Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Strategy Use in Egyptian Arabic and American English Refusals

2002 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-189 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
American English ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Egyptian Arabic ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

scholarly journals THE PRAGMATICS OF REFUSING A REQUEST IN ITALIAN AND AMERICAN ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE STUDY

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 92-112
Author(s):  
Massimo Verzella ◽  
Laura Tommaso
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
American English ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Western Countries ◽  
Avoidance Strategies ◽  
Negative Face ◽  
Pragmatic Strategies ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

This study falls in the area of cross-cultural pragmatics because it compares how speakers of American English and speakers of Italian refuse a request. We used a guided conversation protocol to elicit refusals to a request. The results show marked differences between the two groups. Speakers of American English tend to rely on Positive face strategies (praise, encouragement) to mitigate their refusals. In contrast, speakers of Italian tend to use Negative face strategies: lengthy explanations combined with apologies. Both groups used avoidance strategies, but speakers of American English were less likely to offer detailed explanations that require the disclosure of personal information. These findings show that pragmatic strategies to perform speech acts might vary significantly even when we compare groups from two different Western countries.

Cross-cultural pragmatics and different values

1990 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Wierzbicka
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
American English ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
John Searle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Culture Independent ◽  
Normal Human ◽  
Mainstream American English ◽  
Paul Grice ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

Abstract The author argues that the differences in the ways of speaking prevailing in different societies and different communities are profound and systematic, and reflect the different cultural values. In the past, the extent of the differences between different language communities in their ways of speaking was often underestimated. In particular, the search for universals in language use inspired by language philosophers such as Paul Grice (1975, 1981) and John Searle (1969, 1979) often led to the identification of the mainstream American English with the “normal human ways of speaking”. The last decade has witnessed a growing reaction against this kind of misguided universalism,resulting in the birth of a new discipline: cross-cultural pragmatics. The progress of this new discipline, however, has been hampered by the lack of a suitable metalanguage. Researchers in this field tend to rely heavily on vague and undefined terms such as “directness”, “indirectness”, “harmony”, “solidarity”, which are used differently by different authors, or by the same authors but on different occasions. This leads to confusion, and to a lack of consensus and clarity even on the most basic points. The author argues that to compare cultures in a truly illuminating way we need a culture-independent perspective, and that one can reach such a perspective by relying on a natural semantic metalanguage, based on universal semantic primitives. These claims are illustrated in the paper with numerous examples.

Pragmatic shifts in two translations of Fusheng Liuji

Target ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 209-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent X. Wang
Keyword(s):  
Speech Act ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Strategy Use ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Frequent Use ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Analytical Tools ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

This study focuses on translation shifts in speech act realisation patterns in two English translations of the Chinese work Fusheng Liuji. It employs analytical tools from cross-cultural pragmatics to describe speech act behaviour in the original and its translations. Lin uses more translation shifts—including significant shifts in strategy use, and moderate shifts in information sequencing—than Pratt … Chiang, who mainly retain the original pragmatic features. Both the translators and the original author make frequent use of request formulae. The two translations also show marked shifts from lexical to syntactic modification of requests. The article further examines the translators’ approaches to translation in terms of their concept of translation and the historical and social contexts of their translations.

scholarly journals Los contenidos socioculturales de los actos de habla: el contexto del usuario ideal en cuestionarios de hábitos sociales

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-296
Author(s):  
Diana Bravo
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
Pragmatic Failure ◽  
Actos De Habla ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

ResumenEn este trabajo se aborda la problemática de la universalidad de los actos de habla (Searle, ([1969]1980. Actos de habla. Madrid: Cátedra Visor.) y de su relación con las amenazas a la imagen social (cf. Placencia y Bravo, 2002. Actos de habla y cortesía en español. London: LINCOM; ; Bravo y Briz, 2004. Pragmática sociocultural: estudios del discurso de cortesía en español. Barcelona: Ariel). Dentro de los estudios de orientación pragmática de mayor difusión entre los académicos, encontramos dos posiciones, por un lado la de autores como Leech (([1983] 1988). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.) y Brown y Levinson ([1978] 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), que asumen que determinados actos de habla serían inherentemente amenazantes para la mantención de la imagen social (face); por otro, la de Thomas ((1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4 (2), pp. 91–112.), Wierzbicka ((1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.) y Blum-Kulka, S. y Olshtain, E. ((1984). Request and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, (5), pp. 196–213.), entre otros, para quienes la percepción de los mismos actos en distintas culturas estaría influida por factores socioculturales, de manera que los actos de habla no serían per se amenazantes, sino que esta condición dependería de su interpretación en contexto. Creemos que los actos se describen de modo distinto dependiendo de cuál sea el contexto del usuario ideal, término que refiere al uso habitual de la lengua en su contexto situacional y sociocultural. Por ello sostenemos que no basta con interpretar los actos con la sola ayuda de la bibliografía y de las propias intuiciones, sino que es necesario consultar al usuario de la lengua. En este artículo nos enfocaremos en justificar una metodología de recogida de datos socio-pragmáticos que establece relaciones directas entre los actos y los hábitos sociales de sus usuarios. Nos basaremos en un método de consulta usado por varios autores, el cuestionario de hábitos sociales (cf. Hernández Flores, (2002). La cortesía en la conversación española de familiares y amigos. La búsqueda de equilibrio entre la imagen del hablante y la imagen del destinatario. Tesis doctoral. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitet. Recuperado de http://edice.asice.se/?page_id=305, y Bernal y Hernández Flores, (2016). Variación socio-pragmática en la enseñanza del español: aplicación didáctica de un cuestionario de hábitos sociales. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3 (2), pp. 114–126.).

scholarly journals Corpus-based analysis of the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged

2017 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Liana Markelova
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
American English ◽  
Public Attitude ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
Web Based ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Semantic Prosody

The present study aims to trace the evolution of public attitude towards the mentally challenged by means of the corpus-based analysis. The raw data comes from the two of the BYU corpora: Global Web-Based English (GloWbE) and Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). The former is comprised of 1.8 million web pages from 20 English-speaking countries (Davies/Fuchs 2015: 1) and provides an opportunity to research at a cross-cultural level, whereas the latter, containing 400 million words from more than 100,000 texts ranging from the 1810s to the 2000s (Davies 2012: 121), allows to carry on a diachronic research on the issue. To identify the difference in attitudes the collocational profiles of the terms denoting the mentally challenged were created. Having analysed them in terms of their semantic prosody one might conclude that there are certain semantic shifts that occurred due to the modern usage preferences and gradual change in public perception of everything strange, unusual and unique.

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