Understanding indirect requests for information in high-functioning autism

Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’ difficulties in indirect requests comprehension; others suggest that it might be preserved in HFA. Furthermore, the role of Theory of Mind in understanding indirect requests is an open issue. The goal of this work is twofold: first, assessing whether comprehension of indirect requests for information is preserved in HFA; second, exploring whether mind-reading skills predict this ability. We tested a group of (n = 14; 9–12 years) HFA children and two groups of younger (n = 19; 5–6 years) and older (n = 28; 9–12 years) typically developing (TD) children in a semi-structured task involving direct, indirect and highly indirect requests for information. Results suggested that HFA can understand indirect and highly indirect requests, as well as TD children. Yet, while Theory of Mind skills seem to enhance older TD children understanding, this is not the case for HFA children. Therefore, interestingly, they could rely on different interpretative strategies.

Acts of Requesting as Realized by English for Specific Purposes Students

The success of language learners’ intercultural communication highly depends on their acquisition of not only grammatical knowledge but also pragmatic aspects of the target language. However, research examining English for specific purposes (ESP) learners’ request realization, as a crucial indicator of pragmatic competence, still remains a paucity of evidence. Addressing this issue, the present study aims to examine English for specific purposes (ESP) students’ most frequently used request strategy and their reasons behind the selected strategy. To this end, 36 ESP students of a public university in Surakarta Indonesia were involved in a descriptive qualitative study. A set of Discourse Completion Test (DCT), role-play, and semi-structured interview were employed as a means of data collection. The data were analyzed based on Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s Cross-Cultural Study of Speech Act Realization Patterns (CCSARP) and followed by thematic content analysis for the interview responses. The results depicted that conventionally indirect requests were the most frequently used strategy by the students than other strategies, i.e. direct request, and non-conventionally indirect request. The semi-structured interview further revealed that cultural factors, degree of politeness, and social distance among the interlocutors became the primary reasons for the students’ massive selection of conventionally indirect strategies. These results offer fruitful insights for English language teaching stakeholders as an effort to equip ESP students with satisfactory pragmatic and cross-cultural knowledge.Keywords: acts of requesting, pragmatics, request strategies,

Assessing Pragmatic Language Skills in Adults with Major Depressive Disorder: An Exploratory Study

Introduction: There is increasing evidence that major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with significant pragmatic language impairments. However, there is a lack of studies that use standardized tools and simultaneously investigate all pragmatic language skills among MDD patients. The aim of this study was to propose a more thorough investigation of all pragmatic language skills in patients with MDD. Methods: Twenty adults (aged 22–65) with a DSM-5 diagnosis of MDD were assessed using BLED Santa Lucia (Batteria sul Linguaggio dell’Emisfero Destro Santa Lucia), a battery designed to evaluate pragmatic language skills (comprehension of inferences, of picture and written metaphors, of indirect requests, of humoristic expressions, and of prosody). The performance of the MDD participants on all BLED Santa Lucia subscales was compared to 20 healthy control subjects (aged 20–60) matched for gender, age, years of education, and employment status. Results: MDD patients performed poorer than controls in comprehension of inferences (p < 0.01), picture metaphors (p < 0.001), written metaphors (p < 0.001), indirect requests (p < 0.01), humoristic expression (p < 0.05), and prosody (p < 0.05). Conclusions: All pragmatic language skills can be significantly impaired in MDD patients. A valid assessment of all pragmatic language skills can allow, for each patient, the definition of a specific profile of risk and protective factors before and during psychotherapy.

(Indirect) requests in Natural Language Processing: a preliminary theoretical proposal

This paper focuses on conventionalized and non-conventionalized indirect speech acts, and more concretely, on (indirect) requests. We do so within a Natural Language Processing environment called FunGramKB, which adheres to a cognitively-oriented Construction Grammar view of language. Here, conventionalized formulations like Can you X? are treated as constructions in their own right; that is, as entrenched form-meaning pairings and, thus, they are not considered indirect. By contrast, non-conventionalized formulations such as those instantiated by negative state remarks (e.g. I’m hungry) require degrees of inferencing for interpretation. Both types are computationally handled in different modules of FunGramKB. Our aim is to show that a cognitive version of Construction Grammar can offer a solution to the computational treatment of illocution.

Comparison between Chinese and Japanese Social Media Requests

This study investigates Chinese and Japanese requests in social media communication, focusing on the requests made between university students. The data consisted of 300 social media requests made by 30 Chinese university students and 304 social media requests made by 30 Japanese university students, respectively. The findings revealed that the Chinese and Japanese participants displayed more similarities than differences regarding the request strategy that they preferred to use among peers on social media. Both groups employed direct requests the most frequently, followed by conventionally indirect requests. Non-conventionally indirect requests were used the least frequently by both groups. The Japanese participants employed twice as many external modifiers as their Chinese counterparts. In contrast, the Chinese participants used considerably more lexical/phrasal internal modifiers than the Japanese participants. The findings are discussed in relation to factors such as social distance, living arrangements and new technologies.

How Families Give and Receive: A Cross-Class Qualitative Study of Familial Exchange

Support of family members has been a long-standing interest of social scientists. Contemporary American families must provide support to members in a historical context wherein family inequality continues to rise. Based on the life course perspective, and utilizing qualitative, in-depth interviews with 50 multi-generational participants from the Family Exchanges Study, this article explores the mechanisms through which families across the socioeconomic spectrum engage in and perceive family support. We discuss both direct and indirect requests by family members for help and identify differences by family socioeconomic status. We also discuss how issues of reciprocity, views toward request propriety, and perceptions of appreciation guide family member responses to need. We argue that this cross-class comparison is particularly essential to further scholarly understands of family functioning and support amidst growing inequality in the United States.

Social Contexts of Indirect Requests in Polish and Hungarian

The paper presents the influence of social context on illocutionary metonymy in directives evoked by various elements of request scenarios. As the human language activity reflects the physical and social worlds of the intersubjective context (cf. Verschueren 1999), the recognized and construed social relations have an impact not only on addressive forms, but also on the appearance of other elements such as indirectness and its scalarity. Indirect directives are based on illocutionary metonymic scenarios (Panther and Thornburg 1998) and by evoking a part of the scenario referring to the core action they give access to the illocutionary scenario domain. The scalar nature of indirectness (Panther and Thornburg 1998, see also Panther and Thornburg 1999, 2007 and Thornburg and Panther 1997), depends on the number of evoked elements and their conceptual distance from the core of the request. It can be based on conventional grammatical structures (e.g. auxiliary verbs) or giving hints by only introducing the action scenario. As Veres-Guśpiel (2013) has shown the chosen type of indirectness is influenced by social context and the weight of a directive (for the latter, see also Csató and Pléh 1988, Pléh 2012). The main question of the presented research regards types of illocutionary metonymy, that can be experienced in various social contexts and what their frequency of use is.

Linguistic Intuitions in Context: a Defense of Nonskeptical Pure Invariantism

Epistemic invariantism is the view that the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions don’t vary across contexts. Epistemic purism is the view that purely practical factors can’t directly affect the strength of your epistemic position. The combination of purism and invariantism, pure invariantism, is the received view in contemporary epistemology. It has lately been criticized by contextualists, who deny invariantism, and impurists, who deny purism. A central charge against pure invariantism is that it poorly accommodates linguistic intuitions about certain cases. In this paper I develop a new response to this charge. I propose that pure invariantists can explain the relevant linguistic intuitions on the grounds that they track the propriety of indirect speech acts, in particular indirect requests and denials. [Note: this paper was written in 2010-11.]

College EFL teachers’ beliefs in making requests

This study examined college EFL teachers’ beliefs in their making requests in the classrooms. In this study, the methods for data-collection included a questionnaire, classroom observation, and an in-depth interview. A pre-observation questionnaire was administrated for collecting the information on teacher belief in the use of request types, and why and when teachers made these requests. Five EFL teachers and one of their respective English classes at university in Taiwan were invited to participate in the present study. Over a 4-week period, a total of 40 sessions of teaching, 50 minutes each, were observed, video-taped, and audio-taped. Afterwards, an interview was conducted. The data collected were transcribed, coded, and analyzed. Findings showed that all teachers reported their uses of both direct and indirect requests. Also, all teachers made their requests for some specific reasons and at some specific point of time. It is suggested that teachers be aware of their uses of requests. Teachers’ awareness of their uses of different types of requests may help promote teacher-student interaction.

Do indirect requests communicate politeness? An experimental study of conventionalized indirect requests in French email communication

This article addresses the relationship between linguistic politeness and addressee status in the performance of written requests in French. According to a first view, conventionalized Can you followed by a verbal phrase (in short, Can you VP?) “indirect requests” (IRs) are preferred because they enable speakers to convey politeness effects absent in imperatives. According to an alternative view, Can you VP? is the standard polite request form in written communication because it avoids impoliteness implications. To test these two competing hypotheses, I carried out a production task experiment with 122 native speakers of Belgian French writing email requests. In this experiment, addressee status was manipulated. An important finding is that higher addressee status does not increase the frequency of Can you VP? requests. Instead of using Can you VP? more often when they address higher status people, the participants used specific politeness markers such as formal greetings and the V-form of address. These results disconfirm the hypothesis that Can you VP? is used to convey extra politeness effects and suggests instead that people use such IRs to avoid the risk of being considered impolite.