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.
On a regular basis people encounter unfamiliar uses of pragmatic features, such as offers or requests with differing levels of directness or terms of address showing differing amounts of solidarity ...or deference. Variational pragmatics is the study of such uses, according to region, gender, age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status, among national and sub-national varieties of pluricentric languages. Despite the wide focus just outlined, this volume provides the first study of pragmatic variation across different social classes, using naturally occurring, interactional data. The discourse analyzed here was collected in over twenty restaurant service encounters spanning three price points. The aim of this study is two-fold: to provide a potential framework for how pragmatic variables and their context can be defined, using the concept of a communicative activity, and to investigate socioeconomic variation in pragmatics by taking offers, thanks responses and address forms as examples. This study contributes, both on a methodological and empirical level, to the growing body of research in variational pragmatics, as well as speech acts, terms of address, relational work and sociolinguistics.
The past decade has seen the rapid development of a new approach to pragmatics that attempts to integrate insights from formal and experimental semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, and ...computational cognitive science in the study of meaning: probabilistic pragmatics. The most influential probabilistic approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. In this review, I demonstrate the basic mechanics and commitments of RSA as well as some of its standard extensions, highlighting the key features that have led to its success in accounting for a wide variety of pragmatic phenomena. Fundamentally, it treats language as probabilistic, informativeness as gradient, alternatives as context-dependent, and subjective prior beliefs (world knowledge) as a crucial facet of interpretation. It also provides an integrated account of the link between production and interpretation. I highlight key challenges for RSA, which include scalability, the treatment of the boundedness of cognition, and the incremental and compositional nature of language.
Pragmatic studies of learners' development during study abroad (SA) have mainly focused on English as the target language, whereas limited research has investigated Chinese, particularly over ...extended periods of stay. This study cross-sectionally explores the effect of SA on learners' L2 Chinese requests, with a focus on long SA durations. Data were collected through six role plays from 40 learners in China, who were classified into three groups according to their length of stay (LoS). Fifteen Chinese students were also recruited to provide native speaker data for comparison. The results indicated that, compared with native speakers, learners produced fewer direct but more indirect request strategies and fewer external and internal modifiers. Learners increasingly favoured conventionally indirect request strategies as they studied longer in China, indicating non-target-like development. External modification devices were comparatively easier for learners to acquire, as revealed by similarities in the situational distributions between learners and native speakers and among learner groups. Internal modification posed more difficulties for learners, although their abilities to employ internal modifiers developed with increasing LoS. The effect of SA on learners' pragmatic development is discussed in relation to different natures of pragmatic aspects, LoS, prior L2 proficiency, contact with native speakers, and living arrangements during SA.
•This study investigates the effect of study abroad on learners' L2 Chinese requests.•The study was designed with a focus on longer study abroad (SA) durations.•Learners favoured conventionally indirect requests more as the length of stay extended.•Compared with external modifiers, internal modifiers posed greater difficulties.•The effect of SA duration on learners' pragmatic development is a complex issue.
In intercultural communication there is one element that typically makes L2 speakers feel uneasy and insecure about their linguistic performance: prosody. Mastering the prosodic features of the L2, ...and their pragmatic implications, is often a herculean task that only some learners are able to succeed at. Most studies relate this difficulty to the fact that prosody is one of the first features that are settled in the process of language acquisition from which L2 learners cannot “escape” when they learn another language. In my opinion, the reason for this prosodic “inadequacy” is because pragmatic research is often detached from prosody, possibly because of the lack of a systematic analytical methodology.
The aim of the article will be twofold: first, to present a systematic account of feedback in intercultural communication through the comparison of feedback pragmatic markers in speaker contexts: English L1 conversations, and English L1 conversing with English L2 speakers. Second, to develop the methodology of corpus pragmatics as a useful and reliable tool for intercultural communication.
•The study investigates the realization of pragmatic markers as feedback in the interaction between L1 speakers of English, and between L1 and L2 speakers of English.•The study uses the model of prosodic pragmatics for the analysis of the data.•Using corpus-pragmatics, the paper identifies the differences in the diversity, frequency and prosodic realization of pragmatic markers in the two language contexts.•The results show the importance of using prosody and corpora in intercultural pragmatics research.
British culture is said to be characterised by off-record or negative politeness and norms giving prominence to social distance. However, this assumes that politeness works in the same way across all ...British speakers and contexts. Work constituting variational pragmatics – a field at the interface of pragmatics and dialectology – has shown this to be an over-simplification. Using data from the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, this paper explores politeness variation across gender, age, region, population density, social class, highest educational qualification, and setting. We selected 50 key British conventionalised politeness formulae, each allotted to one of three different types of politeness (tentativeness, deference or solidarity), and differing levels of formality. Instances of these 50 formulae were retrieved from a subset based on setting (private; public; institutional), and then manually screened to remove non-genuine cases of politeness (e.g., sarcasm). We applied a mixed-effects multinominal logistic regression model to analyse the effect of each social variable on the use of politeness formulae. Clear differences across politeness types and levels of formality emerged, particularly with regard to differences between genders, population density (i.e., metropolitan vs. urban), and setting. We offer a series of explanations for each finding.
•Demonstrated a corpus-based method for tracking politeness across social variables.•Men use more politeness formulae than women, largely due to vocative mate.•Rural speakers use more politeness formulae than those in large metropolitan areas.•Politeness usage increases in private compared to public/institutional settings.•Women's politeness usage decreases in the institutional setting specifically.
This article describes the study of pragmatics in a specific domain of deixis found in Channel New Asia. The aim of this study is to find out the type of deixis found in the Channel New Asia. In this ...research, through the discussion, it can be concluded from the Channel New Asia, based on Levinson and Yule theory, there are 4 types found and the function also found. From the 4th types, there are nine types of personal deixis. They are from the third person deixis. The use of she, there are three and the use of he, there are six. From the type of place deixis, there is one and also the same with discourse deixis is only one.
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