face and facework with their focus on politeness alone may not be sufficient to capture speakers' projection of other aspects of self-hood, i.e. the social identities and/or attributes that they want to foreground and be attributed with in particular situations. By analyzing an argumentative conversation of two L2 learners of German, the paper shows different ways in which self-presentation is performed, e.g., by the way speakers organize their turns, the way they modalize their discourse, and the way they use markers of reference and identity. It then argues that the field of interlanguage pragmatic should move away from its focus on politeness in a limited set of speech acts and focus also on self-presentation.

In the mainstream speech culture of Australia (as in the UK, though perhaps more so in Australia), taking yourself too seriously is culturally proscribed. This study applies the techniques of Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) semantics and ethnopragmatics (Goddard, Ethnopragmatics: Understanding discourse in cultural context, Mouton de Gruyter, 2006b, Goddard, Cross-linguistic semantics, John Benjamins, 2008; Wierzbicka, Semantics: Primes and universals, Oxford University Press, 1996, Wierzbicka, Cross-cultural pragmatics, Mouton de Gruyter, 2003, Wierzbicka, English: Meaning and culture, Oxford University Press, 2006a) to this aspect of Australian English speech culture. It first develops a semantic explication for the language-specific expression taking yourself too seriously , thus helping to give access to an “insider perspective” on the practice. Next, it seeks to identify some of the broader communicative norms and social attitudes that are involved, using the method of cultural scripts (Goddard and Wierzbicka, Cultural scripts 1, 2004). Finally, it investigates the extent to which predictions generated from the analysis can be supported or disconfirmed by contrastive analysis of Australian English corpora as against other English corpora, and by the use of the Google search engine to explore different subdomains of the World Wide Web.

The aim of this paper is to reflect on the necessity of pragmatic development of propositional forms and arrive at a better understanding of the level of meaning which Sperber and Wilson and Carston call ‘explicature’. It is also argued that the pragmatically conveyed elements of explicatures are not cancellable—unlike conversational implicatures. While Capone (RASK: International Journal of Language and Communication 19: 3–32, 2003) addressed the issue of the cancellability of explicatures from a merely empirical point of view, in this paper a number of important theoretical questions are raised and discussed. In particular it is proposed that the analysis of the notion of intentionality and the nature of pragmatic intrusion will settle the question of the cancellability of explicatures. An explicature can be considered a two-level entity. It consists of a logical form and a pragmatic increment that the logical form gives rise to in the context of an utterance. However, both the initial logical form and the pragmatic increment are the target of pragmatic processes. Consequently, we need a pragmatic process to promote the initial logical form to an intended interpretation and another pragmatic process to derive further increments starting from the initial logical form as promoted to an utterance interpretation.

Naming (i.e., addressing or referring to) non-kin adults by African children and preadolescents in first-time encounters may, at first sight, seem simple. On close inspection, however, it requires tact because the choice of forms of address is determined by several factors (age, level of solidarity, cultural background). Given that forms of address intertwine with cultural values, African parents spare no effort to transmit appropriate use of forms as an expression of African-ness. Indeed, ways of speaking constitute a behavioral manifestation of a tacit system of cultural rules, or “scripts”. The use of address forms at a given period may provide insights into the evolution of naming norms among Africans over generations. The main linguistic devices found in the data are: teknonymy, fictive use of kinship terms, and accommodation. In addition, upgrading, i.e., a move up the scale of naming due to solidarity, was also attested in the data. The study draws from insights in sociolinguistics and speech act studies, and takes inspiration from the ethnography of speaking and discourse analysis to highlight the interest of looking at forms of address as social indexing, an indicator of the user's cultural ecology.