This book outlines a framework for teaching second language pragmatics grounded in Vygotskian sociocultural psychology. Using multiple sources of metalinguistic and performance data, the volume ...explores both theoretical and practical issues relevant to teaching second language pragmatics from a Vygotskian perspective.
This study aims to investigate the effect of pragmatic competence on the performance of Saudi translators. The researchers used a quantitative method to conduct this study. This study targeted 40 ...Saudi translators to investigate the effect of pragmatic competence on their performance. The participants of this study were 20 teachers of translation and 20 undergraduate students studying translation courses. The teachers were from various universities in Saudi Arabia, while the students were in the Department of English, College of Languages and Translation at King Khalid University. For data collection procedures, a survey questionnaire was used to collect data from participants- translation teachers, and students studying translation in Saudi Arabia. The participants’ responses provided insights into how pragmatic competence impacts translation quality and success from both a theoretical and practical perspective. The results revealed the perceived role of various pragmatic aspects in producing effective translations. Based on the findings, it is recommended that translators prioritize attention to pragmatic considerations, such as politeness strategies, speech acts, cooperative principle, etc., to enhance the effectiveness of their translations.
La compleja naturaleza de la ironía verbal ha llevado a los lingüistas a tratar de definirla a partir de perspectivas de análisis tan heterogéneas que la amplia bibliografía al respecto genera más ...dilemas de los que resuelve, ya que ninguna es por sí sola suficiente para caracterizar nítidamente la totalidad de manifestaciones irónicas posibles. A la luz de este problema teórico, en este trabajo presentamos una revisión y análisis de cinco de los modelos teóricos que, dentro de la disciplina pragmática, han tenido mayor trascendencia en el estudio de la ironía verbal. Nuestros objetivos son mostrar sus debilidades teóricas, así como los fundamentos que son potencialmente válidos, exponiendo las razones al respecto, para, a partir de las conclusiones extraídas, ofrecer algunas de las claves teóricas y metodológicas esenciales para lograr avanzar hacia una definición más unitaria, abarcadora y consistente de la ironía verbal.
In this paper, we explore exclamatives when used as responses in a discourse. Our proposal is based on the following pragmatic observation: so-called that-exclamatives in both Germanic and Romance ...languages are preferred as responses to polar questions, while wh-exclamatives are restricted to a response use in non-polar contexts. We establish this data pattern empirically by means of two judgment studies, and we then provide a detailed theoretical account for these challenging new data points. In particular, we show that the differences between the response uses of wh-exclamatives and that-exclamatives can be explained on syntactic grounds, analogous to ‘the syntax of answers’ proposed in recent syntactic work by Holmberg (2013, 2015) at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In sum, we provide a pragmatically more refined view on exclamatives and their use in a discourse, suggesting new empirical distinctions at the syntax-pragmatics interface.
•We provide a pragmatically refined view on exclamatives and their use in a discourse.•The role of exclamatives in discourse is restricted by features of syntactic form.•Our empirical observations and distinctions hold cross-linguistically.•We provide a starting point for further studies at the syntax-pragmatics interface.
The Gricean paradigm in pragmatics has recently been attacked for its alleged lack of explanatory import, based on the claim that it does not seek accounts of how utterance interpretation actually ...works, but merely of how it might work. This article rebuts this line of attack by offering a clear and detailed account of the explanatory project of Gricean pragmatics according to which the latter aims for rationalizing explanations of utterance interpretation. It is shown that, on this view, Gricean pragmatics seeks psychological explanations of utterance interpretation that are “cognitively real” in a perfectly clear and robust sense.
Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language. How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under ...attack for decades for not being able to account for the seemingly irrational overinformativeness ubiquitous in referring expressions. Here we present a novel production model of referring expressions within the Rational Speech Act framework that treats speakers as agents that rationally trade off cost and informativeness of utterances. Crucially, we relax the assumption that informativeness is computed with respect to a deterministic Boolean semantics, in favor of a nondeterministic continuous semantics. This innovation allows us to capture a large number of seemingly disparate phenomena within one unified framework: the basic asymmetry in speakers' propensity to overmodify with color rather than size; the increase in overmodification in complex scenes; the increase in overmodification with atypical features; and the increase in specificity in nominal reference as a function of typicality. These findings cast a new light on the production of referring expressions: rather than being wastefully overinformative, reference is usefully redundant.
This article investigates the in-situ relations that interlocutors co-construct during troubles talk in a working team, with a focus on talk centred around negative issues or experiences that ...speakers do not blame or attribute to others present. Research in various fields has pointed to the important role that troubles talk plays in the construction of positive social relations, but more detailed pragmatic insights are still needed to understand exactly how these positive social relations are brought about in interaction. To address this, we draw on 25 h of recorded and transcribed team meeting data from an MBA team, collected over a 9-month period. Troubles talk stands out throughout from other types of talk in this dataset, as relations were continuously constructed as equal, close, safe, and featuring positive affect. We examine the interactional strategies that team members used to construct these positive relations in troubles talk and highlight a number of these strategies, including joint story-telling, participatory floor-management, humour, and shared transgressions. Reciprocal self-disclosures were found to be central to constructing positive relations and were used by team members even when troubles were not shared. With this we add further empirical insights to the area of interpersonal pragmatics concerned with fostering good relationships and establish descriptors on how such relations can be characterised and investigated.
•Troubles talk is used to construct positive relations in work teams.•Team relations in troubles talk are equal, close, trustful, and feature positive affect.•Troubles talk is carefully calibrated to mitigate FTAs.•Provides empirical insights on interactional strategies for positive relations.•Establishes descriptors for characterising positive in-situ relations.
This study investigated the understanding of underinformative sentences like "Some elephants have trunks" by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The scalar term 'some' can be interpreted ...pragmatically, 'Not all elephants have trunks,' or logically, 'Some and possibly all elephants have trunks.' Literature indicates that adults with ASD show no real difficulty in interpreting scalar implicatures, i.e., they often interpret them pragmatically, as controls do. This contrasts with the traditional claim of difficulties of people with ASD in other pragmatic domains, and is more in line with the idea that pragmatic problems are not universal. The aim of this study was to: (a) gain insight in the ability of children with ASD to derive scalar implicatures, and (b) do this by assessing not only sensitivity to underinformativeness, but also different degrees of tolerance to violations of informativeness. We employed a classic statement-evaluation task, presenting optimal, logical false, and underinformative utterances. In Experiment 1, children had to express their judgment on a binary option 'I agree' vs. 'I disagree.' In Experiment 2, a ternary middle answer option 'I agree a bit' was also available. Sixty-six Flemish-speaking 10-year-old children were tested: 22 children with ASD, an IQ-matched group, and an age-matched group. In the binary judgment task, the ASD group gave more pragmatic answers than the other groups, which was significant in the mixed effects logistic regression analysis, although not in the non-parametric analysis. In the ternary judgment task, the children with ASD showed a dichotomized attitude toward the speaker's meaning, by tending to either fully agree or fully disagree with underinformative statements, in contrast with TD children, who preferred the middle option. Remarkably, the IQ-matched group exhibited the same pattern of results as the ASD group. Thanks to a fine-grained measure such as the ternary judgment task, this study highlighted a neglected aspect of the pragmatic profile of ASD, whose struggle with social communication seems to affect also the domain of informativeness. We discuss the implications of the dichotomized reaction toward violations of informativeness in terms of the potential role of ASD and of cognitive and verbal abilities.
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