scholarly journals Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure From the Perspective of Politeness

2018 ◽  
pp. 102-114
Author(s):  
Ibtisam Mami ◽  
Radia Attaweel ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
English Department ◽  
Direct Relation ◽  
Cultural Attitudes ◽  
Pragmatic Failure ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects ◽  
Different Levels

The present paper attempts to outline the importance of familiarity of the politeness phenomenon amongst the fifth and seventh semester students of English Department, Misurata University and elaborate its influence on the socio-cultural attitudes and values in different contexts. It focuses on the teachability of pragmatic aspects of English in regard to the speech acts of requests and apologies from the perspective of politeness in the classroom in order to foster the students’ awareness of the phenomenon of politeness and the appropriate strategies according to the context. It also intends to explore the types of strategies of requests and apologies which they use in their English productions and to discover whether there are any significant differences between students’ requests and apologies strategies with respect to their academic levels. The participants are a total of (48) students from two different levels in the English Department. It was found out that students were not aware of the direct relation between language and the phenomenon of politeness. The results indicated that there were no significant differences between students’ requests and apology strategies and their academic levels. The results also revealed the teachability of English pragmatic aspects of both requests and apologies which has led to raising the students’ pragmatic ability in producing polite requests and apologies.

Too Many Words: Length of Utterance and Pragmatic Failure

1986 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shoshana Blum-Kulka ◽  
Elite Olshtain
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Native Speaker ◽  
Systematic Difference ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Pragmatic Failure ◽  
Native Speech ◽  
Utterance Length ◽  
Pragmatic Aspects

This paper investigates the theoretical and applied domains of pragmatic failure. With respect to theory, it further clarifies pragmatic failure both in native and non-native speech, and with respect to the applied domain compares request realizations of native and non-native speakers in terms of length of utterance. In discussing the results of this comparison, a number of hypotheses are put forward concerning the ways in which deviation from native norms of utterance length might be a potential cause for pragmatic failure.The data were collected within the CCSARP (Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Pattern) project involving seven different languages and dialects (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984). The data were collected from both native and non-native speakers of each of the languages. The analysis of responses across several languages revealed a systematic difference in length of utterance used to realize speech acts by non-native speakers as compared to native speakers. The types of pragmatic failure that might be linked to being a non-native speaker are examined, thus continuing a line of research focusing on the pragmatic aspects of interlanguage (Blum-Kulka, 1982; Thomas, 1983; Edmondson et al., 1984).

Conditional Promises and Threats in Germany, China, and Tonga: Cognition and Emotion

2009 ◽  
Vol 9 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 115-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie Song ◽  
Andrea Bender ◽  
Sieghard Beller
Keyword(s):  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Communication Styles ◽  
Cognition And Emotion ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
Action Sequences ◽  
Linguistic Level ◽  
Motivational Level ◽  
Emotional Level ◽  
Different Levels

AbstractConditional promises and threats are speech acts that aim at changing another person's behavior according to one's own goals. They combine several components on different levels: goals and incentives/penalties on the motivational level, formulations on the linguistic level, obligations on the deontic level, action sequences on the behavioral level, and affective responses on the emotional level. In a cross-cultural study – comparing Germany, China, and the Kingdom of Tonga – we examined the extent to which the cognitive understanding of conditional promises and threats on the various levels is shared across cultures. The results support conceptual universality, but also show that the different components are specifically affected by cultural conventions and values that shape communication styles, moral rules, and attribution tendencies.

scholarly journals Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 322-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Beebe ◽  
Ryan Undercoffer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Anchoring Effects ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Epistemic Perspective

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.

scholarly journals Los contenidos socioculturales de los actos de habla: el contexto del usuario ideal en cuestionarios de hábitos sociales

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-296
Author(s):  
Diana Bravo
Keyword(s):  
Language Use ◽  
Applied Linguistics ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Spanish Language ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Cross Cultural Study ◽  
Pragmatic Failure ◽  
Actos De Habla ◽  
Cultural Pragmatics

ResumenEn este trabajo se aborda la problemática de la universalidad de los actos de habla (Searle, ([1969]1980. Actos de habla. Madrid: Cátedra Visor.) y de su relación con las amenazas a la imagen social (cf. Placencia y Bravo, 2002. Actos de habla y cortesía en español. London: LINCOM; ; Bravo y Briz, 2004. Pragmática sociocultural: estudios del discurso de cortesía en español. Barcelona: Ariel). Dentro de los estudios de orientación pragmática de mayor difusión entre los académicos, encontramos dos posiciones, por un lado la de autores como Leech (([1983] 1988). Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.) y Brown y Levinson ([1978] 1987. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.), que asumen que determinados actos de habla serían inherentemente amenazantes para la mantención de la imagen social (face); por otro, la de Thomas ((1983). Cross-cultural pragmatic failure. Applied Linguistics, 4 (2), pp. 91–112.), Wierzbicka ((1991). Cross-cultural pragmatics. The Semantics of Human Interaction. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.) y Blum-Kulka, S. y Olshtain, E. ((1984). Request and apologies: a cross-cultural study of speech act realization patterns (CCSARP). Applied Linguistics, (5), pp. 196–213.), entre otros, para quienes la percepción de los mismos actos en distintas culturas estaría influida por factores socioculturales, de manera que los actos de habla no serían per se amenazantes, sino que esta condición dependería de su interpretación en contexto. Creemos que los actos se describen de modo distinto dependiendo de cuál sea el contexto del usuario ideal, término que refiere al uso habitual de la lengua en su contexto situacional y sociocultural. Por ello sostenemos que no basta con interpretar los actos con la sola ayuda de la bibliografía y de las propias intuiciones, sino que es necesario consultar al usuario de la lengua. En este artículo nos enfocaremos en justificar una metodología de recogida de datos socio-pragmáticos que establece relaciones directas entre los actos y los hábitos sociales de sus usuarios. Nos basaremos en un método de consulta usado por varios autores, el cuestionario de hábitos sociales (cf. Hernández Flores, (2002). La cortesía en la conversación española de familiares y amigos. La búsqueda de equilibrio entre la imagen del hablante y la imagen del destinatario. Tesis doctoral. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitet. Recuperado de http://edice.asice.se/?page_id=305, y Bernal y Hernández Flores, (2016). Variación socio-pragmática en la enseñanza del español: aplicación didáctica de un cuestionario de hábitos sociales. Journal of Spanish Language Teaching, 3 (2), pp. 114–126.).

scholarly journals Analyzing Measurement Invariance of the Students’ Engagement Instrument Brief Version: The Cases of Denmark, Finland, and Portugal

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
T. E. Virtanen ◽  
P. Moreira ◽  
H. Ulvseth ◽  
H. Andersson ◽  
S. Tetler ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Student Engagement ◽  
Measurement Invariance ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
School Contexts ◽  
Invariance Testing ◽  
National School ◽  
Cultural Research ◽  
Cross Cultural Research ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Cross National

The promotion of students’ engagement with school is an internationally acknowledged challenge in education. There is a need to examine the structure of the concept of student engagement and to discover the best practices for fostering it across societies. That is why the cross-cultural invariance testing of students’ engagement measures is highly needed. This study aimed, first, to find the reduced set of theoretically valid items to represent students’ affective and cognitive engagement forming the Brief-SEI (brief version of the Student Engagement Instrument; SEI). The second aim was to test the measurement invariance of the Brief-SEI across three countries (Denmark, Finland, and Portugal). A total of 4,437 seventh-grade students completed the SEI questionnaires in the three countries. The analyses revealed that of the total 33 original instrument items, 15 items indicated acceptable psychometric properties of the Brief-SEI. With these 15 items, cross-national factorial validity and invariances across genders and students with different levels of academic performance (samples from Finland and Portugal) were demonstrated. This article discusses the utility of the Brief-SEI in cross-cultural research and its applicability in different national school contexts.

Maternal affective input in mother–child interaction

2012 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhuo Jing-Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Contrastive Analysis ◽  
Pragmatic Development ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Child Interaction ◽  
Mother Child Interaction ◽  
Parenting Approaches

Contrastive analysis of Chinese and American maternal affective speech acts revealed significant differences in the quantity of child-directed positive and negative speech acts. There were also important qualitative differences in specific types of maternal affective input. Results are consistent with available knowledge of cross-cultural differences in parenting approaches, and have implications for cross-cultural emotion and pragmatic development. Differential cultural values were addressed to account for the observed linguistic behaviors.

Perception of expressive prosodic speech acts performed in USA english by L1 and L2 speakers

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-45
Author(s):  
Donna Erickson ◽  
Albert Rilliard ◽  
João Antônio de Moraes ◽  
Takaaki Shochi
Keyword(s):  
Fundamental Frequency ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Acoustic Analysis ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Choice Test ◽  
Cultural Comparison ◽  
Cross Cultural Comparison ◽  
Frequency Code ◽  
Cross Language ◽  
L1 And L2

Attitudes have been described for different languages, with varying labels or contexts of occurrence for same labels. It renders cross-cultural comparison uncertain. A corpus was designed to bypass these limitations. This paper focuses on USA English produced by L1 and L2 speakers. The best performances in 9 attitudes are used in a forced-choice test, in both audio and visual modalities. Results show that 6 categories group the presented attitudes in coherent sets. The cultural origin affects marginally the categorisation of the expressions. An acoustic analysis of the fundamental frequency and intensity allows to test the predictions of two theoretical propositions – the Frequency code and the Effort code. It concludes to a main coherence of cross-language expressivity, and discusses differences. For negative expressions of imposition, L1 speakers follow the Frequency code – and L1 listeners expect this; L2 speakers use the Effort code in the same situations, leading to confusions in the audio-only modality. Differences for seduction and irony are also discussed.

scholarly journals The Role of Figurative Complexity in the Comprehension and Appreciation of Advertisements

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 957-991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Pérez-Sobrino ◽  
Jeannette Littlemore ◽  
David Houghton
Keyword(s):  
Significant Variation ◽  
Processing Time ◽  
Consumer Response ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Cultural Variation ◽  
Perceived Effectiveness ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Linguistic Backgrounds ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract To date, research in advertising has focussed almost exclusively on metaphor, with linguists and marketing scholars paying very little attention to alternative types of figurative expression. Beyond the finding that metaphor leads to an increased appreciation of advertisements, there has been surprisingly little research into how consumer response is affected by metonymy, or by metaphor–metonymy interactions. In this article, we present findings from a study that investigated the depth to which participants (n = 90) from a range of cultural and linguistic backgrounds (the UK, Spain, and China) were found to process 30 real-world adverts featuring creative metaphor and metonymy in multimodal format. We focus on the cross-cultural variation in terms of time taken to process, appreciation and perceived effectiveness of adverts, and on individual differences explained by different levels of need for cognition. We found significant variation in the understanding of advertisements containing metaphor, metonymy, and combinations of the two, between subjects and across nationalities in terms of (i) processing time, (ii) overall appeal, and (iii) the way in which participants interpreted the advertisements.

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