CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS & CORPORATowards Intercultural Education

Ivana Trbojević, Belgrade

WHY (CONTRASTIVE) PRAGMATICS?

BELLS: How do you see the role of pragmatics in the study of language?

David Crystal: Well, I think pragmatics is probably the most important area of all in language study . But it’s so recent that it’s difficult to percieve it’s full potential . (...) But the detailed empirical studies of the pragmatics of English, say, and then the pragmatics of French, say, and then – do English and French pragmatics meet or what are the diffferences between the two, a sort of contrastive pragmatics... (Bells:Vol I:2009:236)

Defining the term & scope: “Pragmatics is one of those words (societal and

cognitive are others) that give the impression that something quite specific and technical is being talked about when often in fact it has no clear meaning” (Searle, Kiefer & Bierwisch 1980:viii)

The study of how meaning communicated by the speaker/writer gets interpreted by the listener/reader , taking into consideration how context influences what is said and how it is being understood.

The study of how inferences are drawn in communication, when more gets communicated / interpreted than is really said.

The study of choices that speaker makes when deciding what to say and what not to say, depending on the estimated closeness/distance between the speaker and the listener

Taking a broader look at the picture, it easily gets clear that linguistic pragmatic choices are inextricably related to the culture of which a language is part, so these choices are culture sensitive and even culture governed.

E.g. Use of the Imperative /Directive statements S1) Zatvori vrata, molim te! S2) Da li biste bili ljubazni da zatvorite vrata,

molim vas? S3) Budite ljubazni, zatvorite vrata!

E: Close the door, please! E2) Would you mind closing the door, please? E3) Would you be so kind to close the door,

please? E4) ?Be kind, close the door!

Both languages have the Imperative and use it; Its strength is negotiable on-line, relative to the situational context

but for Serbian speakers it appears approapriate in

most of the situations where it is invariably avoided in English as impolite.

The pragmatic study that concerns itself with such choices is sometimes called ethnopragmatics/ethnosyntax (in a broad sense of the word)

Ethnopragmatics: the study of culture specific norms, rules and models of usage; it overlaps with ethnosyntax .

Ethnosyntax : the study of connections between the cultural knowledge, attitudes and practices of speakers on the one hand and the morphosyntactic resources they employ in speech on the other (Enfield :2002)

CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS Once ‘pragmatic descriptions’ of language

use are available in languages, the contrastive procedures is practically the same as at any other level of (micro& macro) linguistic analysis .

The questions are (1) WHY and on (2) WHAT material?

1)Contrasting of ‘real usage issues’ sheds a new light on all aspects of language use , particularly those which are culture specific ; also, application of results opens a multitude of possibilities, especially with FLL and IC education in focus

CORPORA 2) If ‘ussage ‘ is in research focus, then corpora

seem to be the only plausible solution ; analysts cannot rely on intuition/anecdotal evidence , as they look for typical patterns and the contextual factors which govern their usage

Analysts need a large ammount of language data from a large number of speakers/writers, as conclusions must not be drawn on several speakers’ idiosyncrasies

Working with corpora - advantages It is empirical It analyzes the ‘real language’ occurring in ‘real texts’ It makes use of large collections of authentic discourse

collected following the principles of representativeness

It allows for both quantitative and qualitative analysis, i.e. functional explanation, exemplification and interpretation of the quantitative data.

E.g. Distribution of you know by function and speakers’s gender

‘This table shows that women recorded by Holmes use you know more frequently than men when it expresses confidence , but less frequently when it expresses uncertainty. Holmes’s sensitive analysis demonstrates that hedges are multifunctional and that any analysis of gender differences needs to allow for this. Moreover, her findings challenge Lakoff’s blanket assertion that women use more hedges than men as well as Lakoff’s claim that women’s use of hedges is related to lack of confidence , since female speakers used you know more in its confident sense.’ (Coates:2004:89)

Function of you know

Female Male

Expressing confidence

56 37 (p=0.05)

Expressing uncertainty

33 50

Totals 89 87

Comprehensive studies of usage cannot rely on intuition, anecdotal evidence or small samples; however, intuitions or anecdotes can inspire corpus-based research.

(1) Hypothesis: the use of imperative in requests in Serbian is more frequent in male speakers than in female speakers.

The corpus-based research showed it was not really the case.

(2) An accidental observation triggered a more extensive research:

THIS IS WHAT THE CLAIM IN SERBIAN WAS

Garcinia Cambia je ekstrakt (limunska kiselina) koji se dobija iz ploda Malabar Tamarind i koji (Ø modality) inhibira (indicative) sintezu masnih kiselina i redukuje ... Takođe, prirodno reguliše apetit... Ekstrakt zelenog čaja je antioksidans koji (Ø modality) štiti (indicative) organizam od dejstva slobodnih radikala... (Ø modality) ubrzava (indicative ) metabolizam.

THIS IS WHAT THE CLAIM IN ENGLISH SAID:

.... Garcinia Cambia is a fruit extract (hidroxy citric acid) ... derived from a small pumpkin shaped fruit (Malabar Tamarind) which may help inhibit and reduce.. fatty acid synthesis and reduce ... Also, it may help naturally balance the apettite ....Green Tea extract has antioxidant activity and may assit in protecting the body from potential free radical damage.... It may help boost metabolism to aid weight loss.

The corpus obtained was not too large: ‘structural claims’ accompanying 25 products imported and sold in Serbia, and those for 25 products produced and sold in Serbia

3600 words each; all frequencies of occurence were given per 1000 wds.

Practically, the inventory of modal hedges appeared to be very similar (grammaticalized forms, lexicalized forms, constructions) , although E inventory range was much ampler

USE OF EPMS /HEDGES IN E AND S CHP STRUCTURAL CLAIMS

The inferences triggered by the EPMs (hedges) in English and Serbian are the same; also, it is not the inventory of linguistic means that shows contrast between the two languages, but it is the manner in which and the extent to which the speakers/authors of these texts use these means to signal procedural meaning, i.e. to hedge.

What are these choices governed by? Here, ethnopragmatics and cultural theories

get into picture Main technique of ethnopragmatic description:

‘cultural scripts’

a possible cultural script relating to directness (for Serbian)

If I want someone to do somethingIt is NOT BAD to say to this person something

likethis

‘I want you to do something; because of this,

you have to do it’ this cultural script models not only the

encoding, but also the perception of directness and, consequently, the possible reactions, verbal or behavioural.

The second part of the title: Intercultural Education

An education conducive to the development of cross-cultural competences, i.e. helping students to develop a set of cognitive, behavioural, and affective/motivational components that enable them to adapt effectively in intercultural environments, where intercultural may also refer to different cultures within one particular language (academic culture, youth culture, professional culture, company culture, etc).

BELLS: How important is pragmatics for language teaching ?

David Crystal: I think this is a very important area, and one that governs a lot of change of direction that I see in language teaching , both foreign language teaching and mother tongue teaching. One of the biggest movements in English mother tongue teaching in schools in Britain at the moment is a switch from straight descriptive grammatical studies to pragmatic studies . Not just what grammar is in the text, but why is that grammar used in that text. And it’s a big change, I think. (Bells:Vol I:2009:237)

References:

Biber, D., Conrad,S.and R.Reppen (2004) Corpus Linguistics. Investigating Language Structure and Use. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press

Coates, J. (1983) The semantics of the modal auxiliaries. London.Croom Helm.

Coates, J. (1995) The Expression of Root and Epistemic Possibility in English. In Aarts, B. and C.F. Meyer (eds), The Verb in Contemporary English.Theory and Description. Cambridge.Cambridge University Press.

Crystal, David (2009) Interview by K. Rasulić. In :Belgrade BELLS . Vol.1. (Jovanović, A., K.Rasulić and I.Trbojević eds) Beograd. Filološki fakultet Univerziteta u Beogradu.

Goddard, C. (2002) Ethosyntax, Ethnopragmatics, Sign-Functions and Culture. In Enfield, N.J. (ed.) Ethnosyntax. Explorations in Grammar and Culture. New York. Oxford University Press.

Goddard, C. (2006). Ethnopragmatics:a new paradigm. In: Ethnopragmatics. Understanding

discourse in cultural context. C.Goddard (ed.). Berlin- New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1-30.

Holmes, J. (1995) Women, Men and Politeness. London. Longman.

Hyland, K. (1998) Persuasion and context: the pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of Pragmatics, Vol. 30. pp.437-455.

Lakoff, G. (1972) Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts. In: Papers from the Eight Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, pp.183-228.

Lakoff, R.T. (1975) Language and Woman’s Place. Text and Commentaries. Revised and expanded edition. Mary Bucholtz, ed. New York. Oxford University Press. pp.34-119.

Trbojević-Milošević, I. ( 2008) Grammar Can Hurt: A Contrastive View of English and Serbian Imperatives. ELLSSAC Proceedings . Vol. I. Filološki fakultet. Beograd. 103 -114.

Trbojević-Milošević, I. (to appear in 2011) On Inocence and Experience: Modal Hedging in Consumer Helth Products Instructions in English and Serbian. ModE4. Madrid. Universidad Complutense.

Vande Kopple, W. (1985) Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. In College Composition and Communication Vol.36, No.1. pp.82-93.

Watts,R.J. (2004) Politeness. Key topics in Sociolinguistics. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press.

Wierzbicka, A. (1994). ’Cultural Scripts’: A semantic approach to the study of cross-cultural communication. In: Pragmatics and Language Learning. Bouton L.and Y.Kachru (eds). Urbana Champaign: University of Illinois, 1-24.

 Wierzbicka, A. (1996) Contrastive sociolinguistics and the theory of ’cultural scripts’: Chinese vs. English. In Hellinger M. and U. Ammon (eds), Contrastive Sociolinguistics. Berlin.Mouton de Gruyter, 313-44.

 Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F.&Bierwisch, M.(eds) (1980) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics.Vol.10.Dordrecht. Reidel.

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