Indirect reporting and pragmatically enriched context

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-111
Author(s):  
Olga A. Obdalova ◽  
Ludmila Yu. Minakova ◽  
Aleksandra V. Soboleva
Keyword(s):  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Research Problem ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Pragmatic Enrichment ◽  
Quantitative Analyses ◽  
Perlocutionary Effect

Abstract This article examines the pragmatic comprehensibility of indirect reporting. The research problem is to determine how Russian EFL learners (linguists and non-linguists) are able to turn original utterances expressing the intentions of native speakers of American English in direct speech into indirect reports to a third party. Two major issues are analyzed: adequacy of semantic content and preservation of pragmatic enrichment. The study was carried out employing the framework of Kecskes’ Socio-Cognitive Approach (2008, 2010, 2014, 2017). Twelve stimulus-utterances belonging to three communicative types (statements, questions, commands/requests) were video-recorded. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that the participants met with some difficulties preserving the speaker’s intention while interpreting attached pragmatic enrichment and perlocutionary effect. Both cohorts of Russian EFL learners were able to preserve the semantic content relatively efficiently, but encountered substantial difficulties inferring a complex pragmatic content.

scholarly journals A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of the Logical Connector ‘Thus’ in the Academic Writing of Turkish EFL Learners

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 64
Author(s):  
Serpil Ucar ◽  
Ceyhun Yukselir
Keyword(s):  
Likelihood Ratio ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Advanced Learners ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Log Likelihood ◽  
Log Likelihood Ratio ◽  
Effect Relation ◽  
Academic Genre

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary American English and 20 scientific articles of native speakers as control corpora, and 20 scientific articles of Turkish advanced EFL learners. The raw frequencies, frequencies per million words, frequencies per text and log-likelihood ratio were measured so as to compare varieties across the three corpora. The findings revealed that Turkish learners of English showed underuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’ in their academic prose compared to native speakers. Additionally, they did not demonstrate misuse in the use of the connector ‘thus’. Nevertheless, non-native learners of English tended to use this connector in a resultative role (cause-effect relation) more frequently whereas native speakers used it in appositional and summative roles more as well as its resultative role. Furthermore, the most frequent occurrences of ‘thus’ have been in academic genre.

scholarly journals Expressing Gratitude in an EFL Context: The Case of Jordanian Learners

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 190
Author(s):  
Husam Al-Momani ◽  
Abdullah Jaradat ◽  
Nisreen Al-Khawaldeh ◽  
Baker Bani-Khair
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
American English ◽  
Pragmatic Competence ◽  
Contextual Variables ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Frequency Of Use ◽  
Order Preference

This study contributes to the existing literature on interlanguage pragmatics by investigating intermediate Jordanian English Foreign Language (EFL) learners’ gratitude speech act realization compared to that of native American English speakers. The study considered both aspects of pragmatic competence including pragmalinguistic knowledge (i.e., the use of gratitude strategies) and sociopragmatic knowledge (i.e., the influence of contextual variables). A discourse completion task (DCT) was employed to elicit data from 60 participants divided into two groups: 30 native speakers of American English, and 30 Jordanian EFL learners. Findings revealed that while Jordanian EFL  learners and American English native speakers have access to the same gratitude strategies, both groups differed in  the order preference of the used strategies and their frequency of use. Furthermore, the two groups showed different patterns in responding to contextual variables (i.e., social power and size of imposition), an indication that different cultural values govern the speech norms of each group. The study concludes with some pedagogical implications that could be implemented in the EFL classroom. 

The role of cross-linguistic stress pattern frequency and word similarity on the acquisition of English stress pattern by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Post Silveira
Keyword(s):  
Second Language ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
American English ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Stress Pattern ◽  
Target Language ◽  
English As Second Language ◽  
Word Similarity ◽  
L1 Transfer

This is a preliminary study in which we investigate the acquisition of English as second language (L2[1]) word stress by native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese (BP, L1[2]). In this paper, we show results of a multiple choice forced choice perception test in which native speakers of American English and native speakers of Dutch judged the production of English words bearing pre-final stress that were both cognates and non-cognates with BP words. The tokens were produced by native speakers of American English and by Brazilians that speak English as a second language. The results have shown that American and Dutch listeners were consistent in their judgments on native and non-native stress productions and both speakers' groups produced variation in stress in relation to the canonical pattern. However, the variability found in American English points to the prosodic patterns of English and the variability found in Brazilian English points to the stress patterns of Portuguese. It occurs especially in words whose forms activate neighboring similar words in the L1. Transfer from the L1 appears both at segmental and prosodic levels in BP English. [1] L2 stands for second language, foreign language, target language. [2] L1 stands for first language, mother tongue, source language.

A Dual Act Analysis of Slurs

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Camp
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Content ◽  
The Other ◽  
Conventional Implicature ◽  
Clear Cases ◽  
Perlocutionary Effect ◽  
Communicative Role

Slurs are incendiary terms—many deny that sentences containing them can ever be true. And utterances where they occur embedded within normally “quarantining” contexts, like conditionals and indirect reports, can still seem offensive. At the same time, others find that sentences containing slurs can be true; and there are clear cases where embedding does inoculate a speaker from the slur’s offensiveness. This chapter argues that four standard accounts of the “other” element that differentiates slurs from their more neutral counterparts—semantic content, perlocutionary effect, presupposition, and conventional implicature—all fail to account for this puzzling mixture of intuitions. Instead, it proposes that slurs make two distinct, coordinated contributions to a sentence’s conventional communicative role.

The cognitive saliency of word associations of verbs of speech in English as a Lingua Franca interactions

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 417-443
Author(s):  
Yang Pang
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native English Speakers ◽  
Target Language ◽  
English Speakers ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Lingua Franca ◽  
Word Associations ◽  
Similar Word ◽  
Speech Communities

AbstractBuilding on the theoretical insights into the socio-cognitive approach to the study of interactions in which English is used as a lingua franca (ELF)), this paper reports on the idiosyncratic phenomenon that ELF speakers do not adhere to the norms of native speakers, but instead create their own particular word associations during the course of the interaction. Taking the verbs of speech talk, say, speak, and tell as examples, this study compares word associations from three corpora of native and non-native speakers. The findings of this study reveal that similar word associative patterns are produced and shared by ELF speech communities from different sociocultural backgrounds, and these differ substantially from those used by native English speakers. Idiom-like constructions such as say like, how to say, and speakin are developed and utilized by Asian and European ELF speakers. Based on these findings, this paper concludes that ELF speakers use the prefabricated expressions in the target language system only as references, and try to develop their own word associative patterns in ELF interactions. Moreover, the analysis of the non-literalness/metaphorical word associations of the verbs of speech in the Asian ELF corpus suggests that ELF speakers dynamically co-construct their shared common ground to derive non-literal/metaphorical meaning in actual situational context.

The communicative import of gestures

Gesture ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisette Mol ◽  
Emiel Krahmer ◽  
Fons Maes ◽  
Marc Swerts
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Animated Cartoon ◽  
Pointing Gestures ◽  
Gesture Production

Does gesturing primarily serve speaker internal purposes, or does it mostly facilitate communication, for example by conveying semantic content, or easing social interaction? To address this question, we asked native speakers of Dutch to retell an animated cartoon to a presumed audiovisual summarizer, a presumed addressee in another room (through web cam), or an addressee in the same room, who could either see them and be seen by them or not.
We found that participants produced the least number of gestures when talking to the presumed summarizer. In addition, they produced a smaller proportion of large gestures and almost no pointing gestures. Two perception experiments revealed that observers are sensitive to this difference in gesturing. We conclude that gesture production is not a fully automated speech facilitation process, and that it can convey information about the communicative setting a speaker is in.

The role of text type and strategy use in L2 lexical inferencing

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 231-252
Author(s):  
Ming-yueh Shen
Keyword(s):  
Strategy Use ◽  
Text Structure ◽  
Expository Texts ◽  
First Year ◽  
Efl Learners ◽  
Text Type ◽  
Lexical Inferencing ◽  
Text Types ◽  
Quantitative Analyses

Abstract This study aimed to determine as to whether or not the text type and strategy usage affect the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance. The participants were comprised of 87 first-year English majors at a technical university. Data were collected from (1) a lexical inferencing test with excerpts of narrative and expository texts, for which both multiple-choice and definition tasks were designed, respectively, and then (2) the responses from the learners’ self-reported strategy usage. The quantitative analyses demonstrated that the text types significantly affected the EFL learners’ lexical inferencing performance, in which the EFL learners performed better for the narrative excerpt than for the expository texts. However, significant coefficients between the strategy use and the lexical inferencing performance were not found in this study. The results further implied that the text structure and the lexical inferencing strategies should be explicitly taught to the EFL learners.

scholarly journals Analogy-driven change: the emergence and development of mirative end up constructions in American English

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-121
Author(s):  
MARIO SERRANO-LOSADA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American English ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pragmatic Enrichment ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Diachronic Development

This article explores the diachronic development of mirative end up in American English, which emerged in the late nineteenth century and which seems to be, at present, in the process of becoming a parenthetical element. The rise of the various mirative end up constructions is argued to be the result of both pragmatic enrichment and paradigmatic analogy, motivated by a series of semantically and formally related expressions, most prominently by mirative turn out. Moreover, the article delves into the process of cooptation to explain the emergence of parenthetical instances in the present-day language. Cooptation is understood as an intrinsically analogical-driven mechanism when it entails the eventual grammaticalization of formulaic parenthetical constructions. Data for the present study were taken from a variety of diachronic and synchronic sources, which include COHA, COCA and NOW, among others.

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