Examining the Impact of Perceived Cultural Distance on the Pragmatic Choices of Saudi Customers in Service Encounters

This study examines service encounters in Saudi Arabia from a pragmatic perspective. Its aim is to investigate the possible impact of perceived cultural distance between customers and service providers on pragmatic choices. It specifically examines how Saudi customers construct their service encounters when talking to service providers of the same (versus different) cultural/ethnic background in terms of discourse structure; strategies of request and internal modifications, and stylistic strategies. Three cafés with service providers of three different ethnic/cultural backgrounds are chosen. One has Saudi service providers, the second café has Arab (non-Saudi) service providers, and the third café has non-Arab service providers. Forty socially minimal service encounter interactions that take place in each café are observed and manually recorded. The study uses the framework of ‘rapport management’ by Spencer-Oatey (2002) as its approach for data analysis. The findings indicate that there are differences among the three sets of data in terms of discourse structure, the realization of the speech act of request, and the stylistic aspect of interactions. According to the special nature of service encounters, customers’ pragmatic choices are explained in terms of expressing certain degrees of social distance rather than politeness. More specifically, the closer cultural distance between customers and service providers, the more pragmatic strategies functioning to achieve more closeness and solidarity are employed.

Examining the Impact of Perceived Cultural Distance on the Pragmatic Choices of Saudi Customers in Service Encounters

This study examines service encounters in Saudi Arabia from a pragmatic perspective. Its aim is to investigate the possible impact of perceived cultural distance between customers and service providers on pragmatic choices. It specifically examines how Saudi customers construct their service encounters when talking to service providers of the same (versus different) cultural/ethnic background in terms of discourse structure; strategies of request and internal modifications, and stylistic strategies. Three cafés with service providers of three different ethnic/cultural backgrounds are chosen. One has Saudi service providers, the second café has Arab (non-Saudi) service providers, and the third café has non-Arab service providers. Forty socially minimal service encounter interactions that take place in each café are observed and manually recorded. The study uses the framework of ‘rapport management’ by Spencer-Oatey (2002) as its approach for data analysis. The findings indicate that there are differences among the three sets of data in terms of discourse structure, the realization of the speech act of request, and the stylistic aspect of interactions. According to the special nature of service encounters, customers’ pragmatic choices are explained in terms of expressing certain degrees of social distance rather than politeness. More specifically, the closer cultural distance between customers and service providers, the more pragmatic strategies functioning to achieve more closeness and solidarity are employed.

TIARA 2.0: an interactive tool for annotating discourse structure and text improvement

Discourse structure annotation aims at analysing how discourse units (e.g. sentences or clauses) relate to each other and what roles they play in the overall discourse. Several annotation tools for discourse structure have been developed. However, they often only support specific annotation schemes, making their usage limited to new schemes. This article presents TIARA 2.0, an annotation tool for discourse structure and text improvement. Departing from our specific needs, we extend an existing tool to accommodate four levels of annotation: discourse structure, argumentative structure, sentence rearrangement and content alteration. The latter two are particularly unique compared to existing tools. TIARA is implemented on standard web technologies and can be easily customised. It deals with the visual complexity during the annotation process by systematically simplifying the layout and by offering interactive visualisation, including clutter-reducing features and dual-view display. TIARA’s text-view allows annotators to focus on the analysis of logical sequencing between sentences. The tree-view allows them to review their analysis in terms of the overall discourse structure. Apart from being an annotation tool, it is also designed to be useful for educational purposes in the teaching of argumentation; this gives it an edge over other existing tools.

ON TELE-SCOPING AND THE ROLE OF RHETORICAL RELATIONS IN DISCOURSE SEMANTICS

В статье обсуждаются два решения, предложенные (Э. Кешетом и Ш. Чжу) для объяснения «дально-действия» (tele-scoping) - избирательной способности именных групп с универсальной семантикой связывать местоимения через границу предложения в зависимости от риторической структуры дискурса. Исходя из их сильных и слабых сторон мы формулируем требования к формализации, в которой семантический вклад самих риторических отношений состоит в том, что они задействуют различные операции обновления информации в дискурсе. В качестве первого шага в этом направлении предложено различать две операции обновления, одна из которых применяется в случаях «дально-действия». The paper makes a case for encoding different types of update operations directly in the rhetorical structure of discourse. First, I discuss two solutions for the puzzle of tele-scoping, i.e. the conditional ability of universal DPs to bind a pronoun across a sentential boundary, proposed by Ezra Keshet and by Shensheng Zhu. Basing on their relative advantages and disadvantages, I outline an agenda for a formalisation which, instead of linking discourse structure to some features of the interpretative pipeline, directly encodes different types of update into the interpretation of rhetorical relations. The degree to which this direction is worth pursuing is illustrated for tele-scoping, whose difference from cases where cross-sentential binding is impossible is argued to be that the latter use the “oblivious” type of update, which cannot preserve the values of universally quantified variables.

A functional discourse approach to the particle ἀτάρ in Classical Greek

Taking into consideration both discourse structure and the pragmatics of contrast, this paper draws on Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) to provide a comprehensive and unified account of ἀτάρ in Classical Greek. In classical Greek drama, the particle ἀτάρ designates two main types of contrast. In its most common usage, it marks a discourse contrast, a boundary in conversational structure, such as the beginning of a new exchange or adjacency pair. More specifically, ἀτάρ can signal a change of addressee; the introduction of a new topic or new visual focus; or an abrupt thematic discontinuity such as an interruption. Moreover, ἀτάρ can also mark denial of expectation, especially when preceded by a preparatory μέν. When expressing counterexpectation, the particle instructs the addressee to process the next discourse segment in such a way as to contradict or eliminate some piece of information possibly inferred from the preceding segment. Very similarly, the classical prose of Herodotus, Plato and Xenophon shows analogous usages of ἀτάρ, namely, as a boundary between larger portions of discourse with or without thematic discontinuity, or as a marker of denial of expectation between acts and moves.

The discourse structure of free indirect discourse reports

We investigate the discourse structure of Free Indirect Discourse passages in narratives. We argue that Free Indirect Discourse reports consist of two separate propositional discourse units: an (explicit or implicit) frame segment and a reported content. These segments are connected at the level of discourse structure by a non-veridical, subordinating discourse relation of Attribution, familiar from recent SDRT analyses of indirect discourse constructions in natural conversation (Hunter, 2016). We conducted an experiment to detect the covert presence of a subordinating frame segment based on its effects on pronoun resolution. We compared (unframed) Free Indirect Discourse with overtly framed Indirect Discourse and a non-reportative segment. We found that the first two indeed pattern alike in terms of pronoun resolution, which we take as evidence against the pragmatic context split approach of Schlenker (2004) and Eckardt (2014), and in favor of our discourse structural Attribution analysis.

A Case Study on the Pattern of Classroom Discourse in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

Based on the IRF (initiation, response, and feedback) classroom discourse structure model proposed by Sinclair and Coulthard, this research analyzes and studies the actual corpus of Chinese classroom teaching in Thailand, focusing on the structural model of teacher-student communication discourse, mainly from two aspects of teachers’ feedback. On the one hand, it investigates whether IRF is fully applicable to Chinese classroom teaching and whether there are special situations to it. On the other hand, it attempts to summarize the discourse structure model of Chinese classroom teaching and explores the application of the research results in helping Chinese teachers improve their teaching quality in hope that constructive suggestions can be proposed for teaching Chinese as a foreign language.

A corpus-based analysis of referentiality in Mapudungun

This report presents the methodological guidelines as well as some partial results of the study of referentiality in Mapudungun, a language isolate spoken in Chile and Argentina with different degrees of vitality. Reference in discourse encompasses two basic operations: the individuation of the referents and their anchorage in the discourse. Our research is part of a wider project which seeks to identify the structural resources used by the languages in referential operations. We investigate a set of structural and semantic parameters of referential expressions as they occur in a corpus of Mapudungun texts belonging to different genres. Some of the findings may represent general patterns of reference in natural texts, while others may be representative of specific Mapudungun genres. At a methodological level, our research shows that it is possible to substantiate hypotheses on reference and on discourse structure related to reference by hard figures, to characterize text genres by measurable semantic and structural properties, and to discover new phenomena which demand an explanation.