La variación en la cortesía: estudio pragmalingüístico del fenómeno en el español castellano

Resumen: En este trabajo, se presentan los resultados de un análisis de las estrategias de cortesía empleadas por nativos españoles en su lengua L1 (español castellano), la expresión de diferentes actos de habla: la petición, la negación, la instrucción, la queja y el mandato. La actividad se ha desarrollado mediante un TCD. Se pidió a los encuestados que rellenaran diferentes enunciados a partir de un cortometraje animado mudo. A cada enunciado se solicitaba al informante que asociara el grado de cordialidad de cada escena. Una vez recopilados los datos, se analizaron las diferencias en la formulación de los actos de habla junto con el grado de cordialidad asignado. Los resultados, aplicables en clase de ELE, muestran una relación entre el grado de cordialidad identificado y las estrategias discursivas empleadas, y confirma la adopción de estrategias y procedimientos expresivos ya identificados por la literatura científica. Palabras clave: pragmática, cortesía, TCD, ELE. Traducción del título al inglés: Variation in politeness: a pragma-linguistic study of the phenomenon in Castilian Abstract: This article presents the results from an analysis of the politeness strategies used by Spanish native speakers in their L1 (Castilian) to express different speech acts: request, denial, instruction, complaint and mandate. The analysis was carried out using a Discourse Completion Test (DCT). Respondents were asked to fill in different sentences from a silent animated short film. Respondents were also asked to associate the degree of cordiality of each scene to the sentences they provided. Once the data was collected, the differences in the formulation of the speech acts were analysed together with the assigned degree of politeness. The results, which may also apply to SFL teaching, show a relationship between the identified degree of politeness and the discursive strategies used, and it also confirms the adoption of expressive strategies and procedures already identified by the scientific literature. Key words: pragmatics, politeness, DCT, SFL.

CHILDREN`S DRAWINGS AS A TRIAGE TOOL FOR THE ASSESSMENT OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONALITY IN REFUGEE CHILDREN

The study sought to examine the possible indirect trauma indica- tors among refugee children’s drawings. We have analyzed draw- ings of refugee children and non-refugee children as controls (5 - 9 years old). The content and Pickard’s expressive strategies for mood depiction were analyzed on 464 drawings. The content analysis revealed different content-specific categories across groups, with the category of Violence/War appearing significantly more in the drawings of the refugee group. and being used as one of the trauma indicators. The analysis revealed that negative mood was depicted by more complex and detailed drawings in both groups. An expressive strategy, namely the literal strategy, appeared to be specific to the refugee group only (e.g., absence of facial characteristics), while different patterns of non-literal ex- pressive strategies were observed in conveying mood between the two groups. Our findings suggest that the drawings can be used as a triage tool to assess the emotional status of refugee children.

Lessons and Legacies

The earliest literary recognitions of black music set up an artificial dichotomy between “white” and “black” traditions, suggesting for each of these two categories an essence and a stability that didn’t exist. Concert spirituals, commercial spirituals, and indeed the entire black entertainment industry of the nineteenth century were shaped by a common dynamic. Music, dance, comedy, performance practice, and other expressive strategies that had emerged among black Americans—and that were closely bound up with their social and religious lives—were made to conform to the preferences and expectations of white audiences. This conclusion looks at why the spiritual became the common denominator among the different genres in this new entertainment industry, as well as the shift to black managers, arrangers, impresarios, and the role of women entertainers at this time.

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left uses the notion of excess—its transgression, multiplicity, and ambivalence—to consider performances of the sixties that circulated a black political discourse capable of unsettling standard understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Following a route from the United States to West Africa, Europe, and back, these performances staged imaginative subjectivities that could not be contained by disciplinary or national boundaries. Looking broadly at performances found in music, theater, film, and everyday life, the performers considered brought Marxist political strains into contact with black expressive strategies, restaging ideas of the subject that are proposed by each tradition. Attention to their work helps illuminate the role black theatricality played in what is understood as the radical energy of the sixties, and further reveals the abilities of blackness to transform social conditions. Following a transnational route forged by W.E.B. Du Bois and other modern political actors, this book considers the ways artists negotiated at once the local, national, and diasporic frames through which race has been represented. In the works of American singer and pianist Nina Simone, Ghanaian playwrights Efua Sutherland and Ama Ata Aidoo, Afro-German actor Günther Kaufmann, and California-based performer Sylvester, shared signs of racial legacy and resistance politics are articulated with regional specificity. Further, each artist explores the ways blackness responds to gender and sexuality as it proliferates images of difference. They bring important attention to the imbrication of these conditions.

French–English bilingual children’s tense use and shift in narration

Bilingual children sometimes show delays relative to monolinguals on language tasks. In the present studies, we explored whether French–English bilinguals’ tense use and shift would show a developmental lag in the context of narration. In Study 1, we showed that both French and English monolinguals showed age-related changes in tense use, with preschoolers preferring the past and adults the present. A developmental lag among bilingual children could therefore take the form of prolonged use of the past tense through middle childhood. In Study 2, we observed tense use in the narratives of French–English bilingual children (8–10 years), as well as French and English monolinguals from the same age group. The bilinguals tended to use more present tense than the monolinguals. In qualitative analyses, bilinguals also used a multitude of expressive strategies, such as exclamations, repetitions and onomatopoeia, that made the stories more vivid. Taken together these results suggest that French–English bilinguals do not present developmental differences from monolinguals in tense use. Instead, they adopt an imagistic narrative style that differs from the monolinguals in multiple ways, including a greater use of the present tense. The adoption of this style might be linked to both bilingualism and a cultural preference among French–English bilinguals.

Representations of loneliness in children’s drawings

This article reports the results of a study which aimed to examine the development of children’s ability to depict loneliness in their drawings. Seventy-eight children and 20 adults took part in the study. Participants were first asked a series of questions assessing their conceptions of loneliness, and were then invited to draw a picture that conveys loneliness. The resulting drawings were coded and scored for the presence of the two dimensions of loneliness: cognitive and emotional. First, the authors examined the use by participants of graphic indicators denoting deficiencies in one’s social relations resulting to loneliness (cognitive dimension); second, they assessed the expressive strategies participants employed to convey the negative affect that typically accompanies loneliness in their drawings (emotional dimension). Finally, the authors tested the relationship between children’s definitions of loneliness with their drawings of the construct. The results show a clear developmental progression in children’s pictorial representations of loneliness. Whereas the majority of young children represented loneliness as the absence of a social network, older children used graphic indicators to convey both the absence of a social network and the sadness that accompanies loneliness. In contrast to children, adults consistently included symbolic or metaphoric graphic indicators in their drawings to convey the negative affect accompanying the experience of loneliness.

Evaluation of Graphic-Pictorial Characteristics and Contents in the Representation of Legality

The present study examines how child drawers selectively use a set of potential expressive strategies in accordance with the nature of the topic being depicted. The phenomenological and psychodynamic method in the evaluation of drawing activity may thus be a particularly appropriate way to find interesting relationships between the variables considered. People leave in a world of signs and symbols that are verbal or gestural or, of a variety of other modalities, graphic. Through drawing, it is possible to represent memories, events, propositions, ideas, plans and also properties of the habitus or of the ethos. Several authors 1 2 3 have proposed that children’s drawings are often based on schemata, which seem to relate to the typical representation of the topic in question. This study lies within broader research into the perception of legality and into the relative effective communication modalities. Primary school pupils, aged 7-9 years, took part in the study to assess the graphic style, quality of shapes and colours, and the graphic accuracy of drawings focusing on the representation of legality.

Parsing the Popular

This work argues for an engagement with, and analysis of folkloric expression through the concept and cultural practices of communicative action. The article is motivated by a critical need to situate folklore within dynamic and compelling currents of popular culture. It is suggested that the capacities of folklore as popular culture serve to renew and impel folklore studies for traction and relevance in analytic encounters with contemporary media, culture, and society. Foundational concepts and theoretical trajectories in folklore and communication are detailed, challenged and revised with a view to capturing the substance and significance of folklore in cultural terms. The analysis presented is premised on the notion that there is a decisive intersection of the concepts and practices of folklore and popular culture to the extent that definitional boundaries between them are imprecise and unsustainable. The analysis explores how folklore as popular culture socially articulates, negotiates and asserts meaning in codes, practices, knowledge, spaces and expressive strategies in contemporary cultural conditions and environments.