Volume 31, Issue 1 -

This study explores the pragmatic awareness of instructed L2 learners of Greek (economic migrants) by examining the extent to which these learners display differences in their recognition and rating of pragmatic and grammatical violations. Methodologically, the study is largely based on the Bardovi-Harlig & Dörnyei (1998) study on pragmatic awareness. However, unlike the former, it does not compare SL and FL learners, but two groups of SL learners with different length of residence in Greece. Hence, it attempts to reach conclusions with respect to the impact of residence on the development of pragmatic awareness. It is shown that both learner groups consistently recognise grammatical violations with greater frequency than pragmatic ones and rate the former as more severe than the latter. It is concluded that for this particular learner sample, length of residence alone is not a sufficient condition for the development of pragmatic awareness. The suggestion is made that this is due at least partly to the special circumstances of the participants, which do not allow for sufficient opportunities for social contact with native speakers. The conclusions have important implications both for the role of the L2 setting in pragmatic development and for language instruction.

This paper investigates two naturally occurring business interpreting situations where there are a number of participants. Unlike dialogue interpreting situations where there are only two primary interlocutors, the overall interaction shows more complexity in these multi-party situations. This, in turn, means that the interpreters’ functions and their level of involvement also become more multifaceted. In order to see the nature of the interpreters’ participation in the interaction, they will be analysed as a listener and speaker, drawing upon Goffman’s (1981) participation framework and Clark’s (1996) categorisation of listeners and speakers. The study shows that the interpreters not only participate in the communicative interaction in a highly complicated way, but that they are an integral part of the communicative interaction. This is particularly the case when they participate as a speaker

A handful of recent incidents hints at an ideological struggle over the use of the English word fag(got) and the Spanish word maricón in public discourse. This article examines the discursive and ideological struggle over the terms through the comparison of two cases in which Spanish/English bilingual Latinos in the U. S. use what might be considered homophobic slurs in public discourse in two distinct contexts — an informal, off-record sports-related press conference and a radio talk show political interview. The three main aims of the article are to examine and compare the content and context of the two public apologies, to examine the discursive and ideological struggle over the appropriateness of fag/maricón in public discourse through the evaluation of their use, and to contextualize the two case studies within the research on the construction of homophobia in discourse.

Four years after the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned from Britain to China, a survey was conducted in 2001 to examine the attitudes of students toward Cantonese (the vernacular language), English (the colonizer’s and international language), and Putonghua (the new ruler’s language) in the early postcolonial era of Hong Kong. Eight years after, as Hong Kong moved into the second decade after the political handover, which has been characterized by an intense interplay of localization, mainlandization, and internationalization, a follow-up study was launched in 2009 to trace the changes of language attitudes over the past years. This paper reports on a comparison between the results of the two surveys, which shows ‘Pragmatic trilingualism’ as a future trend for the younger generation of Hong Kong. Having experienced the postcolonial changes for twelve years, informants of the 2009 study also showed significantly more positive attitudes toward Putonghua than their counterparts in 2001, as the language starts to take root in Hong Kong society along with the huge economic and demographic power of China.

Discourse markers play significant roles in any spoken interaction. This research examines the functions of the discourse markers (DMs) well, now and and used as turn-initial interruptive devices in a Malaysian radio discourse. Using Schegloff ’s (2002) framework of what constitutes an interruption in turn-taking and previous studies on the functions of discourse markers (Schriffrin 1987; Stenström 1994, Jucker 1993; Aijmer 2002), the study seeks to investigate the functional nature of discourse markers in turn-initial positions in interruptive speech. It relies on a detailed analysis of transcribed recordings of four radio talk shows. The participants are observed to use these interruptive devices in turn-initial positions in interruptive speech with different pragmatic functions. The present study rests on the conviction that such discourse particles in interruptive speech have certain functions which signal coherence to a prior utterance or to earlier segments of the discourse and play interactive roles in the interaction process.