Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning


Edited by

Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya

and María de la O Hernández López

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning, Edited by Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya

and María de la O Hernández López

This book first published 2009

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2009 by Reyes Gómez Morón, Manuel Padilla Cruz, Lucía Fernández Amaya and María de la O Hernández López and contributors

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-0972-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0972-6

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations ................................................................................... viii List of Figures............................................................................................. ix List of Tables............................................................................................... x Introduction ............................................................................................... xii The Editors Chapter One................................................................................................. 1 Social Cognition and Second Language Learning Victoria Escandell-Vidal Part I: Cognitive Issues on L2 Teaching Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 42 Cross-Cultural Differences in Conceptualization and their Application in L2 Instruction Alberto Hijazo-Gascón Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 60 Immigration and Conceptual Metaphors: A Critical Approach to Ideological Representation María D. López Maestre Chapter Four.............................................................................................. 87 Understanding and Overcoming Pragmatic Failure when Interpreting Phatic Utterances Manuel Padilla Cruz Part II: Teaching Languages across Cultures Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 110 The Acquisition of Pragmatic Competence from a Strategic Perspective: Apology, A Case in Point Abdelhadi Bellachhab

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Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 128 Learning how to Promise: A Didactic Approach to the Teaching of Speech Acts Carmen Maíz Arévalo Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 141 The Interlanguage of Complaints by Catalan Learners of English María Sabaté i Dalmau Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 165 Learner Strategies in L2 Pragmatics: The Case of Spanish Compliment Responses Bryant Smith Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 181 Modality is more than Modal Verbs: A Pragmatic Approach to the Teaching of Adverbial Modality Carmen Maíz Arévalo and Jorge Arús Hita Part III: Intercultural Aspects of Communication Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 198 Intercultural Pragmatics in Academic Curriculum – A Hard Nut to Crack? Beata Karpi!ska-Musia" Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 221 Stereotypes of Communicative Styles: Japanese Indirectness, Ambiguity and Vagueness Barbara Pizziconi Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 255 On Intercultural Disagreement: Interaction and Inertia Albin Wagener Part IV: Teaching Languages for Academic and Specific Purposes Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 280 Pragmatic Markers in Academic Discourse: The Cases of well and the Spanish Counterparts bien and bueno Begoña Bellés-Fortuño and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez


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Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 305 Between the Academy and the Front Page: The Double Discourses of Political Communications Research Ruth Breeze Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 321 Pragmatics and ESP Teaching: Politeness in English-Spanish Business Correspondence Mª Sol Velasco Sacristán Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 337 Advances in Intercultural Communication Research and Training based on Computer Simulation of Real Business Settings Victoria Guillén-Nieto, Pedro Pernías-Peco, Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Judith Williams-Jellyman Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 362 The Anecdote as Humorous Narrative: Structural and Socio-cultural Features of Anecdotes written by Native and Non-native Writers of English Laura Hidalgo Downing Part V: Other Methodological Issues on Pragmatics Teaching Chapter Eighteen ..................................................................................... 388 Is it possible to Formalize Pragmatics? Implications for Computer Assisted Language Learning Gemma Bel-Enguix and M. Dolores Jiménez-López Chapter Nineteen ..................................................................................... 408 Implications of Dual-process Theories to Working Memory Capacity and L2 Speech Production and Acquisition Kyria Finardi Chapter Twenty ....................................................................................... 427 The Transmission Model of Aducation: A Cognitive Approach Graciela Nuez Placeres, María Clara Petersen and Juani Guerra Contributors............................................................................................. 445 Editors ..................................................................................................... 450 Index........................................................................................................ 451

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustration 2-1: Body heat for lust Illustration 2-2: Advertisement with the metaphor DESIRED PERSON IS

AN OBJECT

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1-1: Network of connexions Figure 1-2: Learners’ processing Figure 2-1: Basic components of communicative competence Figure 5-1: Representation/reconstruction of the meaning of apology Figure 7-1: Average number of main strategies per situation, in each group Figure 7-2: Average number of main strategies per situation Figure 7-3: Complaint realisation choices per group (%) Figure 11-1: From linguistic signs to values – cooperative frame and

concomitant values Figure 11-2: From linguistic signs to values – competitive frame and

concomitant values Figure 12-1: Diagram of systemic conversations Figure 12-2: Redundancy model Figure 13-1: González’s (2005) proposal of the distribution of markers in

the discourse structure components Figure 13-2: DM classification model (Bellés-Fortuño 2007) Figure 13-3: Pause-filler classification under the operator category (Bellés-

Fortuño 2007) Figure 16-1: Hofstede’s value dimension scores for Spain and UK Figure 16-2: Graphic Adventure Diagram Figure 16-3: Scene Diagram Figure 18-1: Membrane System Figure 20-1: Shannon and Weaver (1949) communication model. Figure 20-2: Container schema Figure 20-3: Domain reduction Figure 20-4: Metaphor and metonymy interaction. Figure 20-5: Metaphor and metonymy interaction Figure 20-6: Transmission model ICM

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2-1: A comparison of English and Spanish metaphors for lust Table 6-1: Linguistic realisation of ‘promises’ at sentence level in Spanish

and English Table 7-1: The complaint speech act set, summarised from Olshtain and

Weinbach (1993: 111) Table 8-1: Frequency of compliment response use by strategy Table 8-2: CR strategies used by level to a teacher Table 8-3: CR strategies used by level to a classmate of the opposite sex Table 8-4: CR strategies used by level to an elderly family friend Table 8-5: CR strategies used by level to a same-sex best friend Table 8-6: Frequency of CR use by strategy and scenario Table 9-1: Uses of ‘certainly’ Table 9-2: Spanish translations of ‘certainly’ Table 9-3: Uses of ‘ciertamente’ in Spanish originals Table 9-4: Types and tokens of ‘ciertamente’ in CREA Table 9-5: Types and tokens of ‘certainly’ in Maíz and Arévalo’s corpus. Table 10-1: Characterization of variables – chosen questions Table 10-2: Relation between subjects and techniques of teaching culture

which are NOT applied Table 12-1: Summary of samples gathered by De Pembroke and Montgomery Table 12-2: Summary of inertia process Table 13-1. Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes)

per LE in the NAC Table 13-2. Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes)

per LE in the SC Table 13-3: ‘well’ pause-filler operator results in the NAC Table 13-4. ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ pause-filler operators results in the SC Table 14-1: Moves used in introductions Table 16-1: Levels of analysis Table 16-2: Value dimensions having an effect on human communication

and social interaction Table 16-3: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on

intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons Table 16-4: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on

intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons


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Table 16-5: Hypothetical correlation of culture-specific values with language-specific behaviour

Table 17-1: Structural elements of a narrative (adapted from Butt et al. 2000)

Table 17-2: Prototypical structure of humorous anecdotes Table 17-3: Recursive pattern of humorous anecdotes Table 17-4: Distribution of preferred patterns in anecdotes Table 17-5: Choice of specific sections in the anecdotes Table 17-6: Distribution of the evaluation in the anecdotes Table 17-7: Position of the punchline line in the anecdotes Table 17-8: Number of punchlines/jabl ines in the anecdotes Table 17-9: Type of event in the anecdotes Table 17-10: Butt of the humours anecdote Table 17-11: Kind of humour in the anecdotes

INTRODUCTION

INCORPORATING PRAGMATICS TO FOREIGN/SECOND LANGUAGE TEACHING1

REYES GÓMEZ MORÓN, MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ,

LUCÍA FERNÁNDEZ AMAYA, MARÍA DE LA O HERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ

1. Pragmatics and Foreign/Second Language Teaching

The relationship between Pragmatics and Foreign or Second Language Teaching (F/SLT, henceforth) seems to have been very clear since the origins of both disciplines. One of the major aims of F/SLT undoubtedly is the development of the students’ communicative competence. Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) initially defined this competence as consisting of four interrelated sub-competencies: grammatical competence, or mastery of the linguistic code of the language that is being learnt; sociolinguistic competence, or knowing the sociocultural rules of use of the L2; discourse competence, or being able to produce unified written or spoken texts, both in terms of coherence and cohesion, and strategic competence, or commanding certain verbal and non-verbal devices in order to compensate for possible communication breakdowns, insufficient mastery of the L2 or to enhance communication. Later on, Bachman (1990) proposed that language knowledge comprises two main kinds of knowledge that learners of an L2 must internalise:

a) Organisational knowledge, which amounts to knowing how the formal structure of an L2 is controlled so as to produce and/or

1 The authors would like to express their thanks to Dr María Elena Placencia (Birkbeck College, University of London) for her useful comments and revision of this introductory chapter.


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recognise grammatically correct sentences and organise these in texts. It subsumes a grammatical and a textual knowledge, similar to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale’s (1983) grammatical and discourse competences, respectively.

b) Pragmatic knowledge, which involves knowing how words and utterances can be assigned specific meanings in context and function as the vehicles of their users’ intentions. As the previous knowledge, this one is also structured in others: lexical knowledge, which amounts to knowing the meaning of lexical items and using them figuratively; functional knowledge, or knowing how to relate utterances to their speakers’ intentions; and sociolinguistic knowledge, similar to Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale’s (1983) sociolinguistic competence.

Elaborating on these two models, Celce-Murcia et al. (1995) suggested a more encompassing model of communicative competence, which they conceive and represent as a sort of pyramid enclosing a circle and surrounded by another circle. Its inner circle is discourse competence, the three points of the pyramid are sociocultural, linguistic and actional competences, and the outer circle is strategic competence, “[…] an ever-present, potentially usable inventory of skills that allows a strategically competent speaker to negotiate messages and resolve problems or to compensate for deficiencies in any of the other underlying competencies” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 9).

Discourse competence refers to the ability to select and arrange lexical items and syntactic structures in order to achieve well-formed spoken or written texts. For an L2 learner to become competent in terms of discourse, s/he must be able to master such important aspects of language as cohesion (anaphoric/cataphoric reference, ellipsis, conjunction, etc.), deixis (personal, spatial, temporal, etc.), coherence (theme-rheme development, management of old and new information, temporal continuity, etc.), genre structure (the kind of discourse s/he is facing: narrative, interview, report, etc.) and conversational structure (how to take turns, hold/relinquish the floor, interrupt, perform openings, etc.).

Linguistic competence concerns the very foundations of communication, basically the phonological, lexical and morpho-syntactic elements of a language and how they are reflected in writing. For an L2 learner to become linguistically competent, s/he must know the sound inventory of the L2, its spelling rules, the meaning of its lexical items and routines, how to order them so as to form phrases and sentences, the elements that can or cannot collocate with others, etc.

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Actional competence, in turn, corresponds to “[…] matching actional intent with linguistic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force (speech acts and speech acts sets)” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 17). Accordingly, a learner must know how to greet other individuals, make introductions, express/acknowledge gratitude, compliment or congratulate, extend/accept/decline invitations, ask/give information, explain/discuss information, agree/disagree with other individuals, express/find out about his feelings or those of other interlocutors, suggest, request, give orders, persuade, encourage/discourage, complain, criticise, or blame among many other language functions but, more importantly, how such functions are performed by means of specific speech acts and the conversational sequences or moves of those speech acts.

Sociocultural competence alludes to the ability to produce utterances that are appropriate to the sociocultural context in which communication takes place, i.e. to the social contextual factors such as participants’ age, gender, power or distance; stylistic factors such as politeness conventions and strategies, degrees of formality or field-specific registers; cultural factors such as awareness of dialect or regional differences in the target language, differences and similarities in terms of usage of communicative strategies between the L1 and the L2, social and institutional structure of the target culture, etc.

Finally, strategic competence is “[…] knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them” (Celce-Murcia et al. 1995: 26). This overarching competence is formed by avoidance or reduction strategies, such as topic avoidance and message abandonment; achievement or compensatory strategies, such as circumlocution, approximation, restructuring of messages or literal translation from L1, among others; stalling or time-gaining strategies, such as the use of fillers, gambits or hesitation devices; self-monitoring strategies, such as self-initiated repair or self-rephrasing, and interactional strategies, such as appeals for help when the non-native speaker (NNS, henceforth) does not know a word, meaning negotiation strategies (repetition requests, clarification requests, etc.) or comprehension checks.

As the study of meaning in context, how individuals use language depending on specific psycho-sociological factors (power, distance, imposition, affect, etc.) and how they understand language and come to a particular interpretation out of the (many) competing ones that utterances may have (e.g. Leech 1983; Levinson 1983; Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Mey 1993; Thomas 1995), Pragmatics has indeed had, and still has, many implications for the development of learners’ communicative


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competence. As can be seen from the various components that the three different conceptions of communicative competence include, Pragmatics is indeed central, if not essential, to the development of learners’ communicative competence in their L2. In fact, practitioners in the field have repeatedly underlined the need to sensitise L2 learners to specific aspects of particular speech acts in the target language, such as their routinised nature, the semantico-syntactic formulae frequently used to perform them, their integrant conversational moves and sequences, what motivates their performance or avoidance in specific contexts – i.e. when, where, how and with whom they can perform or avoid them, etc. (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1982, 1983; Thomas 1983, 1984; Olshtain and Cohen 1990; Harlow 1990; Jaworski 1994; Citron 1995; García 1996; Riley 2006, among many others). They have also underlined the need to be acquainted with the interactive or sociocultural principles underlying language usage in the target culture. In fact, there is a seminal branch of Pragmatics, known as politeness theory, which has examined the different rules or principles governing linguistic behaviour in diverse cultures (e.g. Lakoff 1973, 1977; Leech 1983; Spencer-Oatey 2000, 2008; Spencer-Oatey and Jiang 2003), how such rules or principles are reflected in the selection of a wide range of linguistic strategies aimed at avoiding interactive conflict between interlocutors (e.g. Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and a plethora of politeness phenomena in different languages. Pragmatists working in this area constantly emphasise the need to incorporate the explicit teaching of politeness in course programmes and in the L2 class as a way to contribute to the development of the students’ pragmatic consciousness or metapragmatic abilities (e.g. Sharwood-Smith 1981; Thomas 1983; Blum-Kulka et al. 1989; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Kreuz and Roberts 1993; Meier 1995, 1997; Garcés Conejos 2001a, 2001b; Bou Franch and Garcés Conejos 2003). But not only is the development of learners’ pragmatic consciousness or metapragmatic abilities an urgent need in F/SLT; teachers must also get a thorough and solid training in and knowledge of pragmatics that enables them to address their learners’ needs, lacks, problems and deficiencies when interacting in the L2 (Garcés Conejos 2001b; Bou Franch and Garcés Conejos 2003).

Over the last years, many calls have been made to incorporate pragmatic issues to the teaching and learning of second languages (see Barron 2001; Trosborg 1995; Rose and Kasper 2001; Kasper and Rose 2002; Bardovi-Harlig and Hatford 2005, among many others), as a result of evolving frameworks in cognitive and social pragmatics, on the one hand, and social psychology of language, on the other hand, which reflect the dynamism and complexity of communication in situ. Efficient F/SLT

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must include all those pragmatic factors that affect interaction in order to obtain satisfactory results not only in the classroom but, more importantly, when learners use their L2 in real and authentic contexts. The growing interest in interdisciplinary studies (pragmatics and language instruction) has been intensified since the appearance of Pragmatics in Language Teaching (Rose and Kasper 2001), as it showed that, whatever the linguistic aspect that is at stake, it is clear that there are no concluding results to be applied to the classroom. Likewise, language acquisition studies appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, as far as pragmatic aspects are concerned. What is clear, however, is that cultural and contextual aspects of language cannot be deliberately ignored by the instructor, as defended by Bardovi-Harlig (2001) and Rose (2005): “[…] second language learners who do not receive instruction in pragmatics differ significantly from native speakers (NSs, henceforth) in their pragmatic production and perception in the target language” (Rose 2005: 386).

2. The current volume

This volume stresses the need and importance of incorporating Pragmatics to F/SLT. It gathers twenty chapters resulting from the effort of researchers whose main interests and concerns revolve around areas such as Intercultural Pragmatics, Cognitive Pragmatics, Social Pragmatics, Interlanguage Pragmatics (IP), Languages for Academic or Specific Purposes and F/SLT Teaching. They offer additional evidence of the advantages of dealing with pragmatic issues in the F/SL class or adopting a pragmatic perspective for teaching specific aspects of the F/SL.

The volume is thematically organised in five broad parts, although some of the papers could have perfectly been ascribed to others owing to their multidisciplinary approach. Each of those sections aims at reconciling those aspects that are in the process of being studied and applied to F/SLT, namely, cognitive aspects that may help understand how pragmatics is internalised or influences learners’ L2 comprehension and performance; problems and difficulties that arise when performing specific speech acts or linguistic functions in an L2, their implications for F/SLT and how adopting a pragmatic perspective may contribute to solve them; issues to be taken into account when dealing with intercultural communication in F/SLT; teaching an L2 for specific or academic purposes taking into account pragmatic aspects, and other methodological issues such as the use of new technologies to deal with pragmatic aspects. All these issues show the wide range of factors and topics that must be


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taken into account when teaching and learning pragmatic aspects of second languages.

Mª Victoria Escandell-Vidal opens the volume with the introductory chapter “Social cognition and second language learning”, in which she explains how intercultural pragmatics focuses on the diversity of conversational styles in different cultures and the consequences of such diversity in situations where members of various cultural groups interact. According to the author, the privileged data in this area usually come from the analysis of fragments of actual conversations (business communication, classroom interaction, etc.). The observable communicative behaviour is, however, only the external manifestation of a complex set of internal processes. Her aim is to add a cognitive dimension to the overall picture. The recent development of Social Cognition as a multidisciplinary research field –a field in which Neuroscience, Psychology, Sociology and Linguistics explore the cognitive bases of social interaction– offers a new perspective for a proper understanding of both the unity and the diversity in social behaviour. After presenting some of the major findings of social cognition, Escandell-Vidal examines their implications for intercultural pragmatics, and their contribution to some controversial issues, such as the debate about learnability.

2.1. Part I

After that introductory chapter, the reader will find the first part, entitled “Cognitive Issues on L2 Teaching”. It contains three chapters that adopt a cognitive perspective and therefore focus on the need to consider cognitive aspects of communication in F/SLT. The first two chapters are connected because they deal with a topic such as metaphor, which has recently awoken the interest of cognitive linguists.

Chapter two, “Cross-cultural differences in conceptualisation and their application in L2 instruction”, by Alberto Hijazo Gazcón, is a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic study of the concept of ‘sexual desire’ based on Csábi’s (1998) analysis of English ‘lust’. The cognitive theory of metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Barcelona 2002; Cuenca and Hilferty 1999; Kövecses 2000a, 2000b) considers that metaphors are conceptualising mechanisms that help to understand complex concepts through simple ones, by mapping a source domain into a target domain through different correspondences. Metaphors are not mere ornamental devices, but express key concepts or evaluations, and are a stable part of our category system (Boers and Lindstromberg 2006). In fact, a field such as that of human feelings and emotions is mainly expressed by metaphors

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(Kövecses 2000a, 2000b; Soriano 2004; Barcelona 1992). Although some metaphors seem to be universal, culture variation plays an important role in conceptualising abstract concepts and creating extensive meanings. For that reason, the study of metaphors is an important issue to cross-cultural studies, the author claims. Furthermore, metaphoric intelligence seems to contribute to the development of communicative strategies such as word coinage and paraphrase, so learners awareness of differences in conceptualization could also imply an improvement in their strategic, and hence, communicative competence (Littlemore 2001, 2004). Since conceptual metaphors often have an important cultural background, if L2 students do not have access to that shared cultural knowledge and expectations, they will probably misinterpret their meaning. In the first part of the paper, the author presents a detailed description of ‘sexual desire’ in Spanish. Following Csábi’s (1998) methodology, he draws the metaphors forming his corpus from Spanish romantic novels. Then, he offers a contrastive comparison between English and Spanish lust metaphors, which highlights the differences in its conceptualization and frequency. In the second part of the paper, Hijazo Gazcón examines how the results of his study can be applied to different fields such as Translation, Second Language Acquisition and teaching/learning pragmatic and sociocultural skills. He shows that the study of metaphors can help to understand extensive meanings in other languages and develop strategic skills in communication.

In the third chapter, “Immigration and conceptual metaphors. A critical approach to ideological representation”, María Dolores López Maestre explores some of the conceptual metaphors resorted to by a group of University students in extended essays on the topic of immigration. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the author examines conceptual metaphors from a critical point of view, using analytical procedures from Critical Discourse Analysis, Cognitive Linguistics and Corpus Linguistics. Her aim is to explore not only the conceptualisation of the phenomenon of immigration in the discourse of students, but also to unveil the ideology and socio-cultural values conveyed by their choice of analogical mappings and corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions. Since the connection between metaphors and ideology is an area particularly fruitful to be explored, López Maestre hopes to show with her paper how studies on intercultural communication and immigration can benefit from a fusion of methods from critical discourse analysis and the so called ‘cognitive turn’, so prominent in the linguistic panorama recently. She firstly deals with methodological questions related to the sample studied, explains how the material was collected and offers information about the informants


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who participated in her project. After examining aspects of the theoretical framework, the author also shows the different stages in the design of her research project and provides a list of the candidate metaphors she considered for investigation. From them, she selects and concentrates on two of the most prominent conceptual metaphors that appear in the discourse of her informants, ‘Immigration is war/fight/conflict’ and ‘Spain is a container’, for these two conceptualisations often portray a discriminatory and negative view of immigration. Finally, the author reflects on the ideological power of metaphors to represent experience and the need to develop a critical attitude to the metaphors people use, especially at University. The author argues that, since Language and Literature departments play a crucial role in the development of a linguistic awareness with regard to intercultural issues, teachers should help students become aware of the importance of using a stylistically appropriate language that is respectful to the multicultural experience, and train them to avoid racism, xenophobia and other discriminatory practices.

Finally, the fourth chapter addresses one of the problems when using and understanding an L2: pragmatic failure. Focusing on the hearer and understanding, and assuming that the ‘phaticity’ of an utterance depends on the communicative circumstances in which it is produced and is therefore negotiated by participants, Manuel Padilla Cruz argues that many utterances intended as phatic can be misunderstood by non-native (NN, henceforth) hearers. This may originate pragmatic failures which can negatively affect communication. “Understanding and overcoming pragmatic failure when interpreting phatic utterances” suggests centring on hearers’ interpretive strategies as a preventive way to avoid undesired communicative misunderstandings in intercultural communication between NNSs alone or NNSs and NSs. After briefly reviewing some of the most relevant contributions addressing pragmatic failure, he centres on phatic utterances and summarises some of the extant approaches to this sort of utterances ranging from Malinowski’s (1923) work on phatic communion to Žegarac (1998) and Žegarac and Clark’s (1999) relevance-theoretic approach to phatic communication. In that revision, the author highlights the importance and risks of phatic utterances for communication. Then, adopting a relevance-theoretic approach to communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995), he moves on to explain why and how hearers may recover unintended non-phatic interpretations from utterances whose speakers intended as phatic or, the other way around, why and how they may recover phatic interpretations from utterances whose speakers intended as non-phatic. He argues that what Sperber (1994) calls naïve and optimistic hearers may recover those wrong

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interpretations if, as a result of the expectations of relevance that utterances generate, they believe that their interlocutors are competent and benevolent and stop their processing when obtaining interpretations that appear optimally relevant to them but are not the ones that their interlocutors intended. Next, focusing on communication between NNSs or NNSs and NSs, he proposes that the cognitive strategy that Sperber (1994) labels cautious optimism can help them avoid misunderstandings when interpreting phatic and non-phatic utterances. Such strategy consists of a competent attribution of intentions and is called for when speakers are not competent in their L2. It leads hearers to reject the interpretation of an utterance that accidentally achieves an optimal level of relevance and is not the intended one and look for another that is indeed the intended one. The author thus illustrates that cautious optimism can help NN hearers overcome cases of both accidental relevance and accidental irrelevance when processing specific utterances and suggests to teach learners to become cautious and optimistic hearers.

2.2. Part II

Classroom interaction offers teachers interesting and revealing data to be used as a starting point in order to develop learners’ pragmatic competence, teach an L2’s pragmatic principles or the way in which specific speech acts are performed in the L2. The second part of the book, “Teaching Languages across Cultures”, includes five chapters that tackle learners’ performance in specific speech acts or linguistic functions, examining how they acquire pragmatic principles and exploring the factors influencing their performance in different L2s.

The first chapter of this section, “The acquisition of pragmatic competence from a strategic perspective: apology, a case in point”, by Abdelhadi Bellachhab, presents a study which draws particularly on two convergent approaches concerned with the development of pragmatic competence from a strategic perspective. The first approach assumes that communication is fundamentally strategic, as manifested through speech act realization and communication in general. The second approach draws inspiration from the evaluation criterion proposed by Galatanu (2007) to determine pragmatic competence. According to that criterion, the evaluation of pragmatic competence can be measured by the fluent (and relevant) production of discursive sequences according not only to the context of communication but also to the argumentative protocol of lexical meanings (Galatanu 2007). Bellachhab’s aim is to investigate the links which might exist, on the one hand, between strategic competence –


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manifested through communication strategies (Canale and Swain 1980; Bachman 1990) – and the development of pragmatic competence. On the other hand, the author tries to establish a link between the discursive construction at the level of argumentative associations produced by learners of French as a Foreign Language (FFL) and its discursive deployment/actualisation in verbal interactions. In order to explore those links, a cross-sectional research has been made to study the speech act of apology in interactions of advanced Moroccan FFL learners.

In “Learning how to promise: a didactic approach to the teaching of speech acts”, Carmen Maíz Arévalo focuses on the analysis of promises both from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective, while also looking at concrete examples from different English textbooks (levels A2 and B1). The Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (2001) pictures learning a foreign language as a combination of linguistic, social and pragmatic competence. Within this framework, communication is regarded as the ability to use the correct linguistic structures but also in the appropriate contexts. Thus, under the heading of ’everyday English’ most English textbooks teach learners how to perform different functions such as complaining, apologising, refusing and so on, even from the most elementary levels. Promises, however, have been slightly neglected despite the fact that, in English, they play a significant role in macro-speech acts such as apologies and refusals. Linguistically, this chapter analyses two hundred examples from the Corpus de Referencia del Español actual (CREA) and the Bristish National Corpus (BNC) at sentence level in order to contrast the main realisations of this speech act both in English and Spanish and the possible linguistic transfers Spanish students might make. Pragmatically, it analyses the main uses of promises –both as macro and micro speech acts– in both languages to conclude that they perform a very different function in both cultures. Thus, whereas in Spanish promises usually appear as major speech acts, in English they are also prone to form part –as micro speech acts– of acts such as apologies and refusals. In these cases, they function as face repairing devices, since the addressee’s face has been threatened and damaged either by the refusal or by the speaker’s previous action, hence the need for apologising. On the other hand, it can be observed that in Spanish –on the whole a more positive-politeness culture– apologies and refusals do not necessarily involve promising. These differences in use might make Spanish students appear rude to NSs even though they do not intend to do so, causing a significant pragmatic failure.

The next chapter is “The interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English”, by María Sabaté i Dalmau. IP is gaining a position of

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its own due to three major factors: growing awareness of multilingual societies, migration movement processes and globalisation processes. Many of the studies on complaints stem from a willingness to demonstrate that linguistic differences between people sharing different politeness systems can lead to intercultural misunderstanding. Complaints require a high level of pragmatic competence in any language, both for NSs and NNSs, because they have to do with sorting out the norms of behaviour that have to be shared daily within society, family, friends, or multilingual workers. Given their importance in everyday communication, it is crucial that L2 speakers master this speech act in order to avoid the types of stereotyping that have been highlighted in many studies on interlanguage (IL) complaints. The author analyses the IL of complaints by Catalan learners of English with two main objectives in mind. On the one hand, she attempts to highlight the importance of understanding the NN production of IL complaints in intercultural communication in depth in order to avoid the kinds of stereotyping outlined above, and, more generally, miscommunication or misunderstanding. On the other hand, she also provides detailed descriptions of the difficult aspects of acquisition, development, and mastering of this specific speech act by three groups of Catalan learners of English, which can be understood as pedagogical tools that can hopefully have some practical applications for the teaching of the English complaint system.

Bryant Smith’s chapter, “Learner strategies in L2 pragmatics: the case of Spanish compliment responses” deals with the effect of language transfer that the first language has while learners are attempting to acquire the pragmatic and politeness principles that are central to the target language and culture. One speech act that is particularly of interest to researchers is compliment responses because they require a great deal of pragmatic insight by the speaker and therefore are often rich with data. Smith attempts to bring together the research that has been done on this speech act and clarify it using data from American learners of Spanish in a FL classroom at the university level. Although collecting data from learners is not a new concept, this cross-sectional study of learners at four (beginner, beginner-intermediate, intermediate, advanced) stages of learning will help to fill a void in existing research on the role of language transfer in pragmatic acquisition, as well as the correlation between grammatical competence and pragmatic competence. Results from a compliment response survey administered to American native English-speaking learners of Spanish at LSU from varying levels is analysed and compared to control data from native English and Spanish speakers. This research illustrates that in the second language classroom, pragmatic


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accuracy in the L2 often does not simply emerge with grammatical instruction. Instead, Smith’s data show that explicit instruction might be a better tool for pragmatic accuracy in compliment responses. His results have pedagogical implications, since pragmatic competence largely remains an overlooked aspect of second language acquisition in the language classroom. This study also attempts to clarify how pragmatic language transfer from the first language affects these speech acts in the L2. Smith’s data show that the native language plays a major role in the pragmatic forms used in the second language and that these new forms often incorrectly mimic compliment responses in the native language.

“Modality is more than modal verbs: a pragmatic approach to the teaching of adverbial modality”, by Carmen Maíz Arévalo and Jorge Arús Hita closes the second part of this volume. This work argues that modality has been one of the most widely studied issues in English linguistics, as shown by the extensive bibliography devoted to the topic and exemplified by already classical studies such as those published by Coates (1983), Perkins (1983), Palmer (1990), Westney (1995) and Bybee and Fleischman (1995), or more recent ones such as those by Papafragou (2000), Facchinetti et al. (2003), Facchinetti and Palmer (2004) and Marín Arrese (2004), among others. It has long been acknowledged that mastering a foreign language is a combination of competences, as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference (2001: 108). For the realisation of communicative intentions, users/learners need a variety of competencies: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. In this chapter, the authors deal with those three competencies assuming that the correct understanding and use of the modal adverb ‘certainly’ involves mastering the three of them. Finally, Maíz Arévalo and Arús Hita also aim at applying the results of the analysis to two core subjects that integrate the syllabus of English Studies: Translation and Contrastive Linguistics. In both cases, their research might help students observe the differences between the expression of modality in Spanish and English and how these differences can be overcome when, for instance, translating a text from one language into the other.

2.3. Part III

“Intercultural Aspects of Communication” is the title of the third part of this volume. It comprises three chapters that focus on NNSs’ use of L2 with other NNSs or NSs, centring on miscommunication. Interactional data obtained when people from different cultures communicate through a lingua franca are used to examine how pragmatic principles surface. It is

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believed that, since English is considered to be a lingua franca, there is no real model to follow in terms of cultural aspects (Alptekin 2002). Nonetheless, classroom studies unveil the existence of an inappropriate pragmatic transfer when learning an L2 (Crandall and Basturkmen 2004). That means that students are not aware of such aspects of communication, unless they are explicitly taught. That is why studies addressing pragmatic issues in language learning and teaching try to cover those weaknesses in teaching, as well as in the creation of new materials. As Crandall and Basturkmen state, “[…] the conventional approach to teaching speech acts in most currently EAP [English for Academic Purposes] speaking textbooks is inadequate. The language input in the textbooks tends to consist of lists of ‘useful expressions’. The textbooks seem to wrongly assume that all they need is to be given the phrases to do so” (2004: 44). It is not only lists of useful expressions that must be revised, but also new approaches to teaching that include emergent technologies and devise context-based approaches where cognitive, social, cultural and psychological aspects are integrated, so that the language used when teaching may be closer to reality than it is in traditional teaching.

Beata Karpi!ska-Musia" opens this part with “Intercultural pragmatics in academic curricula– a hard nut to crack?”. The author explains how global reality and globalist discourse affect almost all human spheres of private, social and professional lives nowadays. In its theoretical section, this chapter tries to take a comprehensive look at some ways in which globalization has affected human life, with special focus on educational demands and expectations directed at FL teachers. Language teachers are mediators among numerous cultural realities represented by their students, being essential to become an ‘intercultural speaker’. In order to achieve this goal, teachers need to undergo a psychological shift into the direction of an open and flexible observer who is sensitive to intricacies of human interaction, able to decode the pragmatic implications made cross-culturally and ready to modify own attitudes in the process of ‘life-long learning’. Building such a profile of a foreign language teacher is a demanding task, requiring multiple competencies. Apart from communicative and linguistic competence, a teacher needs to gain an intercultural pragmatic competence. The second part of the article consists of a description of a research carried out among students and teachers of a Foreign Language Teacher Training Department at the University of Gdansk (Poland). Both target groups were asked to specify their opinions concerning the contents, meaning, position and importance ascribed to training intercultural pragmatic competence at an academic level. The distributed questionnaires tested four variables concerning the definition of


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intercultural awareness and competence, self-evaluation as to being inter-culturally sensitive, university as an institutional background for training this ability and evaluation of methodology, i.e. ways of teaching intercultural pragmatic competence. The outcomes of this research brought about a few interesting implications for further pedagogical practice referring to the subject matter. At the same time, they also showed that working on standardized ways to introduce intercultural pragmatic competence into academic curriculum is still quite a ‘hard nut to crack’.

In “Stereotypes of communicative styles: Japanese indirectness, ambiguity and vagueness”, Barbara Pizziconi approaches a topic of central importance to intercultural communication: stereotypes. She shows that the stereotype of reserved and evasive Japanese people, whose language naturally fosters ambiguity and an intuitive and indirect style, pervades popular as well as pedagogical discourse. Despite evidence that, depending on the situation, Japanese can be fairly direct, this persistent stereotype often acquires normative status in language and culture instruction. While acknowledging research that disproves the stereotype and notes instances of Japanese directness, this chapter maintains that such widespread perception of indirectness must also be recognized and explained. Quantitative research, based on analyses of the presence or absence of specific linguistic markers, may fail to account for the subjective nature of perceptions of indirectness. The fact that linguistic meanings can be scattered throughout the utterance, and emerge from the interaction of utterances with situational and relational variables, entails that what is perceived as an indirect style may go ‘under the radar’ if examined only at the level of linguistic forms. Moreover, stereotypes typically do not distinguish between descriptive and evaluative facts; statements about the communicative style attributed to the Japanese fail to question the argumentative positioning that evaluative comments invariably entail. The chapter presents various conceptualizations of ‘indirectness’, which characterize it as a solution to some sort of interactional tension. It then describes an ethnographic interview conducted by the author with two NSs of Japanese and, through an analysis of this conversation, the author tries to provide a reasoned interpretation of the mechanisms responsible for the her own perception of indirectness during the face-to-face encounter, characterized in terms of ‘frames’ of interpretation, i.e. participants’ understanding of and expectations about the nature of the activity under way, including its goals and the allowed contributions. Additionally, the discussion uses Jackendoff’s (2007) composite notion of social values to show how an individual’s (verbal) behaviour can be taken to signal a number of

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different types of the values s/he entertains: affective, normative, utilitarian values etc. This can account for similarities as well as differences to the value systems of other individuals within the same group or culture, and permits to avoid essentializing and stereotyping statements, in and outside the language classroom.

Albin Wagener closes this part with “On intercultural disagreement: interaction and inertia”. The author states that intercultural interactions often trigger disagreement, mainly based on misunderstandings regarding the interactants’ cultural, social and individual schemes. Every individual involved in interaction implicates her/his own cultural codes, leading to a possible confrontation. However, instead of trying to redefine a new way of interacting, speakers often might repeat their own schemes over and over again, in order to verify their validity and to re-create a well-known environment, while the situation may place them in a position of utter discomfort. According to the author, if we analyze the situation from a systemic perspective, we may find out that this reproduction occurs because individuals (who might be considered as systems of their own) try to maintain their sphere of knowledge and comfort inside the ongoing interaction. This attitude might obey to pragmatic and systemic principles; nevertheless, it prevents the disagreement from being resolved and adds a phenomenon of inertia to the discordant interaction. While speakers try to resolve this situation of discomfort by maintaining their own cultural codes, the possibility of a pragmatic hindsight may seem to appear as an unlikely option for disagreement resolution. In order to verify these theoretical proposals, Wagener introduces a case study reported by Emmanuelle de Pembroke et Montgomery (1996), who spent time analysing the cultural differences and difficulties experienced by American and Japanese immigrants living in Paris. This example features several disagreements reported by a Japanese man dealing with French co-workers. While the Japanese man may find it difficult to stand back from a daily situation of discomfort, his French co-workers are also experiencing the same situation of discomfort, though from a different point of view. However, every communicational sign or act produced in that intercultural interaction may set a global inertia leading to a possible amplification of conflict, due to an ongoing repetition of schemes. According to Wagener, in a situation where every speaker needs to be reassured, that solution (which implies insistent cultural markings) not only amplifies the feeling of discomfort, but may also lead to a situation where conflict might emerge as the only possible resolution, for an interactional system which may be unable to renew itself.


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2.4. Part IV

The fourth part of this volume is entitled “Teaching Languages for Academic and Specific Purposes”. It gathers five chapters. Languages for Academic/Specific Purposes is an area of study within the larger area of Applied Linguistics research which overlaps with other fields of linguistic analysis. This is the case of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) and English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and Pragmatics. From the early 1960’s, ESP has grown to become one of the most prominent areas of EFL teaching today (Dudley-Evans 1998). Emerging out of Halliday et al. (1964) work 50 years ago on registers, ESP started life as a branch of English Language Teaching (ELT), promising a stronger descriptive foundation for pedagogic materials. Then Swales (1986, 1988, 1990) and Bathia (1993) called for more attention to the communicative purpose of the communicative event.

Both ESP and EAP examine the way in which members of particular discourse communities use language varieties (genres) to communicate in their pursuit of common professional or work-related goals. Since the late 1980’s, ESP has established itself not only as an important and distinctive branch of ELT, but has also incorporated most of the work on discourse and genre analysis, as well as the results of corpus linguistics. As Hyland (2007) notes, ESP has developed rapidly in the past fifty years to become a major force in ELT and research. At the centre of research in ESP are often considerations about pragmatic effects (Tarone 2005). As Widdowson (1998) points out, the study of ESP is inherently a study in pragmatics, since special purpose genres have their origins in pragmatic principles of communication.

In the first chapter of this part, “Pragmatic markers in academic discourse: the cases of well and the Spanish counterparts bien and bueno”, Begoña Bellés-Fortuño and Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez focus on the study of spoken academic discourse (Crawford 2004; Swales 2004) and, more concretely, the genre of lectures. The authors aim at analysing the use of some linguistic features in lectures such as Pragmatic Markers (henceforth PMs). As lecturers of EAP and NSs of Spanish, the authors have identified some NN lecturers’ needs when lecturing in English as well as some interference from their L1, in this case, Spanish. What they present here is a contrastive analysis between Spanish and English lectures on the use of ‘well’ and its counterparts in Spanish ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ functioning as pragmatic markers (Schiffrin 1987; Portolés 1998; González 2004, 2005) or, as they call them here, operators (Bellés-Fortuño, 2007). ‘Well’, ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’ in spoken academic discourse are mostly used as pragmatic markers of the inferential component,

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facilitators or pause-fillers within the framing relational function of speaker-hearer and/or speaker/speech. To carry out the study, Bellés- Fortuño and Fortanet-Gómez have gathered a total amount of 24 lectures from the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences; 12 of these lectures are English lectures taken from the MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic and Spoken English); the Spanish corpus represents the other 12 lectures taken from the MASC (Multimodal Academic and Spoken Corpus) at Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain). Results show that while ‘well’ is one of the most frequently used pragmatic markers in the English lectures, the Spanish corpus reveals two pragmatic markers according to frequency rate and with the same number of instances: ‘bueno’, and ‘bien’. Some of the arising questions are (i) whether ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ can be used as counterparts for ‘well’ in Spanish, and (ii) in which context ‘well’ and ‘bueno’ or ‘bien’ express a similar pragmatic meaning. The authors conclude that the results derived from this analysis can give insights to the way spoken academic discourse at a tertiary level is used; and moreover, they can be of help to Spanish lecturers teaching in English or native lecturers of English wanting to lecture in Spanish.

Within ESP, research article introductions have proved fertile ground for researchers. Surprisingly, little attention has been paid to research paper introductions in the Social Sciences. The chapter by Ruth Breeze, “Between the academy and the front page: the double discourses of political communications research”, considers the case of political communications research. The study explores the discourses of the hybrid discipline of political communication through analysis of the introductions to 50 research articles from this area. The analysis builds on Swales’s (1981) ground-breaking work on the CARS (create a research space) move structure of introductions in empirical disciplines –establishing a territory by claiming centrality or making topic generalizations, establishing a niche by identifying a research gap or raising a question, and occupying the gap or promising to answer the question that has been identified– but develops a deeper understanding of moves 1 and 2 which reveals the existence of rhetorical patterns in which the author may look inward, to the culture of the academic discourse community, or outward, to the real-world issues at stake, or endeavor to keep both within the field of vision. The pattern which emerges indicates that claims to academic importance are obligatory in this discipline, while claims to real-world importance are also highly recommended. Arguably, writers in this area have to negotiate two very different cultures, that of academia and that of media and politics, and the discourses they negotiate reflect their understanding of their role as commentators and their perception of their own position as


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interpreters of cultural phenomena for the academy and for wider audiences. Finally, the author offers conclusions referring to the consequences of her findings for the teaching of academic writing. She recommends teachers to conduct genre and discourse analyses of target text types before advising students as to the rhetorical strategies to adopt.

In “Pragmatics and ESP teaching: politeness in English-Spanish business correspondence”, Mª Sol Velasco Sacristán investigates the genre of business letters and, more specifically, its pragmatic dimension with regard to the notion of politeness. Certainly, the best known of politeness models is Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987), where politeness is defined as redressive action taken to counterbalance the disruptive effect of ‘face-threatening acts’ (FTAs). They depict two types of ‘politeness strategies’ (i.e. ‘negative’ and ‘positive’), which are considered to be universal. Obviously, conventions of politeness vary considerably between language communities, not least in their linguistic form. This can be clearly appreciated in cross-cultural business correspondence. Surprisingly, despite the importance of linguistic politeness in cross-cultural business correspondence, few studies have so far applied politeness theory to its study (Maier 1992; Pilegaard 1989, 1990, 1997; Bargiela-Chiappini 1996; Marcén Bosque 1997, 1999, 2001; Yeung 1997; Hong 1998; Valero Garcés 1999; Saorín Ibarra 2003; Fuertes-Olivera and Nielsen 2008; Velasco Sacristán, 2008). This is by no means a trivial question in terms of pedagogy. In fact, business correspondence handbooks only focus on issues of form ignoring the crucial matter of politeness (Hagge and Kostelnick 1989; Maier 1992; Rodman 2001; Saorín Ibarra 2003; Ancarno 2005). As a result, business letters written by NNSs, even those which are grammatically flawless, may be perceived negatively by their readers because of the inappropriate use of politeness strategies. In view of this situation, and using Marcén Bosque’s (1997) study of the manifestations of politeness in English business letters, the author proposes some tasks and activities to help Spanish learners of Business English acquire mastery over the use of polite expressions in business letters written in English.

In the next chapter, “Advances in intercultural communication research and training based on computer simulation of real business settings”, Victoria Guillén-Nieto, Pedro Pernías-Peco, Chelo Vargas-Sierra and Judith Williams-Jellyman explain that in the information society at the beginning of the 21st century, as companies grow within the global market, business people are faced with the challenge of exchanging information and establishing international business relations with entrepreneurs who speak other languages and come from other cultures. In international business settings people in general communicate in English, which is

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considered to be today’s ‘lingua franca’ of the academic, cultural and professional world. However, intercultural communication means something more than making use of a lingua franca to communicate with other people. A company’s export activities and business relations are quite likely to be put at risk by the most subtle aspects, which are sometimes invisible but deeply rooted in the human nature of the participants in discourse: namely, their particular cultural frames, beliefs, values and, more significantly, the way in which such aspects are made visible at the pragmatic level of language use. Findings from European studies such as ELUCIDATE, a Leonardo Da Vinci programme, revealed that the UK and Spain are the two countries in the EU that show the largest percentage of loss in business turnover due to the above mentioned communicative and cultural barriers. That is why cultural sensitization and communicative competence in English and/or Spanish in international business settings are two fundamental social needs that have attracted the interest of researchers in English and Spanish for Specific Purposes in recent times. Pedagogic innovation is needed as regards the teaching-learning methodology with which cultural awareness should be developed in our multilingual and multicultural Europe. Therefore, according to the authors, computer simulation of real business settings may indeed be a suitable learning tool for academic and professional people in general and business people in particular, who need to use English and/or Spanish as the lingua franca in their daily activities, for it promotes communication in a fully contextualized way. The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the two main areas of the research project COMINTER-SIMULNEG, namely designing a cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spanish and British people, and developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings.

To conclude this part of the volume, readers will find a chapter that approaches writing in a specific genre such as anecdotes. Laura Hidalgo Downing describes in “The anecdote as humorous narrative: structural and socio-cultural features of anecdotes written by native and NN writers of English” some of the relevant features of humorous anecdotes by examining a sample of 17 anecdotes written by Spanish university learners of English and 10 anecdotes written by American students, plus an anecdote written by a lecturer. With regard to the structure, the analysis of the sample reveals that most of the anecdotes can be said to have a prototypical narrative structure with a punchline typically situated in the resolution. Thus, the previous sections (opening set up, orientation, complication) provide the background and development of a problem


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which reaches a crisis point which is then solved in the resolution by defeating previously created expectations. The anecdote may be closed by a coda with an evaluation of the event. Some of the anecdotes, however, had a different structure, which the author has termed ‘recursive’ as it consists of a general introductory section followed by three or more short anecdotes with almost a joke format. It could also be seen that native writers show a preference for framing the structure of the anecdote in clear opening and closing sections which typically carry the evaluation of the event. NN writers include evaluative language throughout the anecdote, typically in the orientation, complication and coda. Regarding socio-cultural aspects of the humorous event, while there are similarities between native and NN anecdotes in the choice of events which have to do with physical exposure (nakedness or being in underwear), there are also differences in some of the remaining categories, as NN writers include nonsense and absurd and attacking a target, while native writers write about unfamiliar experiences and experiences in other cultures. The author finds some indications that there could be differences not only between native and NN anecdotes but also between female and male writers, as there were differences in the preferences for focusing the butt of the humour on self or other and the humorous event was only felt to be embarrassing by some female writers, but not by male writers. According to the author, these findings may provide a useful starting point for the exploration of both narrative structure in native and NN writers of English and a discussion of socio-cultural aspects surrounding the perception and representation of events as humorous.

2.5. Part V

The last section of this volume discusses issues related to the implementation of new technologies that can be applied in F/SLT, implications of theoretical models and new conceptions of the teaching activity. Under the title “Other Methodological Issues on Pragmatics Teaching” readers will find the last three chapters of this volume.

Gemma Bel-Enguix and M. Dolores Jiménez-López propose in “Is it possible to formalize pragmatics? Implications for computer assisted language learning” to use a framework developed in the field of computer science in order to get a formalization of pragmatics: membrane systems. Taking into account the role of computers in our everyday life, it is very important to develop computational linguistic methods and tools that can be used in intelligent computer assisted language learning. Now, in programming computers to interact with humans in natural language, one

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of the major difficulties is the problem of providing the machine with enough knowledge of the world. It is quite hard to give the computer the ability to produce both appropriate utterances and appropriate interpretations of utterances from the communicative point of view. The solution to these problems implies to search for a mechanism able to formalize pragmatics. Membrane Systems can be defined as a powerful generation device based in the behaviour of cellular membranes. Membrane computing can be included in the area of natural computing. Despite its microbiological inspiration, the model is described as a mathematical and formal computational device. Membrane systems provide a powerful framework for formalizing any kind of interaction, both among agents and among agents and the context. Their flexibility and intuitive functioning makes them very suitable for applications, not only to computer science, but also for computing real life events like interaction between societies. For Linguistics, the main advantage of membranes over other generative methods is that membranes can be understood as contexts, providing a suitable framework for the formalization of pragmatics and interaction between different agents or contexts. Those features of membranes make them a suitable framework to deal with pragmatic issues. The last goal of the authors is to provide a formal model of context with the explicitness, formality and efficiency that are required for the computer implementation of pragmatics. They claim that the interplay between methodologies for teaching languages and techniques coming from the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing can help in the hard problem of teaching/learning pragmatics, having important implications in the fields of intercultural pragmatics and language teaching.

Next, in “Implications of dual-process theories for working memory capacity and L2 speech production and acquisition”, Kyria Finardi reviews implications such theories and draws some conclusions for L2 speech production and acquisition. The author starts by explaining that dual-process theories of the mind postulate two distinct cognitive systems: a memory-based system and a rule-based system. Whereas the former learns regularities in a slow, effortless, incremental and automatic fashion, the latter learns novel information and forms episodic records manipulating symbols in a fast and controlled way. A central tenet of these theories is, according to the author, that behaviour is determined by the interplay of automatic and controlled processing. Psycholinguistic evidence shows that language acquisition relies on these two systems to process language, with the memory-based system being used to learn lexicon and the rule-based system to learn grammar (Ullman 2001). Following Skehan (1998), the


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author argues that L2 acquisition may also be understood as the transfer of items from the rule-based system to the memory-based system, and vice-versa. In the case of adult L2 learners, L2 acquisition differs from L1 both quantitatively and qualitatively because of a possible critical period. During L1 acquisition, children go from a stage of lexicalisation to another of syntacticalisation of their linguistic repertoire, before re-lexicalising language again, thus, processing information in the memory-based or rule-based system depending on processing conditions. In L2 learning, however, the movement from lexicalization to syntacticalization and re-lexicalization will not happen unless contrived by language production which forces the L2 learner to process information at a syntactic level. Finardi also points out that in L2 learning meaning has priority over form and, in the context of a limited capacity cognitive system, focus on form will only take place when there are enough attentional resources to process the form. Then, she discusses studies on individual differences in working memory capacity, which view the idea of controlled attention as one of the major contributors to differences in working memory capacity (Barrett et al. 2004); studies on the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 speech production, which have found statistically significant correlations between working memory capacity and different aspects of L2 speech production such as fluency, complexity and accuracy of L2 speech (Fortkmap 2000; Finardi and Prebianca 2006), and some of her previous work (Finardi 2007, 2008), in which she found statistically significant correlations between working memory capacity and the acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech. This leads her to conclude that the studies she reviews in her paper show that skilled performance – in this case, L2 speaking – can be seen as the interplay of controlled and automatic processes which will be required differently during performance and acquisition, depending on working memory capacity, motivation and processing conditions.

In the last chapter, “The transmission model of education: a cognitive approach”, Graciela de la Nuez, Mª Clara Petersen y Juani Guerra deal with notions of cognition as a social activity applied to SLA. Since cognition is not limited to the person’s mind, it must be true that the linguistic activity it produces is essentially collective. The socio-cultural characteristic of cognition demands, for instance, that the educational system trains students to reach comprehension through distributed activities such as reading, questioning and answering. Each of the activities performed in a class section leads to the desired goal of comprehension. Basically, human languages exist only in the form of social activity (Anderson 2005). The authors face the current problem of

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the failure of Spanish university students to communicate orally in ESL in a simple dialogue situation after ten years of obligatory learning English. In their view, this handicap reveals the lack of teaching effectiveness of the Spanish educational system. Such failure means that the main difficulty teachers still face is a conceptual one due to the traditional influence of the dualistic view of mind and body as two different ontological entities. Cognitive science provides valuable and accurate information to expose the cognitive foundations in which second language teaching is performed. The authors intend to reveal that mental models, so deeply entrenched in our cognitive sociocultural system, underlying the practice of education in Gran Canaria (Spain), are still based on the traditional transmission model of education. So they suggest working with a new model of mind from Cognitive Theory which could provide the necessary tools to accomplish an effective teaching system of ESL in Spanish universities. They analyze the traditional model of education with the analytic tools provided by cognitive linguistics and propose how cognition should be understood in the educational field in order to further create new methodologies. To do that, they analyze the conduit metaphor within the traditional model of education which they see as connected with the Spanish folk conception of mind. Then, they identify metonymies within the ’jug and mug’ model in order to map the interaction between metaphors and metonymies found in the traditional transmission model of education. That mapping suggests a new approach to mind as it conceptually roots our real understanding of this model in order to improve educational effectiveness.

In sum, the contents above synthesised illustrate the wide array of theoretical perspectives, research approaches and methodological issues to tackle pragmatic phenomena in F/SLT. Undoubtedly, these will be a stimulating contribution to researchers and scholars working in the fields of Pragmatics and F/SLT, as they suggest novel insights into and integrative perspectives on existing theoretical frameworks, address important problems and challenges that both language learners and teachers may find, and offer new empirical evidence on phenomena already analysed, which can be useful for devising innovative methodological approaches.


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CHAPTER ONE

SOCIAL COGNITION AND SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING

VICTORIA ESCANDELL-VIDAL

1. Introduction

As most teachers do, in the first day of class I ask my students to fill in a form with some basic information about them. Among other things, I ask them about their command of foreign languages, just to see what kind of academic literature they will be able to read. One of those students wrote the following as an answer:

English: I can speak, understand, read, write, tell jokes and get angry. My student was, as you can imagine, a jokester, but nevertheless he hit the bull’s-eye: there is more to the full command of a foreign language than the well-known four abilities, there is crucially the ability to socially interact in an appropriate way.

It is no news that patterns of communicative behaviour can change from language to language and from culture to culture. Different cultural groups have developed different communicative practices, rooted in different views on values, beliefs, attitudes, power relations, etc. Therefore, when faced with interaction in a different language/culture, most of us experience the feeling of not being at ease, and we all can report problems like the following: ! Being unable to understand and interpret other peoples’ thoughts,

feelings and actions ! Having difficulty using or understanding facial expressions, tone of

voice, jokes and sarcasm, common phrases and sayings (tending to understand them literally)

Chapter One 2

! Not understanding some unwritten social rules, such as standing too close to another person, or starting an inappropriate topic of conversation

! Appearing to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as the result of the inability to express feelings, emotions or needs in the expected way

! Appearing to be insensitive as the result of not having recognised how someone else is feeling

Thus, success in intercultural communication crucially depends, among other things, on the ability of the speakers to be aware of such differences and to try to avoid the possible misunderstandings that can arise. An essential task in the learning of a foreign language is, therefore, to know and be able to cope with such cultural differences.

Cross-cultural studies and intercultural pragmatics focus on the diversity of conversational styles in different cultures and the consequences of such diversity in situations where members of various cultural groups interact with each other. The privileged data in this area usually come from the analysis of fragments of actual conversations (business communication, classroom interaction, etc.).

Observable communicative behaviour is, however, only the tip of the iceberg, i.e., the visible and external manifestation of a more complex reality. A full understanding of how social behaviour and social abilities can be taught and learnt requires a capacity to identify the internal parameters that govern social interaction (cultural bases) and the internal capacities (neural bases) that underlie communicative behaviour.

The submerged iceberg is examined by social cognition studies. Social cognition is a new, though already well developed, multidisciplinary research field that builds on several other disciplines, such as neurophysiology, psychology and biology.

Under the label of social cognition there is a wealth of investigation around the cognitive bases of the human capacity to behave adequately in the social milieu: “Social cognition encompasses any cognitive process that involves conspecifics, either at a group level or on a one-to-one basis.” (Blakemore et al. 2004: 216). More specifically,

SC involves the individual’s cognitive relationship to the social corpora (family, friends, institutions, etc.) and the ambient postulates that inform a culture, its technology, and the complex manifold of artefactual and environmental considerations that are transpersonal. There are two inextricably linked aspects to this: (a) the examination of the individual mind’s processes, encoding, and storage of social information; and (b) the examination of how the individual mind is influenced by social interaction. (Marsch and Olof in press)

Social Cognition and Second Language Learning 3

The cultural side of social cognition (i.e., the role of culture in shaping conversational styles) is well known to linguists, and thus intercultural studies have largely benefited from the insights from sociologists and ethnographers1. In contrast, scholars with a linguistic background (including pragmatists and second language teachers) are less familiar with the physical, neurological bases of social cognition; and yet, they provide crucial information about the underpinnings of social behaviour.

The aim of this paper is to add the cognitive dimension to the overall picture. I want to invite you to dive into deep waters and to explore the underside of the submerged iceberg. My aim is to offer a general perspective of the fundamental questions and the main findings in the field of social neuroscience, on the assumption that any consideration about social interaction and second language learning must be based on what current research has revealed about the physical bases of our social ability. My purpose is to identify the issues that are directly relevant to our views on pragmatics and second language learning.

I will begin by presenting a state-of-the-art of social cognition from the point of view of neuroscience (section 2). Next, I will dwell on the development of social abilities in native speakers; this will include a discussion on how culture enters into the picture and relates to the neural underpinnings of human social abilities, how culturally determined skills are acquired and how the processing of social stimuli works (section 3). Before proceeding to the conclusions, I will explore the implications for second language learning: how the learner’s brain manages to deal with the difficulties of learning, what the processing strategies are, and what can be done to facilitate learning (section 4).

2. The neural bases of social cognition

2.1. The story of Phineas Gage

I will begin by introducing Phineas P. Gage (1823-1860), from New Hampshire, who worked as a foreman in the construction of the Rutland & Burlington Railroad in Vermont. His story is one of the most famous in the annals of medicine as the survivor of a horrible accident2.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 See, among many other, Hofstede (2001), Nisbett (2003), Spencer-Oatey (2005, 2007). 2 See Damasio (1994), Damasio et al. (1994), Macmillan (2000), Adolphs (1999, 2006).

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As reported on “The Boston Post” on 14th September 1848, 25-year old Gage was the victim of an explosion that shot a metal rod through his head. The iron bar entered under the left cheek bone and exited through the top of the head, and was later found some 30 yards from the site of the accident. Gage was momentarily stunned, but regained full consciousness within minutes and was able to talk and walk. To everyone’s amazement and against all expectation, he survived.

After some minor problems, by 1st January 1849 Gage was leading an apparently normal life: he could move and talk as before, and his intelligence, memory and learning capacities remained miraculously unaffected. He lived in reasonable physical health for another eleven years.

However, a crucial change was soon noticed by the people close to him. This change was reported by his physician, Dr John M. Harlow:

His contractors, who regarded him as the most efficient and capable foreman in their employ previous to his injury, considered the change in his mind so marked that they could not give him his place again. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinent, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible. In this regard, his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said he was “no longer Gage.” (...)The equilibrium between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities seems to have been destroyed. (Harlow, J.M. (1868): "Recovery from a Passage of an Iron Bar through the Head" Publications of the Massachusetts Medical Society 2: 327-347.)

So Gage, who had previously been considered a diligent, responsible, reliable, polite person, became irreverent, profane, irresponsible and socially inappropriate after the accident.

Gage’s story is doubly significant to the history of medicine: first, as the survivor of a tremendous accident; and second, because he provided Dr. John Harlow the foundation for establishing a direct correlation between a particular type of brain damage and the loss of social abilities. Thus, Gage’s story represents the emergence of modern social neuroscience.

Natural as it might seem today, the conclusion that there may be a direct link between the brain and social behaviour was hard to believe in the mid of 19th century, and Dr. Harlow was never given much credit:


“[…] the intellectual atmosphere of the time made it somewhat more acceptable that there was a neural basis for processes such as movement or even language rather than for moral reasoning and social behaviour.” (Damasio et al. 1994: 22)

In fact, as Adolphs (1999) points out, the change in Gage’s personality remained a mystery until it could be interpreted in the light of similar patients in modern times. Antonio and Hanna Damasio, Ralph Adolphs and their colleagues, who work at the University of Iowa and the Caltech Institute, re-opened Gage’s case and investigated his skull using modern neural imaging techniques (Damasio et al 1994; Damasio 1994). They conclude that the affected brain region was the prefrontal cortex.

This finding is consistent with what these researchers had previously found about people with lesions to the same brain area3: modern patients with this sort of injury have serious difficulties organising and planning future activity, exhibit socially inappropriate behaviour and are characterised by a lack of concern for others, i.e., they are unable to function in society due to a severe “defect in rational decision making and the processing of emotions” (Damasio et al 1994, Damasio 1994).

Like Gage, these patients develop something that’s been dubbed “acquired sociopathy.” They perform normally on IQ tests, and have normal language, memory, and perception, but are unable to guide their behavior with respect to other people. They can’t make decisions that are in their best interests, typically fail to hold a job, and are unable to maintain lasting social relationships. (Adolphs 2006: 15)

At this point, the sense in which this story is relevant for our current purposes should be clear. What neuroscientists have found is, first, that our social behaviour can be explained in neuroanatomic terms –an idea that was difficult to accept not only in the 19th century, but even today, since we still tend to understand ourselves in dualistic terms (i.e., in terms of a dichotomy between body and mind; Damasio 1994); and second, that our social ability is not merely the result of the operation of a general, all-purpose, cognitive device that simply has to learn a given set of social rules, but of a dedicated system specialised in dealing with social information. Any damage to the physical organisation of this system

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 The findings in Damasio et al (1994) have been used and subsequently developed in much research work and further implementations. Wagar and Thagard (2004) have developed a computational model for decision making. The results of Damasio et al. (1994) have been contested by other researches, but the debate concerns neuroanatomic details that are not relevant for my current purpose.

Chapter One 6

correlates with a failure in social interaction, leaving other capacities unaffected. And if this system is lost, its functioning cannot be regularly taken over by other brain areas.

2.2. “The woman who knows no fear” 4

Almost in the same year that they were publishing their results about Gage, Ralph Adolphs and the Damasios were working on a different case, which represents a significant story as well. The patient is known as S.M., a 43-year old woman. She is reported to be a woman “[…] with normal IQ, a high-school education, […] stable and cheerful, with no indication of depression […]. Her visual-perceptual discrimination was normal.” (Adolphs et al. 1994: 669). None of these features seem to be particularly noticeable. However, she has earned a place in the history of medicine as the woman who knows no fear… or at least, who cannot recognise a fearful expression in a face.

When she was 30 and while she was recovering from epilepsy at hospital, her doctors found that she suffered a rare disease (Urbach-Wiethe disease), which caused the accumulation of calcium in a particular region of her brain, namely in her amygdala, an almond-shaped organ that is primarily related to the processing of emotions; as a consequence of the disease, her amygdala was destroyed.

Adolphs and his colleagues asked her permission to carry out a series of experiments and test one of their hypotheses about the role of the amygdale in social cognition. What they found was really amazing: she could not identify negative expressions in a face. She was baffled by any picture showing a fearful expression. She also had problems perceiving other "negative" emotions if expressed in combination with other types of feelings, such as anger and surprise. In contrast, she could identify positive emotions, such as happiness, and she could also recognise familiar faces. The conclusion of this study is the following:

From our results, the amygdala appears necessary both to recognize basic emotion of fear in facial expressions, and to recognize many of the blends of multiple emotions that the human face can signal. The amygdala may be an important component of the neural systems subserving social cognition in part because fine-grained recognitions of the emotion signaled by faces

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 This title heading is borrowed from an article by Jennifer Altman on this topic (New Scientist magazine, 17 December 1994, page 20).


is essential for successful behaviour in a complex social environment. (Adolphs et al 1995: 672)

S.M. and the neuroscientists’ team have been collaborating since then. In 2005 they found that her inability to recognize fearful expressions was due to impairment in the fixation on the relevant features of the faces (Adolphs et al. 2005). Whereas normal people tend to focus on the eyes and the mouth, patients with amygdala lesions tend to fix their attention on the nose instead, a feature of the face which is clearly less relevant to the recognition of emotions.

In 2007 a new experiment was carried out (Spezio et al. 2007) to gain further understanding of the problem. Instead of using photographs of facial expressions, the scientists tested S.M.’s reactions in real life social interaction. Since their working hypothesis was that her impairment caused a failure to fixate informative features of the faces, they used an eye tracker device to record the fixation of her eyes during the interaction. What they found is that her injury did not cause a reduction in “[…] overall gaze to the face during conversations, but instead changed the way gaze was deployed to the face”. “S.M. made nearly no fixations on the eyes during a social interaction […], but spent most of the time looking at the mouth.” (Spezio et al. 2007: 3394, 3996)

The story of S.M. represents a further instance of how social cognitive neuroscience has addressed the question of identifying the neural bases of our social behaviour by investigating more specific and basic aspects. This particular research has shown that other brain areas, such as the amygdala, are relevant for a normal social interaction since they are responsible for the processing of some emotions. Eye contact is a major ingredient in face-to-face interaction, and constitutes a pre-requisite for the recognition of the emotions in facial expressions5.In fact, the expressions shown on our faces are so important to the modulation of the verbally communicated content that emoticons have been created to try to convey basic emotion in written texts.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 The finding that the amygdala plays a major role in social cognition in human interaction is consistent with previous work on primates. As reported in Cacioppo and Bernston (2005), rhesus monkeys with lesions in the amygdala lack the ability for effective social interaction. As a consequence, they are ostracised by their conspecifics and perish without the support of their troop. This is due to the crucial role of the amygdale in the normal perception and production of expressive displays and behaviour. Macaque monkeys with lesions in the amygdale are uninhibited animals.

Chapter One 8

2.3. “Through the mirror”

Consider now a totally different situation. At a clothing store, a man is looking at himself in a mirror while wearing a t-shirt with a tag from the shop. What is he doing? What does he intend to do? What might happen next? All these are questions that any of us can answer without much difficulty. But there is yet another question which does not seem that easy: How do we know all this? How do we know what he is thinking and what he intends to do? Can we actually read someone else’s mind? A decade ago most neuroscientists and psychologists would have explained this ability as the result of a rapid reasoning process, not unlike the kind used, for instance, to solve a logical problem. Nowadays, the answer is a very different one.

Let’s move from the United States to Europe, to Italy. By the same years in which the Iowa and Caltech research team were investigating on Gage and S.M., the researchers of the Neuroscience Department of the University of Parma, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Vittorio Gallese, among others (Gallese 2007; Gallese et al. 1996, 2001, 2004; Rizzolatti et al. 2006) were working on hand and mouth movements with macaque monkeys. They were investigating the brain areas related to movement, particularly the neurons that control movement in goal-directed actions, such as grasping a piece of fruit. Almost by chance, the Parma team found that the very same neurons that activate when an individual is performing an action also fire when the individual sees someone else perform the same action. This means that the motor cells are active not only when making a movement, but also when watching it. The same neurons were immediately sought for, and found, in the human brain as well. Since these neurons in some sense reflect other individual’s actions, they were labelled mirror neurons.

Thus, mirror neurons provide a new answer to the question of how we know what is in someone else’s mind. Our mind-reading capacities come from the activation of motion-related neurons. Thus, when we see a goal-directed action performed by another individual, we do not merely guess what is s/he doing, we do not (explicitly and consciously, or implicitly) reason about her/his intentions, but rather we have “[…] a direct internal experience” of the action itself (Rizzolatti et al. 2006: 56), which explains why we can understand it in such a quick and easy way.

Mirror neurons provide the neurological link between intention and action. This correlation can be found not only for simple actions, but extends to more complex series of events. The effect is that there are specific chains of mirror neurons that appear to encode full templates for specific actions and their goals. Therefore, if an action (for instance,


grasping a cup) can have different goals (to drink from it or to clean it), a different chain will be formed for each one:

Interestingly, we found that most of the neurons we recorded discharged differently during the grasping part of the monkey’s action, depending on its final goal [grasping a piece of fruit to eat it, or to place it in a container]. This evidence illustrated that the motor system is organized in neuronal chains, each of which encodes the specific intention of the act. (Rizzolatti et al. 2006: 59)

In this sense, as can be easily gathered, neural chains are highly relevant to the understanding of social behaviour, including socially determined courses of actions.

Moreover, recent research has shown that mirror neurons play a significant role not only in the interpretation of actions, but also in the understanding of emotions. Thus, the same mirror neurons that fire when experiencing a particular feeling –for instance, pain (Singer and Frith 2005) or disgust (Wicker et al 2003)–, also fire in the brain of those who observe the experiencer of the feeling. Psychologists had always talked about empathy and emotional contagion; now we have a more precise understanding of how empathy and emotional contagion work.

Taken together, such data strongly suggest that humans may comprehend emotions, or at least powerful negative emotions, through a direct mapping mechanism involving parts of the brain that generate visceral motor responses. Such a mirror mechanism for understanding emotions cannot, of course, fully explain all social cognition, but it does provide for the first time a functional neural basis for some of the interpersonal relations on which more complex social behaviors are built. (Rizzolatti et al 2006: 60)

2.4. “Rain Man”

The reader will probably remember the following scene from a famous film:

[A character has stopped in the middle of the street because the sign said DON'T WALK. An angry driver is yelling at him] Motorist: Hey you! Hey dipshit! Move it! You ain't gonna move, I'll move you! Raymond: Have to get to K-Mart. 400 Oak Street. The sign said 'Don't Walk'. Have to get to K-Mart. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/quotes)

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The scene comes from Rain Man (Barry Levinson 1988), an Academy Award winning film. This movie introduced the problem of autism to the general public through the character of Raymond, played by Dustin Hoffman. The conversation between Charlie (Raymond’s brother, played by Tom Cruise) and Dr Bruner can illustrate the folk view on autism:

Charlie: He's not crazy, he's not retarded but he's here. Dr. Bruner: He's an autistic savant. People like him used to be called idiot savants. There's certain deficiencies, certain abilities that impairs him. Charlie: So he's retarded. Dr. Bruner: Autistic. There's certain routines, rituals that he follows. Charlie: Rituals, I like that. Dr. Bruner: The way he eats, sleeps, walks, talks, uses the bathroom. It's all he has to protect himself. Any break from this routine leaves him terrified. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095953/quotes)

Autism6 is a brain development disorder that occurs in differing degrees and comes in a variety of forms, usually known as “autistic spectrum disorders” (ASD), and which are commonly characterised by a triad of impairments (Frith et al. 1991; British National Autistic Society: http://www.nas.org.uk/nas/jsp/polopoly.jsp?d=211):

1. Social communication: People with autism have difficulties with both verbal and non-verbal language. Many have a very literal understanding of language, and think people always mean exactly what they say. They can find it difficult to use or understand:

! facial expressions or tone of voice ! jokes and sarcasm ! common phrases and sayings; an example might be the

phrase It’s cool, which people often say when they think that something is good, but strictly speaking, means that it’s a bit cold.

2. Social interaction: People with autism often have difficulty recognising or understanding other people’s emotions and feelings, and expressing their own, which can make it more difficult for them to fit in socially. They may: ! not understand the unwritten social rules which most of us

pick up without thinking: they may stand too close to another person for example, or start an inappropriate subject of conversation

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 Frith et al (1991), Frith and Happé (1995), Frith (2003).


! appear to be insensitive because they have not recognised how someone else is feeling

! prefer to spend time alone rather than seeking out the company of other people

! not seek comfort from other people ! appear to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as it is not

always easy for them to express feelings, emotions or needs. 3. Social imagination: Social imagination allows us to understand

and predict other people’s behaviour, make sense of abstract ideas, and to imagine situations outside our immediate daily routine. Difficulties with social imagination mean that people with autism find it hard to: ! understand and interpret other peoples thoughts, feelings and

actions ! predict what will happen next, or what could happen next ! understand the concept of danger, for example that running

onto a busy road poses a threat to them ! engage in imaginative play and activities: children with

autism may enjoy some imaginative play but prefer to act out the same scenes each time

! prepare for change and plan for the future ! cope in new or unfamiliar situations.

From the above list, the reader can immediately see ways in which autism is relevant to the understanding of the neural underpinnings of social cognition: autism is an impairment of social cognition with a biological origin; in other words, autism can be defined as a genetic deficit in the ability to predict and explain the behaviour of other humans in terms of their mental states, i.e., a sort of mindblindness, as Baron-Cohen (1995) dubbed it. Autism is to social cognition what Broca’s aphasia is to grammar7.

Interestingly enough, Williams syndrome, which is a genetic disease resulting from the deletion of some genes on chromosome 7, instantiates the inverse pattern of autism: Williams syndrome patients show mental

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!7 Patients with Broca’s aphasia “[…] produce little (or at least labored) speech, which is poorly articulated and telegraphic, involving omission of so-called 'function' or 'closed-class' words (articles, auxiliaries, etc.). Their speech relies heavily on nouns, and (to a far smaller degree) verbs. Their written communication follows this same production-comprehension dissociation, with impaired writing but often less severe disturbance to reading” (Swinney 1998: 31).

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retardation together with hypersociability and strengths in language, music and face recognition; that is, serious impairments in non-social domains together with very unusual social skills and with “[…] an exaggerated interest in other people and remarkable expressiveness and social communicative abilities.” (Adolphs 2003: 176) The dissociation between social and the rest of cognitive abilities is a further argument for the modularity of social cognition8.

All the findings about mirror neurons, the relevance of the amygdala to the processing of faces and emotions (especially, fear and other threatening stimuli), and the role of the frontal lobes in social behaviour have shed new light on autism as an impairment in the ‘social brain’, as Ashwin et al. (2007) call it. In addition, the fact that autism does not necessarily correlate with mental retardation or deficits in other cognitive skills, such as language, reasoning or memory offers an argument for the specificity of social abilities. Thus, taken together, all these facts provide compelling evidence for the autonomy of the systems supporting social cognition.

2.5. The ‘social brain’

2.5.1. A human-specific, universal system

It is time to recapitulate on the data we have discussed so far in the previous sections, and to draw some consequences from it. Since the mid-nineties cognitive neuroscience has developed very fast. Meaningful correlations among certain brain areas and social behaviour have been discovered which provide partial, but very significant, answers to the question of what the neural bases of social cognition are9. The stories of Phineas Gage and S.M., and the discovery of mirror neurons, are representative instances of the kind of issues that cognitive neuroscientists deal with.

The conclusion seems straightforward: what has been identified and described is a universal, human-specific set of biological mechanisms that !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!8 Adolphs (2003), Meyer-Lindenberget al. (2005), Karmiloff-Smith (2007); Bellugi et al. (2007) 9 According to Caccioppo and Bernston (2005: xiii), the main findings are “[…] that the brain determines social behaviour, that there are dissociable systems in the brain for social and non-social processing, […] for face and object processing […], for the perception of biological and non-biological movement, and that the perceptions of biological movement can automatically elicit imitations and empathy”.


determine social behaviour. Our ability to behave in society in an appropriate way does not merely depend on general, all-purpose cognitive capacities; on the contrary, our brain contains neural systems that specialise in processing different kinds of socially relevant information. We humans have biological, innate predispositions for certain abilities10, such as recognizing faces and emotions, following eye gaze, acting out a fictitious situation or identifying the intentions of others; and there are also innate constraints and predispositions that allow infants to learn about specific kinds of recurrent features of the social world quickly and efficiently, as Schaller et al (to appear) point out. None of these skills can be understood as a result of instruction; they are instances of nothing more than the normal development of the normal capacities of all members of our species, just like being able to speak or to stand up and walk on our feet.

2.5.2. A specialised, modular domain

The specificity of these systems also suggests that social cognition should be conceived of as a modular mechanism or, more precisely, as a domain-specific capacity. A domain is a functional or anatomical component dedicated to the processing of a particular class of data. It processes only the sort of information to which it is sensitive: for instance, vision (a well-established modular domain) is sensitive to shape, colour and light patterns only; other simultaneous, but non-complying stimuli (for instance, auditory stimuli) cannot be processed by the visual system. A domain deals with information of a specific kind and format only, which means that it imposes certain conditions on the input. In addition, domains process their data in an automatic, predetermined way. Finally, domain-specificity allows for a further prediction as well. A modular cognitive

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!10 “Six-month-old infants perceive animate action and follow gaze direction, which enables them to build up experiences on the basis of which they predict people’s actions in familiar contexts. By 9 months of age, infants understand that people have goals and persist in behaving until they see that their goal has been reached (avoiding obstacles and persisting past accidents and failures in the process) – being happy when the goal is reached and disappointed if it is not. By 14 months of age, infants begin to understand full-fledged intentional action – including the rudiments of the way people make rational decisions in choosing action plans for accomplishing their goals in particular reality contexts and selectively attending to goal-relevant aspects of the situation. This kind of understanding leads to some powerful forms of cultural learning, especially imitative learning […]” (Tomasello et al. 2005: 680). See also Saxe (2006).

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ability can be lost without any significant loss in other cognitive abilities. In this sense, a domain is a dissociable system. Indeed, this is precisely what we find: social abilities can be lost as the result of an injury or a disease, as illustrated by Gage’s and S.M.’s stories, or as the result of a genetic disorder, as shown by autism.

2.5.3. An adaptive evolution

The emergence of such a specific and complex system for managing social interaction comes as no surprise from an evolutionary perspective. All the species that live in groups have to find a solution for the tension between two opposing factors: on one hand, collaboration among group members can enhance prospects for survival; but, at the same time, other members can be potential competitors as well. As Schaller et al (to appear: 2) point out, our brain evolved

[…] to help our ancestors make functional decisions in an environment that included other people as a prominent feature. Some of those people were relatives; some were strangers. Some were socially dominant; some were meek. Some were potential allies; others were potential enemies. Some were potential mates; others were potential competitors for those mates. Many aspects of human cognition – especially the processes that define the conceptual territory of social cognition – are adapted to the recurrent problems and opportunities posed by these other members of ancestral human populations.

While some species, such as bees, display rigid behaviour, we humans have developed more complex and flexible forms of behaviour. In this sense, social cognition is the response to the “[…] especially challenging demands of a complex social life of constant competition and cooperation with others in the social groups.” (Hermann et al. 2007: 1360). The human solution requires, as Adolphs (2001: 231) states, “[…] the ability to construct representations of the relations between oneself and others, and to use those representations flexibly to guide social behavior.”

3. The development of social abilities

The previous considerations support the view that social cognition is a universal system. However, this universality can be found “[…] primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviours”, as Barkow et al. (1992: 5) put it. Of course, all neuroscientists acknowledge the importance of the cultural context within


which an individual grows up, as the complementary environmental counterpart of the innate cognitive capacity.

3.1. The acquisition of culture

In fact, normal human development depends crucially on both biological and cultural inheritance: social cognition will not mature adequately if it is not deployed in a social milieu. This is known as the Dual Inheritance Theory (Tomasello 1999). In other words, the development of an individual depends on the social and cultural context within which s/he grows.

What we usually call culture is a collection of ways of thinking and behaving that members of a group share as a result of the process of socialisation and that determine their beliefs and behaviour11. It is commonly agreed that individuals acquire the set of norms and values of their culture.

In fact, social cognition allows for an extraordinary degree of variation across cultural groups. As Tomasello (1999: 518) has pointed out, “[…] human cultural traditions and artifacts accumulate modifications over time, whereas this does not seem to be the case for nonhuman primate cultural traditions”. This is indeed a unique feature of human social cognition, a feature that Tomasello et al. (2005: 721) called ‘locality’. “Individual groups of humans develop their own unique ways of symbolizing and doing things – and these can be very different from the ways of other groups, even those living quite nearby.”

Cultural diversity can be explained in terms of different ranking of values in different cultures. Ethnographers and scholars working on intercultural pragmatics have largely examined the relation between cultural features and communicative behaviour, so this is a topic that I will not pursue here.

Becoming a “normal” member of a group requires “learning” to think, believe and act as other members in the group do. But how does this process take place? From the point of view of social neuroscience the relevant problem is how culture interacts with the social neural system; more specifically, how culture gets incorporated into the ‘social brain’.

A frequent answer among anthropologists has been that cultural values and ways of thinking are representations which get communicated and

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11 See Janney and Arndt (1992, 1993), Jackendoff (1992); see also Piller (2007) for a critical view.

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transmitted from individual to individual and from one generation to the next in an epidemiological way:

Consider a social group [...]. Each member of the group has, in his or her head, millions of mental representations, some short-lived, others stored in long-term memory and constituting the individual's ‘knowledge’. Of these mental representations, some — a very small proportion — get communicated repeatedly, and end up being distributed throughout the group, and thus have a mental version in most of its members. When we speak of cultural representations, we have in mind — or should have in mind — such widely distributed, lasting representations. (Sperber 1994: 33).

This account, however, puts too much emphasis on the representational, explicit side of culture. I do not mean to contend the idea that there are indeed cultural representations that are transmitted as such, but rather to suggest that this is not the main way in which most cultural values and routines are internalised. In addition, an approach in terms of epidemiological propagation of representations would entail that learning the values of a different culture is merely a matter of identifying the relevant set of representations and incorporating them into the individual’s mental database without any further effort. However, the difficulties that the learners of a foreign language experience show that things cannot be that simple.

Other philosophers have proposed a different account. Bourdieu (1990: 55), for instance, emphasises the role of practice:

The habitus, a product of history, produces individual and collective practices —more history — in accordance with the schemes engendered by history. It ensures the active presence of past experiences, which, deposited in each organism in the form of schemes of perception, thought and action, tend to guarantee the ‘correctness’ of practices and their constancy over time, more reliably than all formal rules and explicit norms.

This account focuses on the implicit and non-representational side of the acquisition of culture, which may be a desirable move, but the proposal is not clear enough about the actual way in which this sort of implicit learning takes place.

3.2. The formation of mirror neuron chains

The approaches put forward by anthropologists and philosophers to the problem of how cultural values are internalised are speculative hypotheses.


Modern social neuroscience can provide a more convincing explanation with a sound empirical support. This new explanation is based on what has been discovered about mirror neurons. As the reader will remember, mirror neurons activate when an individual sees a goal-directed action performed by another individual; in the observer’s brain the neurons fire that are active when the individual is performing the action her/himself. In complex activities, mirror neurons have been found to form chains that, in some sense, “encode” particular sequences of related actions. A complex activity is, then, stored as a single chain of simpler subevents.

Now, in children, the acquisition of the social patterns of their culture is carried out through a process of implicit learning, by which they internalise the practices of their group. Implicit learning, such as the kind that takes place in family life, is the result of the formation of millions of stable neural chains of mirror neurons. The same procedure extends to all kinds of social behaviour, which ensures the propagation of culture-specific practice. The activation of mirror neurons and the formation of neural chains constitute the biological device that underlies our innate ability to learn and internalise cultural experiences.

A number of properties of the development of social cognition can be immediately related to the underlying neurological process. To begin with, it can account for the fact that social learning is primarily implicit. The process of formation of mirror neurons chains is an innate, automatic response, and requires neither the existence of any explicitly represented event, nor the subject’s awareness or her/his motivation to learn. The fact that social learning is basically a kind of implicit learning does not mean, of course, that explicit reinforcement has no role at all in the transmission of cultural patterns, or that explicitly taught representations should be completely discarded. Indeed, it is obvious that the explicit communication of cultural values has a privileged place in institutional education; however, it should be kept in mind that this sort of socialisation practice is a secondary source for social learning, not an inherent requisite for human social cognition to develop in a normal way.

Second, chain formation provides empirical support for the idea that knowledge is organised in larger units that include sequences of events, participants and relations, in a way that reduces processing effort and allows predictions about the expected course of events. When a link in a neural chain is activated, the whole chain and its intermediate links are

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activated as well, so the internalised outcome is made readily accessible, with no need to access any explicit representation of the whole event12.

Third, it can explain a feature of the acquisition of social abilities, namely that this acquisition process develops in a very fast way. This is so not only “[…] because there are so many ways to acquire it: directly from experience and indirectly from observation or cultural transmission” (Frith and Frith 2006: 39), but rather because we humans have a specific, dedicated system for social cognition that favours the acquisition of socially relevant skills. It has been shown by Mesoudi et al (2006) that information with a social load, such as gossip, is transmitted and remembered in a more accurate way than any kind of factual information. Our cognition is, therefore, biased towards socially related knowledge. The emergence of this system appears as the evolutionary response to the need to attune every individual to the systems of the other members of the group in a relatively short period of time.

Fourth, it can account for the stability of implicit knowledge as well: once acquired, it is very difficult to modify this kind of knowledge, let alone remove it. This is probably so because neural chain formation is not merely a way to store information: it is not just like putting new books on a shelf or saving new files in a computer. Chains of neurons are both the information and its own support. When a chain is formed, the physical organisation of the brain itself changes to some extent13. This feature will prove to be crucial for the understanding of the differences between native and non-native learners.

And last, but not least, it provides an explanation not only for the acquisition of patterns of action, but also for the acquisition of patterns of emotions and of emotion display. As mentioned before, mirror neurons also play a major role in the understanding of emotions, so the previous considerations can be extended to the way in which emotions are displayed and understood. Mirror neurons provide an explanation for some

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!12 This does not mean, of course, that individuals cannot have conscious access to the contents of a script, with a complete representation of its constitutive parts and the relations among them; rather, what it predicts is that representation is not a necessary requisite for the internalisation of a complex activity. 13 This is true for different kinds of learning. Research carried out on London taxi drivers has shown that “part of the hippocampus is larger in taxi drivers than non-taxi drivers and its size is related to the time the person has been driving taxis” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 462). The acquisition of navigational abilities, however, does not come for free: “[…] a different part of the hippocampus was found to be smaller in taxi drivers. So, there might be costs when one part of the brain develops and grows through experience.”


external manifestations of empathy as well. When two persons empathise, they tend to display the same emotions, adopt the same gestures, and behave in a similar way. This sort of behavioural contagion is the result of the attunement in their mirror systems14. Thus, children implicitly learn how to react in different situations, how emotions are manifested, what emotions can be displayed and what should be avoided.

To sum up, chains of mirror neurons are, thus, at the basis of implicit learning, and make it possible to explain how implicit knowledge is acquired and organised, for both actions and emotions.

3.3. The processing of social information

In the previous section, an answer has been offered to the problem of how culture is incorporated into the ‘social brain’. But there is still a relevant question: once an individual has matured in her/his culture, what are the processes that take place in her/his brain when dealing with socially relevant stimuli?

Though neuroscientists have found compelling evidence that the perception of a stimulus with a social load triggers the activation of all the brain areas that are involved in social cognition (orbitofrontal cortex, amygdala, premotor cortex), they cannot provide a detailed answer to this question. They can, however, offer some significant hypotheses.

The ’social brain’ can be conceived of as a postperceptual processing device, which receives visual information and relates it to information from other brain systems (memory, attention, decision making…). It is responsible for linking perceptual representations to behaviour on the basis of the emotional or social value of the stimuli.

According to Adolphs (1999, 2001, 2003) and Frith and Frith (2006), the stimulus is first recognised and evaluated to yield a global representation. Such global representations can be seen as the result of a process of categorisation, i.e., of identifying and labelling the stimulus. The way in which the stimulus is categorised determines the subject’s response to it and her/his subsequent behaviour. Categorisation is an automatic process, one that is far beyond the conscious control of the subject, as is the identification of visual stimuli. This sort of process is called stimulus-driven, or “bottom-up”. For instance, current research has shown the important role of the amygdala in processing stimuli related to danger and threat, as a built-in feature of primate cognition --a feature that

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!14 See Russell et al (2003), Frith and Frith (2006).

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enhances the individual’s prospects for survival by prompting a rapid and automatic reaction.

This does not entail that culture has no bearing on categorisation; on the contrary, both basic instinctive responses and culture-sensitive information come into play. In fact, automatic responses can be modulated by implicitly acquired knowledge. For example, fear seems an instinctive reaction; however, the set of animals that are considered threatening depend heavily on culture, so the responses of their members, though automatic, are the result of a cultural view of danger. This is true even for facial expressions, as Adolphs et al. (1995: 672) have suggested, “Facial expressions can convey both basic emotions whose expression and recognition may be partly innate, as well as subtler emotions whose meaning is partially determined by culture.”

The same goes for social stereotypes. A stereotype represents a quick-and-simple way to categorise people about whom one knows little as individuals; it makes it possible to guide and predict behaviour, even if one can be aware of the fact that stereotypes are too simplistic and very often plainly incorrect. They are not individual constructions, but complex, culturally learnt categories that represent shared conceptualisations and produce automatic reactions: they are a further instance of how our brain tends to privilege efficiency over accuracy.

However, bottom-up processes do not represent the whole story. There is more to social processing than automatic responses, be they instinctive or implicitly learnt. Research on the way we judge people has shown that explicitly acquired knowledge can affect social behaviour in a conscious way as well. Frith and Frith (2006) point out that the perception of out-group members can elicit both positive and negative feelings. For instance, viewing a face from another race unconsciously produces activation of the amygdala as some sort of threatening stimulus; however, there is empirical evidence that people try to suppress this response by activating a conscious process of self-regulation that reanalyses the stimulus and the global categorisation delivered by the automatic systems, and tries to find new assessment of the individual by explicitly including other considerations. This kind of process, which does not depend on the properties of the stimulus, but rather on the knowledge of the subject, is called task-driven or “top-down” process15.

The effect of top–down processes on all our predictions of social behaviour is an example of a general cognitive process that applies to all the information that we process, either from the physical or from the social

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!15 See Semin and Cacioppo (2008).


world. Thus, top–down processes allow us to become aware of what we are doing and in this way allow us to repair and redirect inappropriate but powerful automatic responses. (Frith and Frith 2006: 44)

One of the most salient features of social cognition is the fact that it

responds not only to perceptual, physical properties of stimuli, but also to learnt social judgements with no perceptual motivations. There are a number of categories, such as those related to social roles, which do not necessarily have a direct, visible correlate, but are ultimately a product of the brain itself; however, they have a central function in our behaviour. A young doctor will be approached preferably as a doctor (which is something that you cannot see, but have to know), than as a young individual (which is something you can directly perceive). In such cases, additional information is used to go beyond what can be directly perceived, a crucial step for guiding behaviour in social interaction. In this way, social cognition both creates specific categories and provides the mechanisms for dealing with them, including the need to inhibit automatic responses. This shows the tension between stimulus-driven processing and the sensitivity to culture-created distinctions. To sum up, as Adolphs (2001: 231) puts it,

Social cognition guides both automatic and volitional behavior by participating in a variety of processes that modulate behavioral response: memory, decision-making, attention, motivation and emotion are all prominently recruited when socially relevant stimuli elicit behavior.

Thus, social cognition draws on both biology and culture, and brings into play both automatic and conscious processes. The relationship among these categories is not a simple one, since there is not a direct, one-to-one mapping. The intertwining can be appreciated from several points of view: on the one hand, what is learnt through exposure to a given culture is acquired through a biologically determined set of devices; on the other hand, a significant part of the knowledge we acquire as members of a culture is internalised and yields automatic responses; and finally, conscious thinking can inhibit automatic reactions. This complex network of connexions can be represented as in the following diagram:

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Figure 1-1: Network of connexions

4. Implications for second language learning

Neuroscientists have found brain areas dedicated to the processing of socially relevant data that are to some extent independent from other cognitive abilities; the ‘social brain’ follows specific paths of development and specific processing routes. It is time to explore the implications of such a system for second language learning. As mentioned in the Introduction, the problems in the acquisition of a second language that both teachers and student report are the following (repeated here for convenience): ! Being unable to understand and interpret other peoples thoughts,

feelings and actions ! Having difficulty using or understanding facial expressions, tone of

voice, jokes and sarcasm, common phrases and sayings (tending to understand them literally)

! Not understanding some unwritten social rules, such as standing too close to another person, or starting an inappropriate topic of conversation

! Appearing to behave 'strangely' or inappropriately, as the result of the inability to express feelings, emotions or needs in the expected way

! Appearing to be insensitive as the result of not having recognised how someone else is feeling

The first significant fact is the striking resemblance between this list and that which enumerated impairments in autism. What this reveals in an obvious way is that the difficulties that learners experience are problems with social cognition, as if the whole social brain collapsed when speaking a different language. Why is this so?


4.1. Mirror neurons and second language learning

Mirror neurons proved to be a relevant system for implicit learning, including all sorts of practical and social learning. We should therefore expect that the mirror system could contribute to facilitating the learning of a foreign language and to acquiring its social practices. However, it seems that this prediction is not borne out, as the difficulties experienced by learners show. Rather, what has been commonly assumed is that there is a critical period for language learning, and after that period, the ability to learn decreases significantly. In fact, transfer from the first language into a second language, and from the common social practices of one’s native culture into another culture, indicates that, once established, the values of a language and a culture can hardly be modified16.

Once such assumptions are formed, they remain relatively stable and their influence on social interaction becomes almost automatic. Events that contradict them do not change them, but tend rather to be interpreted as incorrect, ununderstandable, or abnormal. (Janney and Arndt 1992: 31)

Is there any biological explanation for this somewhat unexpected fact? Nowadays, most neuroscientists believe that critical periods are not completely rigid and inflexible; they are not critical, just especially ‘sensitive’, and relate to biological changes in the brain’s ability to be shaped by experiences17. In a developmental study about the adolescent brain, Blakemore and Choudhury (2006) have reported the existence of a number of significant neural changes linked to puberty and adolescence. Their findings strongly suggest that the social system, once initialised with the input data from the individual’s native environment, might lose the capacity for incorporating new data after puberty, so social cognition tends to fossilise. This is not unlike what can be found in the domain of grammar: there is a critical period in the acquisition, so once the individual has acquired a particular grammar, or particular phonological system, s/he cannot build a different one on the same innate basis: “Much like sound categorisation during language acquisition […], experience with executive functions and certain social cognitive skills might be much more difficult to incorporate into brain networks once they are established after puberty.” (Blakemore and Choudhury 2006: 307)

This may come as a rather unexpected fact. There has been common agreement on the specificity of grammar as a modular system, and on the

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!16 See, for example, Kasper (1992), Escandell-Vidal (1996b). 17 Blakemore and Frith (2005).

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particular development of paths and periods for its acquisition18. Social routines have been considered, on the contrary, as external norms, as a set of non-constitutive, conventional routines merely “added” in interaction. The neural specificity of the systems involved in social cognition and their dissociation from other cognitive capacities have shown that the social brain is not very different from the language faculty. A new piece of evidence has thus been found that completes the picture of social cognition and supports its specificity as a neural system.

Now the question is why it should be so: why social cognition should come with an “expiry date”. A tentative answer could be provided along the following lines. The social neural system has to be attuned to the patterns of the group in a relatively short period of time; its mission is to deliver fast, simple and stereotypical responses to familiar situations, without having to calculate every situation anew, which would result in a slow and effortful social processing19. It might well be, then, that evolution has favoured a system that is extraordinarily active during a given period of time only–in which it has to establish the relevant chain connections-,but that cannot keep this high level of activation forever. In addition, as was mentioned before, the internalisation of native culture patterns does not merely fill available gaps on a shelf, but builds the adequate shelf. Brain resources are powerful, but limited, so there is always a cost to any cognitive operation. This can explain why chains of mirror neurons, once created, can hardly be modified at all.

4.2. A different processing strategy

This does not entail, however, that learning after puberty is impossible, or that mirror neurons stop working after that age. In fact, there are many

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!18 DeKeyser (2000). 19 This is, at least, what can be hypothesised in view of the following considerations:

The prefrontal cortex participates in implementing a particular mechanism by which we acquire, represent, and retrieve the values of our actions. This mechanism relies on generating somatic states, or representations of somatic states, that correspond to the anticipated future outcome of decisions. Such ‘somatic markers’ steer the decision-making process toward those outcomes that are advantageous for the individual, on the basis of the individual’s past experience with similar situations. Such a mechanism may be of special importance in the social domain, where the enormous complexity of the decision space typically precludes an exhaustive analysis (Adolphs 2001: 235)


different things we usually learn as adults, such as accountancy, laws, or driving a car. And mirror neurons keep doing their job as facilitators of learning through imitation. A crucial difference, however, can be found between social abilities, on the one hand, and the acquisition of factual knowledge and practical skills, on the other, which crucially do not involve social information.

As for social information, the fact that the storage of new patterns is not completely free and available after a given period does not turn learning into an impossible task. It may still be possible, but through a different strategy, namely, by using the same system that stores factual information. In other words, we can learn the norms of interaction of a different culture, but we can no longer benefit from the quick-and-ready organisation and processing routines of our social systems. Instead, we have to store such norms as (regular) factual information, not as implicit knowledge.

This is, indeed, what we presumably do, as Blakemore and Frith (2005: 462) point out:

We also assume that there is, in addition, an all-purpose ‘mind-machine’ that is not specifically geared to particular stimuli, but can cope with almost anything. This is like a general learning system that simply responds to associations of experience. Again speculatively, we suggest that this general mechanism might take over if a module is faulty. It would make any learning different from normal fast learning, but still feasible.

This would explain why late learning of social norms is “[…] different from the type of learning that occurs naturally during sensitive periods.” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 461). In addition, it will be consistent with DeKeyser’s (2000: 518) findings: “Learners with high verbal ability can use explicit learning mechanisms to bypass the increasingly inefficient implicit mechanisms.” The difficulties for late learning of the social patterns of a different culture are not limited to the inability to internalise new information in an implicit way after a given period; if that was not enough, a further problem arises, namely the fact that the automatic social devices of the learner will still continue using her/his native, internalised cultural values, which can be very different from those of the target language and culture, and which will cause transference and intercultural misunderstandings. To avoid them, the learner will have to set up a secondary self-regulation process in order to inhibit the automatic response whenever it is inadequate to the newly acquired norms. This will require first building an explicit representation of the situation and all socially relevant details, then

Chapter One 26

inhibiting her/his automatic responses and finally replacing them by consciously monitored reactions. This would explain both the persistence of pragmatic transfer (even across various generations of immigrant families, as Kasper, 1992 has reported), and the slow and effortful interaction of non-native speakers.

What is different in learners’ processing is the division of labour between conscious and automatic processes in social interaction: conscious processes take control of the interaction, and top-down and monitoring tasks have a leading role in avoiding the interference of internalised, automatic processes based on the social categories of their first language. This situation can be summarised in the following graph:

Figure 1-2: Learners’ processing

4.3. What can teachers do?

Social cognition can, thus, explain the difficulties that learners of a second language experience. Can it also provide some suggestions for teachers to facilitate learning? Answering this question would require an experienced second language teacher, which unfortunately, do not have. However, some tentative hints can be offered about how to maximise the possibilities of social cognition. 4.3.1. The nature of input

The first consideration has to do with the nature of the input. Most current approaches to second language teaching emphasise that the student has to learn from real life situations: purely structural learning (such as the kind normally used for learning Latin or Ancient Greek) can hardly develop communicative competence. This idea receives further support


from what social neuroscientists have discovered. The mirror system activates with goal-directed actions, so any kind of learning will presumably be enhanced and facilitated if linked to concrete tasks. Goal-directed activities in which language itself is not in focus, but is a means to achieving a superordinate purpose have every chance of producing better results. The methods based on activities with a motor counterpart, such as in the classical ‘total physical response’ method (Asher 1969), could possibly exploit the mirror system in an even deeper way. True, those methods will not adjust the social cognition values overnight, but nevertheless they will foster implicit learning by boosting the associative links between language use and social experience.

Also related to the nature of the input is the role of conscious learning and awareness. The emphasis on implicit learning, practical abilities and communicative methods has pushed the role of the explicit representations to the background, and explicitly taught content has been neglected in some influential methods. However, current approaches to social cognition have shown the significant role of conscious self-regulation and of top-down (task-driven) processing in inhibiting undesired automatic reactions, as a means of attempting to avoid intercultural misunderstandings. In fact, if implicit learning capacities are not available for social cognition after a given period, and if the social patterns of a different culture have to be learnt, explicit representations will have to play a major role. Raising awareness about cultural differences and the social parameters governing them is a necessary step towards social adequacy in a foreign language20. 4.3.2. The learner’s profile

Apart from the nature of the input, the nature of the learner has to be taken into account as well. The development pattern of social cognition as a biological system suggests that there should be significant age differences in the way a new language and its culture are learnt, depending on the activation status of implicit learning mechanisms. The prediction is that children will learn more deeply and adults will learn faster. This is in fact what has been suggested in the literature on the psychology of learning: “Children do better in terms of ultimate attainment because many elements of language are hard to learn explicitly […]; adults learn faster because their capacities for explicit learning let them take shortcuts” (DeKeyser 2003: 335). The prediction is that children will learn more !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!20 Advantages of explicit learning can also be found for grammar, and apparently we are witnessing the birth of a new ‘focus-on-form’ era (DeKeyser, 2007).

Chapter One 28

deeply and adults will learn faster. This is in fact what has been suggested in the literature on the psychology of learning: “[...] full-scale immersion is necessary for children to capitalize on their implicit learning skills, and formal rule teaching is necessary for adolescents and adults to draw on their explicit learning skills.”

The fact that late learning has to resort to explicit representations does not necessarily entail that these should remain conscious forever. In fact, explicitly learned abilities become automatic when repeated. This is what happens, for instance, when learning to drive a car: sequences of movements have to be explicitly learned, together with conditions and restrictions on performance. But after some practice, all these tasks are carried out with less and less effort, until they become automatic. Such unconscious actions, without having exactly the same status as implicitly acquired patterns, eventually become routine and produce the effect of smooth interaction. 4.3.3. Scripts as analytical tools

Both for those learners that require implicit scenarios and for those that need explicit representations, teachers may find the notion of script as an analytical tool very useful. This notion was borrowed from Artificial Intelligence: “A script is a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in particular contexts […] a predetermined stereotyped sequence of actions that defines a well-known situation” (Shank and Abelson 1977: 41).

For the AI developers, a script was a means to analyse, describe and model the way in which knowledge is stored, organised and retrieved, which can provide a common template for the computational implementation of behaviour. The fact that, at a neural level, learning can be seen as a process of formation of chains of mirror neurons provides empirical support for the notion of script as an adequate concept in the account of social behaviour.

The notion of script has also been adopted by a number of researchers in the field of pragmatics. It has the obvious advantage of allowing both analysing and describing whole situations as sequences of features, conditions, participants and activities, and conceiving sequences of events as single processing units. In this sense, it has turned out to be a powerful conceptual instrument21. On the one hand, scripts can explain an individual’s behaviour and her/his understanding of similar behaviour in

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!21 See Tannen (1993), Escandell-Vidal (1996a), among many others.


others; scripts represent as well the main source of expectations regarding courses of actions: it is very easy to show that when presented with a familiar activity, we all know what comes next; finally, scripts provide an elegant explanation of cultural differences.

In addition, the notion of script can be further extended to the analysis of emotions, as Russell (1991, 2005) has suggested. There is “[…] great similarity, but not always identity, across cultures in the way in which emotions communicable by facial expression are categorized. There is also, surprisingly, evidence for differences as well” (Russell 1991: 426). Thus, to account for cross-cultural diversity, Russell has suggested that emotions are not simple concepts, but rather have to be analysed in more basic features, in a way not unlike the sequences of actions that make up complex activities. In this sense, he suggests that the notion of script can be also useful to explain the differences in the categorisation of emotions, which should be understood as a sequence of subevents rather than as homogeneous concepts. As Russell (1991: 442) puts it,

In happiness, you desire something, get it, feel pleasure, smile, and, perhaps feel kind toward others. For other concepts, the story is more complicated. Jealousy might include anger, but jealousy implies a surrounding situation, a social relationship involving three people, specific motives, behaviors, and consequences. These implications must be understood to know what the word jealousy means.

The same explanation goes for the norms that different cultures

establish about the control of emotional expression, which Russell calls display rules:

These display rules might dictate that at a funeral, for example, grief should be inhibited, displayed, or exaggerated. Peoples of different cultures thus expect different behavioral consequences of specific emotions. Again, I propose that these expectations are incorporated into the meaning of terms and that this aspect of meaning can vary with culture. (Russell 1991: 444)

So, display rules can vary from culture to culture, but once they have

been internalised, they automatically determine behaviour, with no need for conscious access to any sort of explicit representation.

Finally, it is worth devoting a few words to the debate about the notion of culture and its role in intercultural communication. Some scholars reject the common, “essentialist” view of culture as a set of norms and

Chapter One 30

representations shared by the members of a group22, which they find too static and artificial. They reject as well the “[…] pervasive association between ‘intercultural communication’ and ‘misunderstanding’” (Piller 2007: 214). Instead, they defend a constructivist approach, in which culture is conceived of as a dynamic notion that speakers construct in discourse. So, the idea that in intercultural communication there are two different systems of values that can enter into conflict should be replaced by a scenario in which negotiation and the search for a common ground and a shared context have a leading role.

Perhaps that would be a desirable situation, but it does not seem feasible at all. To begin with, negotiation and the search for a common ground both require, to some extent, laying one’s cards on the table: this means that the interlocutors should have an explicit representation of the current situation, of what is shared and what is not, and how to build a common ground, which is precisely the kind of approach to culture that one was supposed to try to avoid. Inevitably, each participant will enter the communicative exchange with some initial assumptions, most of which are not even consciously and explicitly represented by the participants themselves; native speakers have implicitly learned the patterns of their group, so they do not usually have conscious access to the particular values and settings that determine their social behaviour.

5. Conclusion

It is time to conclude. The findings in the field of social neuroscience suggest that our understanding of social cognition has to be articulated in a way that should be compatible with its dual nature, i.e., as a biological system and as a product of culture; as a processing device with a neural basis, and as a social mirror that depends on the exposure to a specific culture for its development and operation; as innate feature of neural architecture, and as an emergent social construction; as a universal faculty and a culture-specific set of skills. The result is a complex processing system, in which predetermined responses, implicitly acquired routines !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!22 Piller (2007: 211) considers the following definition of culture as the prototype of the essentialist view:

[…] the deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, social hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relationships, concepts of the universe, and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving. (Samovar and Porter 2003: 8, quoted by Piller 2007: 211)


and explicitly learnt norms all have a precise role in the production and understanding of social behaviour.

Many of the ideas that had usually been taken for granted about social cognition were–we know now--hypotheses and superficial speculations that did not hold any water. What we currently know about the neural underpinnings of human social abilities casts new light on these issues: some of those ideas are being questioned, whereas others have received empirical support. Current research has provided a more solid foundation to the debate and a firmer ground on which to establish new approaches to social behaviour and intercultural communication.

Among those findings, the one with the most far-reaching theoretical consequences is that social cognition qualifies as a domain specific system, with its own procedure and its own processing paths. In this sense, social and grammatical faculties have proven to be more similar than what had been assumed. In addition, a new approach to the division between body and mind, between biology and psychology will no doubt be a central topic for debate in the coming years. The central role of the mirror system in understanding the behaviour of others has influenced our view on cognition from an approach based on representations towards the idea of embodiment.

All this perfect machinery for picking up and internalising social norms of behaviour can collapse as the result of certain diseases or accidents; in such cases, the result is not very different from what happens to learners of a second language: for some period, their social ability seems to have disappeared. Not only do they lack the set of internalised patterns of the target culture, but their own cultural experience does not prove helpful either in intercultural communication. These kinds of learner difficulties find a natural explanation in terms of the properties of the underlying social system. However, the brain can resort to different strategies to alleviate those problems.

Our current understanding of how our social brain works has largely benefited from what neuroscientists have discovered in the last decade: they have offered many sound answers to a host of intriguing questions; and yet there is still much to learn. This is what makes the research in the field of social cognition and second language learning a fascinating enterprise.

Chapter One 32

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PART I:

COGNITIVE ISSUES ON L2 TEACHING

CHAPTER TWO

CROSS-CULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN CONCEPTUALIZATION AND THEIR APPLICATION IN L2 INSTRUCTION!

ALBERTO HIJAZO-GASCÓN

1. Introduction

The Cognitive Theory of Metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Barcelona 2002; Cuenca and Hilferty 1999; Kövecses 2000) considers that a metaphor is a conceptualizing mechanism that helps to understand complex concepts through simple ones, by mapping a source domain into a target domain through different correspondences. Metaphors are embedded in our discourse and often used to express key concepts or evaluations. Although some metaphors seem to be universal, culture variation plays an important role in conceptualizing abstract concepts and creating extensive meanings. Then, the study of metaphors is an important issue to cross-cultural studies (Kövecses 2005; Ibarretxe Antuñano 2008).

Metonymy is another cognitive device that structures our conceptual domains. In this case, the activations will be done within the same domain. Since metonymies are structuring the domain of Lust as well, some of them will be collected here. But it is important to note that this paper is focused on metaphors and it will not enter into the discussion of differences in the status of metaphors and metonymies.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! This paper is based on the paper presented to the doctorate course “Tipología y semántica: la conceptualización del mundo y el significado desde el punto de vista interlingüístico” given by Dr. Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano at the University of Zaragoza (Spain). I would like to thank her for her help and support in elaborating this paper.

Cross-Cultural Differences in Conceptualization and their Application in L2 Instruction

43

2. Metaphors for lust in English and Spanish

This paper studies how Lust is conceptualized in English and Spanish. Csábi (1998) establishes a corpus for Lust metaphors in English and compares the use of frequency of these metaphors in two different genres, romantic novel and pornographic. Her classification by frequency was collected in Kövecses (2005). In this study, Csábi’s methodology and classification is applied to the study of Lust metaphors in Hispanic language and culture.

Through the present study for Spanish, it is observed if cultural variation is possible in metaphors that refer to a domain, which is a taboo itself: Sexual Desire. In order to do so, a corpus of conceptual metaphors and metaphoric expressions is collected from three romantic novels by Corín Tellado, one of the most famous Spanish author in this genre. This corpus will allow us to see whether English and Spanish metaphors coincide and if they are used with the same frequency in both languages. Furthermore the structure of each conceptual domain will be taken into account, showing which metaphors are valid for each part of the domain.

It should be noticed that this study is preliminary since the comparison with the English corpus is limited. The Spanish corpus contains only 120 metaphors and metonymies while Csábi’s comprises 370 examples in two different genres. This quantitative difference must be explained before comparing both corpora and it should be present along this paper. Table 2-1 compares the frequency of metaphors and metonymies (marked with an asterisk) for Lust found in English and Spanish. The number of examples found for each metaphor is indicated in brackets.

Chapter Two 44

Metaphors for lust in English (Csábi 1998)

Metaphors for lust in Spanish

FIRE/HEAT (65) She yielded to his fiery passion.

FIRE/HEAT (22) Aquella cercanía encendía sus sentidos. ‘That nearness lighted her senses’

HUNGER/EATING (50) He prepared to satisfy their sexual hunger.

PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST (13) * Se estremeció al oír su nombre de los labios de él. ‘She shuddered when she heard her name from his lips’.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS (25) He moved with animal ferocity

AWAKENING FROM LETHARGY/ TURN TO LIFE (13) Stephen había despertado en ella sensaciones que no creía posibles. ‘Stephen aroused in her feelings that she did not believe possible’.

BODY HEAT FOR LUST (25) * His masculinity made her body go hot.

RAPTURE (8) Su cabeza daba vueltas. ‘She felt dizzy.’

WAR (21) He took her mouth in a preliminary conquest.

POSSESED OBJECT (8) Recordó cómo Gareth la había poseído. ‘She remembered how Gareth had possessed her’.

INSANITY (20) She had turned him into a raving maniac.

OPPONENT (7) Le arrebató de golpe toda la resistencia que había reunido. ‘He snatched her all the resistance she had collected’.

NATURAL FORCE (19) She felt the flood.

NATURAL FORCE (6) Ella sintió que su cuerpo estallaba en oleadas de placer. ‘She felt how her body exploded in waves of pleasure’.

RAPTURE (18) He gave her a drugging kiss.

CONTAINER/CONTAINED ELEMENT (6) Sentía que estaba a punto de estallar. ‘She felt about to burst’.

OPPONENT (17) He struggled against his lust.

PAIN/TORMENTOR (5) Sintió una aguda punzada de deseo. ‘He felt a sharp pain of desire’.


45

!

PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST (17) * A hot shiver went through her.

PHYSICAL FORCE (5) Ella no era consciente del magnetismo de sus ojos. ‘She was not aware of her eyes` magnetism’.

PAIN/TORMENTOR (16) His touched tormented her.

DISCOVERY/DIFFICULT GOAL TO REACH (5) Como si sus cuerpos fueran un oasis tras haber caminado largo tiempo por un árido e inalcanzable desierto. As if their bodies were an oasis, after being walking for a long time through a dry and unachievable desert.

CONTAINER (15) Her passion exploded.

WAR (4) Él estaría contando a sus amigos la batalla que había ganado. He would be telling his friends about the battle he had won.

UNITY/BOND (12) Their bodies collided and merged into one fiery entity.

BODY HEAT (4) * Estaba a su lado, sintiendo su calor. He was next to her, feeling her heat.

POSSESED OBJECT (10) She wanted him to let him have her.

HUNGER/EATING (4) Seguía sintiendo hambre de los labios de Elena. ‘He kept feeling hunger for Elena´s lips’.

PHYSICAL FORCE (10) There was no denying the power of his sexual magnetism.

TABOO/FORBIDDEN OBJECT (3) Era una forma de prohibirse volver a pensar en Gareth. ‘It was a way of forbidding herself to think in Gareth’.

GAME/PLAY (9) “I´m not playing your games”, she said.

ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS (2) No podría controlar sus reacciones. ‘She could not control her own reactions’.

MAGICIAN (7) Their lovemaking had been magic.

GAME/PLAY (2) Los mismos juegos amorosos en los que él la había iniciado. ‘The same love games in which he had initiated her’.

INTERFERENCE WITH ACCURATE PERCEPTION FOR LUST (6) * She lost her ability to think.

WOMEN SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER (2) Bajo su mirada había florecido como una maravillosa flor nocturna. ‘Under his look, she had blossomed like a wonderful night flower’.

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!

TRICKSTER (5) She bewitches men.

TRICKSTER (1) ¿No te bastó con seducirme con tus sucias artimañas? ‘Was it not enough to seduce me with your dirty tricks?’

SOCIAL SUPERIOR (5) She was driven by lust.

INTERFERENCE WITH ACCURATE PERCEPTION FOR LUST (1) * Ella tenía algo que le desconcertaba y le atraía. She had something that disconcerted and attracted him.

MAGICIAN (1) Los mismos juegos amorosos en los que él la había iniciado como un profano ritual. ‘The same love games in which he had initiated her as a profane ritual’.

Table 2-1: A comparison of English and Spanish metaphors for lust

3. Parts of the target domain

Sexual Desire is a wide domain and therefore it is important to see how metaphors and metonymies structure the domain. Desire itself, participants and different stages in the domain are relevant for certain metaphors, and these are exclusively used to structure one part of the domain. For example, DESIRE IS AWAKENING is only available for the start of the feeling of desire and not for all parts of the domain. Other metaphors can be applied to different phases or to both participants. It is the case of LUST IS CONTAINED ELEMENT for the Desire itself is a contained element, but the desiring person is a container, within the same metaphor. The same can occur in other cases such as SEXUAL DESIRE IS RAPTURE, rapture is the moment in which the desire becomes true and the previous phases to rapture correspond to the start of the feeling, or SEXUAL DESIRE IS FIRE / HEAT, the start of desire is lighting the fire, the lack of lust is cold…

It is important to bear in mind the different distribution of these metaphors in the organization of this domain since it can have an effect on the frequency of use of the metaphors. In sum, the parts of the domain established here are: desire itself, participants (who desires and who is desired) and different stages of the desire (beginning, consummation and end).

It has been observed how most metaphors tend to specialize in one part of the domain or two, establishing a special relation with some parts of the


47

domain: desiring person and desired person; beginning of desire and realization of desire, and so on. As a consequence, a metaphor used for the desiring person is bound to be used for desired person as well, rather than for any other part of the domain.

In any case, three metaphors have been found as the most “polyvalent” in our corpus since they appear in three parts of the domain: DESIRE IS OBJECT (applied to the participants and to the moment of realization, as taking possession of the object). The other two are used in the three temporal phases of the domain: DESIRE IS OPPONENT (beginning of the fight, fight and end of the resistance to the opponent) and DESIRE IS WAR (beginning, war and end).

4. Differences between the Spanish and English corpora

In this section the differences between both corpora will be analyzed. Some of the metaphors and metonymies appear in one of the corpus but not in the other. It will be showed how the lack of some metaphors in the corpus does not imply the inexistence of these metaphors in that language.

4.1 English metaphors that do not appear in the Spanish corpus

DESIRE IS INSANITY, DESIRE IS BOND and DESIRE IS SOCIAL SUPERIOR have not been found in the Spanish corpus. However, it does not mean that these metaphors are not known in the Spanish language. In fact, the metaphoric expressions given by Csábi for English can be easily translated into Spanish. The CREA (Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual, ‘Current Spanish Reference Corpus’1) was consulted to show that these metaphors are possible in Spanish, too:

Deja que la locura te invada, interpreta la danza de los siete velos, hazle algún numerito o dile palabras fuertes. (Magdalena Reyes, Spain 1995). ‘Let insanity invade you, perform the seven veils dance, make him a scene or tell him strong words ’ Por las noches, aparte de fundir nuestros cuerpos con más o menos convicción en la gran cama turolense. (Carmen Martín Gaite, Spain 1992). At nights, apart from uniting our bodies, with more or less conviction in the big bed in Teruel. Un voraz apetito sexual me dominaba. (Ramón Hernández, Spain 1995).

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1 http://corpus.rae.es/creanet.html

Chapter Two 48

‘A voracious sexual appetite dominated me’.

Then, there are two possible explanations to this fact. One is the limited dimension of the present corpus. On the other hand, their lack here could imply that they are not among the most prototypical in Spanish. Future studies will tell us which of these two possibilities is the right one.

4.2 Spanish metaphors that do not appear in the English corpus

In the current study four domains have been found only in Spanish to conceptualize sexual desire:

SEXUAL DESIRE IS AWAKENING OF LETHARGY SEXUAL DESIRE IS A DISCOVERY/DIFFICULT GOAL TO ACHIEVE SEXUAL DESIRE IS A TABOO/PROHIBITED ELEMENT WOMEN´S SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER As in the case of the metaphors that do not appear in the Spanish

corpus, the fact that these metaphors are not found in the Csábi’s and Kövecses’ papers does not mean that they do not exist in English. It rather points out that its frequency is low in English and therefore, there is a difference in its use if a comparison with Spanish metaphors is held.

It has been done a preliminary research in the British National Corpus2 for the four metaphors and it has been found an example for the first one:

The body builder, wrestler, aerobics queen and Madonna use their bodies to control the responses of others: to arouse feelings of fear, jealousy, admiration and desire in others. Status: what it is and how to achieve it. Davies, Philippa. London: Piatkus Books, 1991, 2381 s-units, 36076 words.

In any case these searches should be improved in the future. In the two analyzed corpora, some differences have been found. Tough

these metaphors might be produced in those languages and they simply do not appear in the corpora due to its limited extension, it is important to highlight that it is not aimed here to see if these metaphors are possible in these languages (because they probably are). What is being shown here is that the frequency with which they are used is minor than in the other cases.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!2 http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk


49

5. Differences in frequency of use in Spanish and English lust metaphors

After having analyzed the data and the differences in quantity in the corpus, the next step is to check out whether these languages tend to use some of these Lust metaphors more often than others.

It has been found that the source domains most frequently used in Spanish are FIRE/HEAT, PHYSICAL AGITATION, AWAKENING FROM LETHARGY/ TURN TO LIFE, RAPTURE and POSSESED OBJECT. Comparing them with the five most used in English in Csábi´s corpus FIRE/HEAT, HUNGER/EATING, ANIMAL BEHAVIOR/WILDNESS, BODY HEAT and WAR, it can be concluded that the metaphor LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is common to both languages and it might be considered as a universal, at least within the Western Culture. However, it could be interesting to point out that some frequent domains in English are not so in Spanish: HUNGER and ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, for example, appear in the corpus as minor metaphors in Spanish. Even the fourth and fifth domains in English, that is, the metonymy LUST IS BODY HEAT and the metaphor LUST IS WAR are at the same level as LUST IS HUNGER in the Spanish corpus with only four examples each. On the other hand, it can be seen how the most frequent domains in Spanish do not coincide with the most frequent in English: RAPTURE, PHYSICAL AGITATION and POSSESED OBJECT are in the middle of Csábi´s list and the second metaphor in use in Spanish. LUST IS AWAKENING does not appear in the English corpus, so its frequency in that language must be low.

As a conclusion, it can be seen how cultural variation can be found in different languages within the same conceptual domain. It is true that our experience as human beings makes our conceptualization of the world similar, but each culture makes variation arise with differences in metaphors, frequency of use and specializations of different parts of the domains3. Even in domains with high importance of human experience such as perception verbs, it has been shown how differences in the use of the senses depending on the culture can vary. It has been pointed out how a universal-thought metaphor as SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING should be extended to PERCEPTION IS UNDERSTANDING (Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2008).

In the case of LUST it has been seen how all the metaphors found in both corpora are understandable in both languages (even those that are not

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!3 A more detailed view of cultural variation in metaphors can be seen in Kövecses (2005)

Chapter Two 50

found in the corpus in the other language)4. Moreover, LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is clearly the most used metaphor in English and Spanish. The differences are in the frequency of use. In the second part of this paper, it will be shown how the study of these differences is useful to Second Language instruction, especially to the development of language learning strategies.

6. Cognitive linguistics applied to second language teaching

6.1 Cognitive linguistics and applied linguistics

Cognitive Linguistics has caused an important change in the development of Applied Linguistics contributing with a new point of view to Second Language teaching. Some of the interesting points that link this theory with Applied Linguistics have been collected by F. Boers and S. Lindstromberg (2006). These items are: - Language is considered an integral part of cognition as whole. So

language learning will be improved thanks to the application of general theories of cognitive processing.

- The idea of an acquisition faculty which leads to essentially the same results in L1 or in L2 acquisition.

- No dichotomy between grammar and lexis. This will be useful especially in the study of semi-fixed multiword expressions, i.e. idioms.

- No distinction between ‘dictionary meaning’ and ‘encyclopaedic meaning’. Then, words and patterns are nodes in semantic networks. If one is activated the others will follow it. That implies that language instruction aims at depth of linguistic knowledge and pedagogical exploration of inter-subjectivity.

- The importance of figurative meaning in semantics of languages and in patterns of thought. So metaphor and metonymy will be useful to the development of communicative competence, as will be seen later.

- Semantics is a matter of conceptualization of speakers and their construction of the world under the influence of culture-specific

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!4 Although it has been shown that the same metaphors do not necessarily appear in all different varieties of the same language, see, for example, Hijazo-Gascón´s (forthcoming) comparison between Chilean and European Spanish metaphor for lust.


51

preferences, subjectively and anthropocentrically. This points out the importance of cross-cultural perspective in L2 instruction.

- The central role that motivation plays in Cognitive Linguistics can have an important pedagogical potential. It can help learners reach a deeper understanding of linguistic phenomena. Moreover, motivation can be a useful device to retention and processing of the information and it can contribute to reach pragmatic and cultural awareness.

From these cognitive theoretical items pointed by Boers and Lindstromberg, many applications have been proposed, mainly in the field of polysemy (including prepositions, phrasal verbs, verbs and discourse connectors), idioms and constructions. Furthermore, cognitive applications have also reached other skills such as reading comprehension or raising cultural awareness (see Boers and Lindstromberg 2006). Indeed, it is especially interesting the study of the acquisition of figurative meaning by children and their pedagogical application (Piquer-Píriz 2008).

6.2 Metaphor and Strategic Competence

The study of metaphor is considered important for the development of different skills, specially reading comprehension (Boers and Lindstromberg 2006; Littlemore 2001). Cameron (1999: 111) claims that “[…] readers may try metaphoric processing as one strategy for dealing with interpretation problems [in discourse]”. Thus, it seems clear how the study of metaphors helps to comprehension, but it enriches language production, too. If it is true, it means that the study of metaphors contributes to all levels of communicative competence and increases their fluency and effectiveness.

Littlemore (2001) studies the benefits of metaphor applied to language instruction. and proposes the term metaphorical intelligence, to refer to the ability of interpreting, producing and appreciating metaphors5. This concept relies on the psychological processes of loose analogical reasoning and divergent thinking. Littlemore states that effective communication in a L2 involves the ability to use both novel and frozen metaphors, i.e. those new and those of common use in the language by native speakers. In a more recent paper, Littlemore (2004) studies how metaphor is an important source of misunderstanding for international students. Key concepts are often expressed through metaphors and non-!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!5 Metaphoric intelligence is proposed within Gardner´s (1983) theory of multiple intellingences. He argues that people vary in terms of visual, verbal, mathematical, kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic and rhythmic intelligence. Metaphoric would be the ninth type of intelligence.

Chapter Two 52

native speakers usually miss them. Following her thesis, the grounds of metaphorical expressions are mostly due to cultural conventions. Then, non-native speakers do not have access to the shared cultural knowledge and shared expectations of the speakers in the target language. The only way that learners have to compensate this lack of information is by using different strategies: imagery, literal interpretation, their own background knowledge or overall context. Metaphor plays an important role in some of these strategies, such as word coinage or paraphrase. If the students use these resources, they will be able to express a wider variety of concepts in the second language (Littlemore 2001)

One of the goals of this paper is to show the awareness of metaphors in L2 instruction can be highly useful to reinforce these language learning strategies. It must be pointed out that strategic competence is one of the four levels that compose communicative competence in the model by Canale and Swain (1980) and Canale (1983) as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1: Basic components of communicative competence

These authors claim that strategic competence is “[…] made up of

verbal and non-verbal communication strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence”. (Canale and Swain 1980: 30). Oxford (1990) studies the importance of learning strategies as active and self-directed tools to develop communicative competence. She also classifies these strategies into direct (memory, cognitive and compensation strategies) and indirect (social, affective and metacognitive

Communicative

Competence

Grammatical Competence or

Accuracy

Sociolinguistic Competence

Discourse Competence

Strategic Competence


53

strategies). Furthermore she proposes several activities and trainings to achieve this strategic competence.

My hypothesis in this paper is that this strategic competence can be reinforced by conceptual metaphor and metonymy and metaphorical intelligence.

6.3 How to apply this study to second language learning?

The differences in conceptualization of Lust in English and Spanish can be used in a language class. Since the important differences are found in their frequency and not in the metaphors themselves, activities based on the understanding and use of these metaphors can be a good training to the development of language learning strategies.

Following Oxford’s classification (1990), the study of metaphors for Lust6 can reinforce these strategies:

DIRECT STRATEGIES: - Memory strategies:

They help learners to remember vocabulary or constructions needed to achieve fluency and linguistic competence. They enable L2 speakers to have a store to retrieve in communication. o Creating mental images: associating and elaborating.

Metaphors can be very useful here, since this strategy is about linking one piece of new information with concepts already stored in memory. These associations can be either simple, complex, strange… what is important is that they are meaningful for the student. Metaphors can help since their correspondences and mappings between domains can make students be aware of a meaningful relation between pieces of language and help them to remember.

o Applying images and sounds: using imaginary and semantic mapping. The mind´s storage capacity for visual information exceeds its capacity for verbal material (Oxford 1990: 40). The use of pictures or comics in class can be helpful to remember abstract concepts, and some of these pictures can be based on conceptual metaphors or metonymies. Semantic mappings can be even

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!6 I will focus here on metaphors for lust, but these strategies can be applied to metaphors for any other emotion or to any kind of conceptual metaphor. The main claim of this paper is to show that working with conceptual metaphors in L2 Teaching can foster the development of the strategic competence.

Chapter Two 54

drawn in the board when a metaphor with many correspondences appears. An example is shown in illustration 2-1 in which the metonymy BODY HEAT FOR LUST is showed.

Illustration 2-1: Body heat for lust

- Cognitive strategies: As Oxford argues, cognitive strategies are essential in learning a language. They are used, among other skills, to understand the meaning of a new expression or to create a production in the second language. o Analyzing and reasoning:

! Analyzing expressions. It implies the use of the meanings of various parts of an expression to understand the whole. It is useful in languages that often use composition, i.e. German. The practice with metaphors might make students be aware of the importance of relations in language and make them improve this strategy.

! Analyzing contrastively. It consists of comparing elements: sounds, meanings, grammar… of the target language with elements of the first language in order to determine differences and similarities. This strategy is important to avoid the use of “false friends” in L2. A cross-linguistic study, as the one


55

presented in this paper, can be a good ground to prepare activities that could activate this strategy.

! Translating and transferring. These two strategies are based in the use of the mother language to understand or produce an expression. These are risky strategies because they can provoke mistakes or misunderstandings due to false friends, differences in structures… Again, a contrastive study can be the first step to design activities, which mean a first step for students to make hypothesis of the target language, prevent the mistakes…

- Compensation strategies: They are used to make up for the limitations in the learners´ knowledge when they are communicating. o Guessing intelligently: these strategies have been also known as

‘inferencing’. The learner can guess the meaning of an oral or written discourse by either using linguistic clues or using other clues (context, situation, text structure, personal relationships, topic or “general world knowledge”). Metaphors can give clues to guessing intelligently as well.

o Overcoming limitations in speaking and writing: these are the strategies studied by Littlemore (2001) included in her metaphoric intelligence. Coining words is about making up new words to communicate the desired idea. Using a roundabout or Synonym (Littlemore speaks of paraphrase) means getting the meaning by describing the concept. Both can be fostered by the use of metaphors in class.

INDIRECT STRATEGIES: - Social strategies:

Since communication involves a social dimension, it is important to use social strategies. o Empathizing with others: developing cultural understanding and

becoming aware of others´ thoughts and feelings. These strategies can be worked out in class through metaphors. It can be especially interesting to work with a topic such as lust, since the expression of it can vary in different cultures and the taboos can be very different.

Chapter Two 56

6.4 Activities

Based on Oxford’s model, different activities in class are proposed in order to develop the strategic skills of the students. Only the strategies that can be of special interest to be realized by metaphors are mentioned.

Littlemore´s proposals (2001) can be applied to the semantic field of Lust. She proposes that the use of argumentative text can be interesting since they are often based on one or two conceptual metaphors. The use of the genre in the current study, Corín Tellado’s romantic novels for Spanish or an equivalent English author can be useful to activate cognitive and compensation strategies in reading comprehension. It would be also possible to use romantic films in order to practice listening comprehension as well.

Oxford (1990) proposes how to promote guessing by means of different strategies such as previewing questions before listening or reading, interrupting the story in the middle to ask for predictions or giving the ending to guess the beginning, asking which picture corresponds to what they are hearing or reading and so on.

Working with advertising can be interesting, too, especially as Littlemore proposes with images, giving them pictures of items for which they do not know the concept in the second language and ask them to describe it in pairs, in order to guess what it is. The interpretation of an advertisement and the role that the image plays in it can be important to develop the strategies for analyzing expressions and guessing intelligently. Moreover, the production of an advertisement with its different elements: slogan, picture, sounds… can be important to the development not only of memory but also of cognitive and compensation strategies. A possible example could be the advertisement shown in illustration 2-2, since the metaphor showed in the slogan is PERSON DESIRED IS AN OBJECT which was very polemical and finished with a change in the marketing line of the brand.

And of course in any of these activities the social strategies of emphasizing with others will be fostered, as they imply a new point of view from the second culture. The understanding of lust and sex varies from one culture to another and the ways of expressing desire can provoke serious problems in communication, since a taboo is difficult enough to be treated in our own language, it becomes even harder in the case of a second language.


57

Illustration 2-2: Advertisement with the metaphor DESIRED PERSON IS AN OBJECT

7. Conclusion

In this paper it has been showed how conceptualization of Emotions varies in English and Spanish. The domain of Lust has been studied and it has been seen how the main metaphors coincide in both languages, i.e. LUST IS FIRE/HEAT is the most frequent in both languages and other coincide as well: LUST IS POSSESSSED OBJECT, LUST IS HUNGER. The same occurs with some metonymies such as PHYSICAL AGITATION FOR LUST or BODY HEAT FOR LUST. However, there are some other metaphors that do not coincide. It is the case of LUST IS INSANITY, DESIRE IS BOND, DESIRE IS SOCIAL SUPERIOR that appear in the English corpora but not in the Spanish one. On the other side, LUST IS AWAKENING, LUST IS A DISCOVERY, LUST IS A TABOO and WOMEN´S SEXUALITY IS A FLOWER have been seen in the Spanish corpus but not in English. This does not mean that these metaphors are not available in the other language, but they show that it exist a variation between language and cultures in the domain of Lust, at least in the frequency of use of these metaphors. .

In the second part of the paper, the contrastive study of Lust metaphors has been linked to Second Language Instruction. It has been explained how the study of metaphor can be a good tool to improve the development of the strategic competence. Following Oxford’s (1990) model of language learning strategies, it has been shown how metaphors contribute to some of the memory, cognitive, compensation and social strategies. Finally

Chapter Two 58

some activities to foster strategic competence based on metaphors have been proposed.

References

Barcelona, A. “El lenguaje del amor romántico en inglés y en español”. Atlantis 14 1/2 (1992): 2-27.

—. (ed.) Metaphor and Metonymy at the Crossroads: Cognitive Approaches. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002.

Boers, F. and S. Lindstromberg “Cognitive linguistic applications in second or foreign language instruction: rationale, proposals and evaluation”. In Cognitive Linguistics. Current Applications and Future Perspectives, edited by G. Kristiansen, 305-358. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006.

Cameron, L. “Identifying and describing metaphor in spoken discourse data”. In Researching and Applying Metaphor, edited by L. Cameron and G. Low, 105-134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Canale, M. and M. Swain “Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing”. Applied Linguistics 1/1 (1980): 1-47.

Csábi, S. Conceptualization of Lust in English. Vienna: Semiotische Berichte, 1998.

Cuenca, M. J. and J. Hilferty Introducción a la lingüística cognitiva. Barcelona: Ariel, 1999.

Hijazo-Gascón, A. “Conceptualization of Lust and its applications in Advertising. A cross- and intra-linguistic study”, forthcoming.

Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I. “Vision metaphors for the intellect: are they really cross-linguistic?” Atlantis 30/1 (2008): 15-33.

Kövecses, Z. Metaphor. A practical introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002a.

—. Metaphor and Emotion. Language, culture and body in human feeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002b.

—. Metaphor in Culture, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1980. Littlemore, J. “Metaphoric intelligence and foreign language learning”.

Humanising Language Teaching 3/2 (2001): http:/www.hltmag.co.uk/mar01/mart1.htm.

—. “The misinterpretation of metaphors by international students at a British university: examples, implications and possible remedies”. Humanising Language Teaching 6/3 (2004):


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http://www.hltmag.co.uk/sept04/sart6.htm. Piquer-Píriz, A. M. “Reasoning figuratively in early EFL: some

implications for the development of vocabulary”. In Cognitive Linguistics Approaches to Teaching Vocabulary and Phraseology, edited by F. Boers and S. Lindstromberg, 219-240. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008.

Soriano, C. “The Conceptualisation of Anger in English and Spanish. A Cognitive Approach”. PhD Diss., Universidad de Murcia, 2004.

CHAPTER THREE

IMMIGRATION AND CONCEPTUAL METAPHORS: A CRITICAL APPROACH TO IDEOLOGICAL

REPRESENTATION

MARÍA D. LÓPEZ MAESTRE

1. Introduction

This article presents an exploration of some of the conceptual metaphors resorted to by a group of English Philology students at the University of Murcia (Spain) in extended essays they were asked to write on the topic of immigration. Following an interdisciplinary approach, I examine conceptual metaphors from a critical point of view, using analytical procedures from critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, with the aim of exploring not only the conceptualisation of this phenomenon in the discourse of our students but also unveiling the ideology and socio-cultural values conveyed by their choice of analogical mappings and corresponding metaphorical linguistic expressions.

I believe that this critical consideration of the way metaphors about immigration reflect attitudes and cultural values is significant for a number of reasons. Immigration, apart from being an important topic of study within the academic field of intercultural relations, is also a very important issue in Spanish society today. For our country it is a relatively new phenomenon. It is well known that throughout history many Spaniards had to migrate to other countries because of forced exile or in search of better life and working conditions. Nowadays, however, this situation has been reversed. A much improved economic and political panorama has made Spain a country attractive to immigrants from a wide variety of nationalities. This and the fact that the number of immigrants has substantially increased in recent years has brought about a new situation

Immigration and Conceptual Metaphors

61

which entails a societal and cultural scenario very different from the one prevailing just a few decades ago.

Within this context, the university as an institution, now more than ever, has a very important role to play in promoting and fostering tolerance, mutual respect, appreciation of cultural diversity and cooperation among people from different cultural backgrounds. We have a privileged position from which to engage actively in such important issues as the promotion of intercultural relations and intercultural dialogue between the local and the immigrant population.

In particular Language and Literature Departments, being specially concerned with the teaching of language, literature and culture, have a role to play in developing language awareness with regard to intercultural issues. That is, we should help our students to become aware of the importance of using a stylistically appropriate language that is respectful to the multicultural experience, training them to avoid racism, xenophobia and other discriminatory practices. Sooner or later they will engage in public speaking, either as teachers, translators, interpreters, intercultural mediators or in other professions, therefore they should be aware of the ideological power of language, so that they do not perpetuate but deconstruct and challenge pernicious use of linguistic practices which portray an unfair and negative image of immigrants that could hinder intercultural relations.

In Murcia the question of immigration is as important as it is on a national level, since there has been a substantial increase in immigration quite recently. The population has become more varied and enriched with the arrival of people from other cultures. In my opinion, now we have a wonderful mixture of persons from different backgrounds, which makes our region a more interesting and fascinating place to live in. But, as a teacher I wonder what the perception of our students is. How do they feel about the phenomenon of immigration? Is their perception negative or positive? Do they perceive the question of immigration as a problem or as a benefit? How do they feel about “these other people” with whom we now share our lives? Are the immigrants perceived as being distant, separated from “us” by differences in culture and traditions? Are the students conscious of the benefits of multiculturalism? Or do they react with fear and other negative emotions? etc.

To answer these questions I thought it would be interesting to ask my students to write an extended essay where they could express their ideas, attitudes and opinions on the subject of immigration. These essays would also give me the chance to look at and study the socio-semiotic discoursal representation of immigration they construct. Following an interdisciplinary

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approach which combines insights from different perspectives their discourse can be scrutinized to explore linguistic choices and potential ideological representation and implications. In this sense their essays provide very interesting material for a discourse analysis from a critical point of view.

Due to limitations of space, I deal with just one particular but highly illuminating aspect of the discourse production of the students: their use of some conceptual metaphors. Metaphors are such a powerful vehicle for ideological representation that they are particularly worthy of investigation. Therefore here I deal with the metaphorical conceptualisation students make to refer to immigration from a critical point of view, considering the ideology, value judgements and socio-cultural evaluations conveyed by both metaphorical linguistic expressions and the source and target domains chosen as analogical mappings.

I believe this exploration about the way essays and metaphors reflect attitudes and cultural values is useful for teachers and students alike. For teachers, these essays provide valuable information to identify the needs for pedagogical intervention. They can tell us a great deal about linguistic usages that convey prejudices, racism or other discriminatory values. For students, the essays provide class material to be worked on and analysed when dealing with the topic of language and ideology and in particular immigration, intercultural relations and intercultural dialogue. In this way, the students are given the chance to analyse critically their own language/metaphors, style and ideology. It is not the language of other people. It is their own and their classmates’ language, they are confronted with, to look at what values, stereotypes and prejudices they show in their discourse. I believe essays like these can serve as the basis for a more personal approach which seeks to make them reflect upon their own moral and ethical responsibility in these matters.

In my opinion, the discourse of English Philology students is also worth investigating for other reasons. English Philology students are in contact with both the Spanish and English culture. To a greater or lesser extent they have lived the “intercultural experience”. To improve their command of the English language, they have to travel abroad, as part of an Erasmus Exchange Programme or for other reasons. Therefore generally they have had the experience of being a foreigner for a while. They know the difficulty of getting by in a foreign country if they are not proficient in the language; how stressful it is not knowing the culture of the country they live in; how disconcerting it can be not knowing certain social customs and conventions etc. For all these reasons, a priori we can expect them to be especially sympathetic and understanding to the question of


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immigration. This makes their discourse even more interesting to be investigated to see the actual discourse they produce as well as the metaphors they resort to.

Just before moving on to the discussion of the data, a brief consideration about the organization of this article seems in order here. It must be noted that, first, I deal with methodological questions related to the sample studied, explaining how the material was collected and giving information about the informants that took part in the project. Then I examine aspects of the theoretical framework this research is based on. I also show the different stages in the design of the research process and provide a list of the candidate metaphors I considered for investigation. Since, due to space limitations, I cannot study all the candidate metaphors in the list, in the section devoted to the discussion of the data, I explore two of the most prominent conceptual metaphors that appear in the discourse of our students: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT and SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. These two conceptualisations are worth considering critically since they often portray a discriminatory and negative view of immigration that should be looked at. Finally in the concluding section I reflect upon the ideological power of metaphors to represent experience and the need to develop a critical attitude to the metaphors we use.

2. Methodology

2.1. Material: sample collection method

As was mentioned above, the informants selected for this project were students in the 5th year of English Philology at the University of Murcia who were asked to write an extended essay on the topic of immigration. This exercise was part of the coursework they do for stylistics prior to the study of a unit on style and ideology, where students have the chance to reflect upon the interrelation between language, power and ideology in both literary and non-literary texts. Here aspects of language and ideology are explored in connection with transitivity, modality, lexical categorization, the use of the passive voice, intransitive clauses, pronouns, presuppositions and inferences, metaphors etc.

The students were given one hour to plan and write their essays and were instructed to write on a fairly general topic: Immigration- positive (if any) and negative (if any) aspects. To ensure the anonymity of the process and give them the chance to express their opinions on the matter freely and without any constraints, they were asked not to supply their names.

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Participation was voluntary. Several students totally refused to take part in the project and they were allowed to leave the classroom. For example, there was a student who said that s/he lived in a village with one of the highest rates of immigration in Murcia. S/he was too emotional about this subject and felt unable to write on it. So the number of students who finally took part in the project was 35. 35 essays were written and I identified them only by a number. It must be emphasised, however, that this article shows the initial stage of what is a more extended project which covers a critical discourse analysis of the discourse of immigration produced by English Philology students during a period of five academic years 2003-2008. The essays explored in this paper were written in the spring term of 2004, during class-time.

Finally, it must also be noticed that in the processing and digitalisation of the material, the teacher’s intervention was kept to a minimum and only those language mistakes which hindered comprehension were corrected.

2.2. Theoretical framework

As far as methodology is concerned, an interdisciplinary approach was applied, linking critical discourse analysis (CDA henceforth), cognitive linguistics (Cog Ling henceforth) and corpus linguistics in what I believe offers a clearer and more fruitful approach to the consideration of the socio-cultural and ideological values conveyed by conceptual metaphors in discourse.

CDA provides the main theoretical framework for our research. Along with other practitioners of CDA, as Fowler et al. (1979), Fowler (1991), Van Dijk (1993), Fairclough (1989, 2003), Fairclough, and Wodak (1997), Wodak and Meyer (2001) etc., I am particularly interested in issues of discourse, power and ideology. Ideology is an important, but nevertheless slippery concept in CDA. CDA analysts have been criticized for using such a term on the basis of its elusiveness and the difficulties they face in giving a clear-cut scientific definition. Here I do not refer to this concept as a false distorted consciousness in the Marxist sense, I simply take it to mean common values and assumptions shared collectively by a community (Simpson, 1993:5). An ideology therefore derives from the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs and value-systems which are shared collectively by social groups (Simpson 1993: 5).

Considered in this way, ideology is almost inevitable in language use. Ideas do not merely float in the air. Ideas are produced and simultaneously reproduced in social and cultural situations by speakers who make selections from the various linguistic options their language system makes


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available and, in doing so, are positioned through their use of language in different ways in these situations. Therefore particular linguistic or stylistic choices are not value-free selections; they can work to conceal or reveal certain realities or world views rather than others, establishing or reinforcing ideologies in the process and particular points of view (Carter and Nash 1990: 2-24). Metaphors are particularly revealing in this respect, since they reflect attitudes and socio-cultural values too, and therefore have a potential for ideological representation.

In this article I am going to explore the metaphors used by our students according to the basic tenets of the cognitive theory of metaphor as developed by writers such as Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Lakoff (1987), Kövecses (2000, 2002, 2005), Gibbs (1994), and others. For cognitive linguists, metaphor has come to mean a cross-domain mapping in our conceptual system whereby we ordinarily understand one domain of experience in terms of another discrete domain (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Turner 1989; Gibbs 1994). The notion of “mapping” refers to a set of conceptual correspondences that can be established between source and target domains, whereas the term “metaphorical expression” is reserved, in particular, for those linguistic expressions (a word, phrase, or sentence) which are the surface realisation of such a cross-domain mapping. To account for the fact that several metaphorical expressions usually activate the same conceptual metaphor, the mnemonic label TARGET DOMAIN IS SOURCE DOMAIN is used (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). It must be noted, therefore, that metaphorical mappings “involve a set of relations rather than single attributes so that what is transferred is a knowledge of a set of properties, their behaviour and interrelationships as they are known in the source domain” (Charteris-Black 2004: 13-14).

From the point of view of the study of ideology, this approach to metaphor is particularly interesting for CDA studies, since metaphorical analogical mappings and their correspondences can tell us a great deal about knowledge, social issues and ideology. Analogical mappings give us insights for perspectives commonly shared by members of a community on which correspondences are based. This role of metaphor as a cognitive heuristic is particularly worthy of note. Its relevance in shedding light on social issues is made manifest by a developing line of socially cognitive research on issues such as security policy (Chilton 1996; Chilton and Ilyin 1993; Thornborrow 1993), unemployment (Straehle et al. 1999), racism (Van Teeflen 1994), political discourse (Chilton 2004; Charteris–Black 2004, 2005), gender (Koller 2004), genetics (Adolphs 2006), immigration (O’Brien 2003; Santa Anna 1999; Charteris-Black 2006), etc.

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It is also interesting how metaphors can highlight or hide certain aspects of the conceptualisation of phenomena which can reveal attitudes and ideological positioning. A critical consideration of the values conveyed by the choice of source domain can be enlightening in this respect, especially in connection with naturalised values and assumptions. This is significant since the danger with the metaphors we live by is that their usage is often conventionalised to such an extent that ideological implications pass by unnoticed, are “naturalised” (Fairclough 1989: 120) and taken for granted as normal and common sense. This makes conceptual metaphors acutely damaging when the image they portray is negative, unfair and detrimental to the social issues they are meant to represent. No doubt the link between metaphors and ideology is an area that can be fruitfully explored and it is here where CDA and Cog Ling can unite for a common goal. Such a combined approach promises rewarding insights into the consideration of the ideological consequences of cognition and their impact on culture and society.

Having clarified aspects of theoretical framework and terminology, let us move on to consider some final questions related to corpus linguistics, which are methodologically important. As mentioned in the introduction, corpus linguistics has provided us with useful analytical procedures for the processing and analysis of the material that have complemented other manual operations, greatly simplifying the task of compiling and sorting out the material.

Our project was carried out in several stages, which combined a manual more subjective approach with a computerized analysis of the lexical choices in the corpus. Bearing in mind the findings of the literature on the subject, a manual inspection was carried out first to establish the relevant areas to be studied. This made it possible to set up a list of conceptual metaphors as well as relevant “keywords” which I thought required investigation. Once a conceptual metaphor was spotted, it was considered a candidate metaphor and was included in the list mentioned above, which served as a basis for subsequent automatic analysis to establish frequency of use and concordances.

When digitalized, the essays provided a small corpus of 15,326 running words. The number of different words was 1886. Subsequently two files were produced: One to be processed with WordSmith Tools! and the other, a PDF document, to be processed with Adobe Acrobat!. WordSmith Tools! suite of text analysis software made it possible to obtain quick information about lexical frequency, key words and concordance lines. In particular frequency lists were very useful in providing clues as to which words were worthy of investigation as


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potential metaphors. The empirical data obtained in this way was used to corroborate the findings initially made in a manual way as well as to supply additional information about the actual linguistic usage in texts. The list of candidate metaphors produced included the following:

CANDIDATE METAPHORS: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT IMMIGRATION IS A NATURAL DISASTER IMMIGRATION IS A DISEASE CONTAINER METAPHOR: LOCALS ARE IN/IMMIGRANTS ARE OUT LOCALS ARE IN THE MIDST/IMMIGRANTS ARE FAR SPAIN/MY TOWN IS A HOUSE LOCALS ARE LANDLORDS-LADIES/IMMIGRANTS ARE GUESTS

(often, NEGATIVE EVALUATION) (Negative + problematic+ threatening)

IMMIGRATION IS A VALUABLE OBJECT IMMIGRATION IS A BUSINESS TRANSACTION

(often, POSITIVE EVALUATION), etc.

WordSmith Tools! was very effective for the processing of the material. However, one of its drawbacks, as is often the case with computer searching facilities, is that it provides very limited information about the context in which the metaphorical linguistic expression appears. When searching for concordances, it is possible to know the words used before and after within a range of 25 words. Although useful for other purposes, this is a drawback for the analysis and investigation of metaphorical linguistic expressions in connection with culture and ideology, because it is very difficult to know if the item in question is used metaphorically or not since the context of use is often too limited. For this reason, we used the possibilities offered by Adobe Acrobat! software to help to find the particular passage where the concordance line was extracted: this made it possible to obtain pragmatic information about the context more easily and with greater speed. This procedure was very helpful since it greatly facilitated the task of deciding whether a particular item was metaphorical or not and what the ideological implications of the use of the metaphor were.

Finally to conclude this brief consideration of methodological issues, I have summarised the stages of the research process as follows:

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STAGES IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS:

1. Manual inspection. Selection of candidate metaphors.

2. With WordSmith we produced: Frequency lists of words (also provided clues as to candidate metaphors). Concordance lines.

3. With Adobe Acrobat: We extracted the context of the keyword (number of the essay, the paragraph the word was used in etc.).

3. Discussion of the material

Although all the metaphors in the list of candidate metaphors provided above would deserve a detailed exploration, due to limitations of space, I shall concentrate on two metaphors that are particularly prominent in the discourse of our students: IMMIGRATION IS A WAR / FIGHT / CONFLICT and SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. They are also worthy of being selected for examination because, in my opinion, many of the metaphorical linguistic expressions they generate convey negative evaluations related to an unfair and discriminatory representation of immigration as a socio-cultural phenomenon. Therefore these are structures that demand attention from a pedagogical point of view, requiring greater teacher intervention. They should be discussed in the classroom to enable students to become aware of the ideological power of metaphors and of how important it is to use alternative representations and avoid certain metaphorical linguistic expressions due to the potential negative values that can be conveyed.

Let us start with IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT. The manual inspection and frequency lists produced point to a metaphorical conceptualisation of immigration as a WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT. To confirm this hypothesis, I decided to explore the lexis of conflict in the corpus to see whether words from this lexical field were used figuratively. In particular I checked the metaphorical use of the following terms: Invasion/invade; enemy; opposite/oppose/opposed; clash; against; fight/combat/battle; threat/threatened/ threaten.

The results found point to a discourse of confrontation present in the compositions of the students, since we found metaphorical linguistic expressions which are the realization of the IMMIGRATION IS A WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT conceptual metaphor in 54.3% of the essays.


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The resulting metaphorical structures arise basically from the conceptual domain of WAR/FIGHT/CONFLICT whereby immigration is understood as a conflict or clash between two antagonistic or opposed forces. It is presented as a war/fight/conflict between opponents who (according to the logic of the source domain) try to defeat each other. As a result, there is a mapping whereby entities in the domain of immigration correspond to entities in the domain of war/fight/conflict. The mapping basically preserves the image-schematic structure of the source domain because the image schematic structure of the source domain is projected onto the target domain, thus giving us the following correspondences:

" Immigrants activities are a war/fight/conflict that must be repelled/fought against.

" Immigrants attack and invade (towns/country). " Immigrants and locals are rival enemies/opponents. " Immigrants’ activities are a threat/a conflict. " Locals fight and defend themselves.

Let us look at some passages to illustrate the use of this conceptual

metaphor. In an essay, the student wrote:

When you walk on the streets and most of the times you get them saying something and looking or staring at you. My town is completely invaded. If you go out on a Saturday or Sunday in the afternoon there aren’t any people anywhere. It is full of Moroccans and Ecuadorians as well as people from Peru, etc. Essay 17

In this passage we can see how, due to this vision of immigration in

antagonistic terms, the town this student lives in is portrayed with a battle image as having been invaded. The evaluative adverb “completely” leaves no doubt as to the modality conveyed by the sentence which shows the town as having been taken by immigrants who apparently are everywhere. This is also a realization of the container metaphor, THE TOWN IS A CONTAINER, whereby the town is a container full of immigrants who leave no space for the local population. It is also unfortunate that, in this passage, the immigrants are not given the status of persons as, quoting the words of the student, “there aren’t any people anywhere”: Hence, the immigrants are here the subject of a dehumanisation process whereby they are deprived of their status as human beings, their human condition being obliterated and taken away from them.

In the following example the student has also resorted to war/conflict imagery to conceptualise aspects of this phenomenon through the use of the word enemy to refer to people with different religious ideas. Cultural

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and religious differences are thus seen as the source of a problematic relationship:

[…] for them Catholic people are considered an enemy, so it is just a way of seeing things. Essay 30

It is interesting how the student here is speaking about what s/he

assumes is the opinion of the “others”, but does not provide any reference as to whom s/he refers in particular. This is one of the most dangerous ideological generalizations that can ever be made, particularly pernicious since such opinions could be based on stereotypes, beliefs, and false ideas with little justification.

The lexical item clash is also worth commenting on. In my opinion it can also be related to an antagonistic discourse of fight and conflict whereby differences in ideas, culture, religion, languages can be interpreted as metonymically referring to the sound of swords clashing when opponents fight. According to the logic of the source domain, once the immigrant is depicted as an “enemy”, it makes sense to conceptualise differences as metonymically provoking a “clash of ideas and beliefs”. This can be seen in the following passages as a way of illustration:

Obviously, the arrival of people from different nationalities to a country, particularly when it takes place on a large scale, always brings about both positive and negative aspects, due to the clash of cultures, languages, religions, etc. Essay 13 […] there is a constant clash among the majority of Spanish people who are Catholics and this minority which consists of people from different ethnic groups. Essay 29 The clash is due to religion, mostly. Muslims are said to be very fanatic and it is agreed by almost everyone that they loathe Catholics, that Catholic do not like them very much. Culture is another fact. There are aspects of Arabic culture that Catholics cannot put up with. This does not mean that the Arabic Culture is worse. It is simply different. Essay 30

In line with this antagonistic view, we find the use of other terms such

as oppose, opposite, opposed and against, also used, in my opinion, to emphasize differences and confrontation:

It has been said that, when immigrants enter Spain, they must adapt to our culture or else return to their homeland, since they are completely opposite to us. Essay 21


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In my opinion, Spanish society is very racist and it has lots of prejudices against all kinds of immigrants. Essay 19 I’m not completely against them, but in my opinion if somebody goes to another country in order to look for a better way life they must try to adapt themselves to the new country or at least not to oppose them. I mean that sometimes immigrants don’t like the culture of the country they have migrate to but they should at least respect it, and of course they mustn’t try to impose their culture in the new country. Essay 2 I’m not against immigration because in some ways it is not as bad as many people think. Essay 2

Several of these passages are also particularly noticeable not only for

the metaphors but for the use of mitigation strategies to ameliorate and qualify statements. In essay 2 the student wrote, “I’m not against immigration because in some ways it is not as bad as many people think”. Here the residual implication is that it is still bad, harmful and negative in some way. Maybe not “[…] so bad as many people think” but still negative and problematic. Examples like these are interesting because they show how ideology is complex and indirect and can not be read directly from linguistic items, since an apparently innocuous statement can carry dangerous ideological presuppositions based on generalizations concerning mental processes (Simpson 1993: 91, 2004: 23) that are supposed to take place in the mind of many people, but which are not adequately referenced. Fortunately, not all passages with against show such a negative approach, there are other cases where the students show concern and call for a more sympathetic and supportive view of immigration, as can be seen in the passage below. These are also linguistic usages that should be discussed in class to counterpart other more negative statements:

Arguments against immigration are often based on an emphasis on nationality which is exclusive and dangerous. The association of immigration with criminality entails a danger in itself that could lead to xenophobia. So people should be aware of that and be careful not to favour these kinds of attitudes. It is necessary to be concerned with the real situation of these people and feel a sense of empathy towards them. Essay 3

Carrying on with our discussion about antagonistic discourse, we can

mention the use of the term impose in the following examples:

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Another negative aspect of immigration is that many of the immigrants that come to Spain find it very difficult to adapt to our culture, especially Moroccan people. I have found many cases where they wanted to impose their culture on the country they are living in. This generates conflicts. Essay 6 The different cultures and traditions are important factors related to the separation between natives and immigrants, because most of the time- they don’t adapt themselves to the culture of the country they come to, and what they try to do is to impose their beliefs and way of live on the natives, and this is a fact that nobody likes, especially when immigrants think they are the “owners” of the new city”. Essay 9

The use of expressions with impose is consistent with this discourse of

confrontation I have been commenting on. The students say that immigrants want to impose their culture and way of life on the local population, and obviously this is a fact that nobody likes, especially when immigrants think they are the “owners” of the new city. The volitional nature of the process is expressed in such an unequivocal and absolute way that the intentional nature of the process is left in no doubt. And obviously this manifest intention to impose something not wanted is annoying and induces fears of losing control and of having to put up with an undesirable situation. Therefore, in line with this position, it makes sense to portray immigration as a threat, something to be feared, menacing and scary: threat scored four hits in our database (0.03%), threatened 2 (0.01%), menacing 1; fear 5 (0.03%); scared 2 (0.01%):

When we talk about the negative aspects we must not only focus on the situation of immigrants but also on the opinion of some Spanish people who see immigration as a threat to society in general and to their jobs in particular. Many Spanish workers complaint that they may lose their job. Essay 26 This is when lots of factors come into action, among them the threat of their own identity or the fear of being rejected. At the same time, this threat of one’s identity is as well present in Spanish people. Essay 27 As for mentioning some disadvantages, one of the most important problems immigration causes is that people feel threatened by living with foreign people in the same city or village. It leads to insecurity on the streets and violence of some groups against foreigners, but it does not mean that immigrants are to blame for this. Essay 11 Obviously, not all immigrants are from the same country, although the ones I am referring to are from Africa. I live near Cruz Roja Hospital and I


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am scared of going out alone at night because of them. They are also brave and they tell you insults and bad things when you pass by. Essay 1 To sum up, these examples show how students resort to an antagonistic

discourse of confrontation whereby immigrants are viewed as enemies, posing a threat, a menace to the general population. However, the very acceptance and use of this metaphor has serious ideological implications. Fights and wars, by their very nature, recall images of hostility and aggressiveness; their imagery leaves little room to conceive of immigration in terms of joint problem solving and harmonious cooperation. The problem is, as Gibbs states, that because “conceptual metaphors reflect unconscious schemes of thought, people are often unaware of the metaphorical nature of their speech, which can mislead them about the consequences of these metaphors” (Gibbs 1994: 142). The danger of using metaphors like the ones quoted above is that the particular value system they are based on is simply taken for granted and not questioned at all. And this is precisely what makes metaphors more dangerous, since they present value judgements as being commonsensical and natural. The students should reflect upon these issues, deconstructing assertions and questioning the values conveyed. Metaphorical linguistic expressions such as these present immigration in negative terms and may have consequences hindering social relations and posing obstacles to intercultural dialogue and to our living together in harmony.

In our consideration of a few more conceptual metaphors, another aspect that must be noted, which can probably be related not only to this antagonist representation but also to other metaphorical linguistic structures we shall see later, is the perception of mass immigration as the source of great concern. Obviously the greater the number of immigrants, the worse the situation/invasion will get, according to students who stated that:

Spain is receiving everyday the arrival of thousands of people mostly from Africa and South America […] the phenomenon becomes the origin of many problems when it is not controlled rightly. Essay 10 Massive waves of immigrants can change an entire country. This can be seen by the recipient country as a threat to their identity and way of life. For example, the African immigration in Spain can have serious consequences for the maintenance of the Spanish traditions and experience as a country. Essay 28

This last example is particularly revealing. Firstly, because the use of

the word “massive” gives an indication of the excessive nature of the

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phenomenon. This word scored four hits in our database, being used in the following contexts: “massive immigration”, “massive character”, “massive entrance”, “massive waves”. The perception the students seem to have is of hundreds, of thousands of people every day entering the container that is our land/town/country – a metaphor that shall be explored later. Secondly, because by means of the wave metaphor immigration is portrayed as if it was a natural disaster, maybe even a tsunami. This characterization makes it possible to describe an increase in the rate of migration in a vivid and emotional way, establishing a rhetorical contrast between a situation where there was less immigration with one where there is more, at the same time highlighting the emerging nature of the phenomenon as a scary disaster scenario threatening to flood the surrounding areas with people, which is perceived as a threat to identity and way of life:

However, there are many people who fear that one day their culture could fade away. This type of fear is ordinary among people who have not been in contact with other people from different races or cultures. This situation clearly happens in Spain. Essay 30

“Massive waves can change the entire country” the student wrote

(essay 28 quoted above). This linguistic representation is also significant because of its use of a material event process (Simpson 1993:89) which, due to its metaphorical nature, has the potential to leave agentivity unclear. Thus, it dehumanises the immigrants who are not represented as subjects of human life stories but as a natural catastrophe, which induces extreme fear and horror related to imagined terrors that something dangerous can happen that will leave behind massive destruction and devastation. By means of this metaphor local people are shown as being under the threat of being ideologically and culturally engulfed or damaged by the massive waves of immigrants entering the country. Native culture and traditions are thus portrayed as being at risk of fading away, disappearing as if diluted in the massive waves. Fortunately, the use of this conceptual metaphor in our corpus was not prominent. “Wave” was only used in essay 28 and no instances of “flood”, “swamp”, “tide”, “flow”, “influx” or other liquid metaphors were found in the corpus.

The next group of metaphorical linguistic expressions I would like to deal with has to do with the representation of Spain as a container: SPAIN IS A CONTAINER. On the basis of the data found we can affirm that it is a prominent metaphor, often resorted to by the students in their discourse, whereby the local population is inside the container whereas the immigrants are outside, often trying to enter into the locals’ container


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space. This gives us the mapping LOCALS ARE IN/ IMMIGRANTS ARE OUT. An example can be found in the following passage:

For the last few years, immigration in Spain has been a very controversial issue. There are all kinds of opinions about it and the authorities don’t know how to deal with it. It has got to a point in which it’s impossible for them to control the number of immigrants coming into the country. Essay 19

As Chilton (2004: 118) notes there is a spatial containment schema

which grounds such conceptualisations of one’s country as a closed container that can be sealed or penetrated. This conceptualisation seems to be grounded in bodily experience. It is well known how cognitive linguists have revealed evidence of the body itself being conceptualised as a container – and even of words themselves being conceptualised as containers of meaning that are physically moved in communication (the “conduit” metaphor, cf. Reddy 1979). Thus, this container experience, based on personal experience of the body as a container, has been extrapolated in a metonymic way to the country we live in, all this with important ideological and socio-cultural implications as we shall see below. The notion of a container implies:

" There is an inside and an outside. " The space inside of container may be full or empty. " Substances can be put in or taken out/ entities can enter in and out

of the container. " There may be pressures on the container from the inside (maybe

due to lack of space) etc. To identify the realization of this metaphor we checked the figurative

use of terms such as: In; out; inside; outside; outsider; enter / entering/ entered / entrance; come in; incoming; fit into; full. By means of this metaphor the immigrant can be represented as being an outsider, as in the passages below:

As they are poor, they become marginalized and are regarded as outsiders. The worst situation is when the immigrant does not even find a job. They stay in the country and they feel the pressure of their families. In some cases, the immigrant is forced to enter the world of delinquency. Essay 18 However, people from Morocco or Ecuador do not transmit positive feelings to us. Regarding this last group of people we could say that one of the negative aspects is their failure to adapt. Normally they come here because they want to look for ways to improve their way of life or merely to find a job. They probably just want to work in order to have something

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to eat and to send money to their family in their home country, but the problem is that sometimes they feel like outsiders. They try to bring their own culture and way of life with them. This implies that they want to create their own institutions and shops where they can buy the kind of food they are used to eating. I think that if they come to Spain, they cannot impose their culture. They should adapt to our way of life. And very often this is not what they do. It is very annoying when they want to change our customs or other things. We don’t have to adapt to them, but the other way round. Essay 35

This second example is a particularly extreme case. The student takes

for granted that immigrants from Ecuador feel like outsiders, that is the “problem”. His/her argumentation is solely based on a generalized mental process, not even on a verbal process, but a mental process (Simpson 1993: 91, 2004: 23) which takes place in the mind of who knows whom, unspecified immigrants of this nationality who are portrayed as intentionally bringing in “their own culture and way of life”. The bringing in of substances or other entities is also typical of the container representation. In this case by means of a material action intentional process (Simpson 1993: 89), immigrants are portrayed trying to bring into the container their own culture and way of life with them, as if this was or could be an intentional choice, something done on purpose. The student does not seem to realise that our culture is part of who we are and cannot be brought in or out: it is simply an essential and consubstantial part of us, of our identity as human beings. Apart from culture, other undesirable actions liable to be brought in by immigrants are criminality, delinquency, violence or even xenophobia, as we can see in these passages:

On the other hand, this mixed society can also bring about negative consequences. Most immigrants come to our country to find a job and we are willing to live here peacefully and harmony with everybody. However, there massive entrance into the country, many of them illegally, forces them to live in awful conditions and many turn to delinquency in order to survive. This creates a bad image of immigrants and therefore leads to a situation of xenophobia among the Spanish population. Their difficulties in finding a job also turn immigrants to illegal activities. Essay 24. This change is usually most of the time accompanied with the incomprehension of some intolerant, narrow-minded people who think that all immigrants want is to bring delinquency, violence, danger into the country, but the fact is that they work under the worst conditions you can possibly think of, the jobs nobody wants to do. Essay 20


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As we have seen above, the existence of a container implies both an inside and an outside and therefore it also implies both the “us” and the “them” so often referred to in the literature. The penetration of the boundary of a container seems to convey the idea of the “them” symbolically entering the “us” inside the container, where the society, culture and traditions of the local population are located. Outside there are “the others”, with a different culture, language and way of life. As a result of this conceptualisation, we find metaphorical linguistic expressions which highlight movement towards the container from an external source, and show the immigrants as entering, trying to get into/enter into the locals’ container space. The problem arises when the inside of the container is perceived as being full, maybe due to lack of control on the part of the government or security forces or because the immigrant does not fit into the inside space available. Then there seems to be the perception that there is no space available for the local population. Inside the container the newcomers enter in competition for resources and public services, such as housing and school places, or even public areas such as streets and parks. Therefore not fitting into the inside of the container space can be interpreted as posing a threat to the identity of both groups:

[…] the difficulty when trying to find a job, the poor salaries when they find one, etc. This makes immigration become a problem. Together with this, there is the fact that immigrants don’t always seem to fit into the country where they arrive. This is when lots of factors come into action, among them the threat of their own identity or the fear of being rejected. At the same time, this threat of one’s identity is as well present in Spanish people. Essay 27

It is even worse when the container is perceived as being full due to too

many immigrants coming in, as was the case with a passage mentioned before in connection with war/conflict imagery, where the student said: “my town is completely invaded. […] It is full of Moroccans and Ecuadorians as well as people from Peru, etc.” (essay 17), thus linking war imagery to the container schema, whereby as the result of a massive invasion the container is shown as being full with immigrants –the inner space totally occupied.

When superimposed with attributes such as doors, gates, landlords, the container schema easily transforms into such an emotional construct as a house, hence making it possible the use of actions such as enter or entered we find in the following passages:

Nowadays, immigration is a problem that Spanish society has to deal with. In the last few years hundreds and hundreds of immigrants entered our

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country. When we try to analyse the problem in order to look for a solution we find different opinions and different aspects too. Essay 26 The situation is completely out of control. It is obvious that the exact number of immigrants entering the country illegally is not known but those who get arrested and caught and reach the Spanish mainland in a very unfortunate situation, without money, without documentation, without anything. Essay 19

A house always belongs to somebody. Metaphorical linguistic

expressions based on this conceptualisation (IMMIGRANTS ARE GUESTS/LOCALS ARE LANLORDS/LADIES) generate a discourse which is consistent with the expression host countries, whereby the immigrant is presented as being a mere guest in the country s/he goes to. The connotative implications of the word host, implying a courteous welcoming attitude, seem ironic in this context. On the whole, such discursive practices are also consistent with other expressions where, as with the landlord/guest dualism, the local population is always put first, given priority, whereas the immigrant is presented as a second-class citizen. The implications are clear: the landlord/lady has full right to the property and resources etc., while the immigrant is just “invited” to share the leftovers –for example jobs not wanted. So it is quite logical that jobs should be reserved for the proprietors, who should have first pick and only leave what they do not want for themselves to the invited or maybe unwanted guests. Such conceptualisation perhaps explains the resentment towards those immigrants who “think” they are the “owners” of the new city:

The different cultures and traditions are important factors related to the separation between natives and immigrants, because most of the time- they don’t adapt themselves to the culture of the country they come to, and what they try to do is to impose their beliefs and way of live on the natives, and this is a fact that nobody likes, especially when immigrants think they are the “owners” of the new city. Essay 9 In the passage above it is also interesting to note how differences in

culture and traditions are seen as producing a separation between locals and immigrants. It is as if immigrants and locals were in separate containers which are portrayed as being apart, with no contact with each other –incidentally due to the immigrants’ incapacity for adaptation, whatever that is supposed to mean. This is coherent with the discourse of exclusion and segregation related to the use of the pronouns “we” vs. “they”, “us” vs. “them”. “They” are different, far and intentionally distant,


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hence the metaphors of distance and separation used in the following passages:

Besides, since they do not approach us, we cannot talk with them about those subjects. All this creates a series of prejudices which are really difficult to overcome. Essay 4 Nevertheless, in my opinion, people from Morocco seem to be intentionally more distant. Essay 4 Having said that, in my view, the major problem with immigration arises when this does not take place and the integration or the merging of communities or cultures is replaced by segregation, isolation and stigmatization of the new communities. Essay 13 These are the negative things that create a gap between host of the great societies which prevent citizens from receiving a better understanding. Essay 20 […] we could even mention terrorism. Muslim countries and western countries are separated more and more by this. Essay 7 Fanaticism is the biggest problem we have to face when speaking about immigrants in Spain; they come from North Africa and their religious beliefs are Muslim. Their way of life is so different to ours that sometimes it creates a civilization gap that produced tension between both cultures, for instance the role of woman in both societies is completely different. Essay 20 As we can see here, not only do pronouns emphasize the distance

between “them” and “us”, but also metaphorical linguistic expressions speak of separation and a civilization gap between containers intentionally separated, apart and with little contact. The association of criminality/terrorism and immigration, we find here, is particularly pernicious and unjustifiable by any standards, just as it is to make generalizations such us “Muslim countries” and “western countries” which imply an artificial antagonistic representation based on the “assumed” homogeneous nature of all “western” and “Muslim countries”. Such simplistic confrontational discourse does more harm than good hindering understanding and harmonious cooperation between human beings, and seriously misrepresenting the multicultural experience. Such structures must be deconstructed and challenged in the classroom so as to help students develop an awareness of the implications that such representations convey.

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4. Conclusion

In this article I have reflected upon the negative representation of immigration prompted by the use of several conceptual metaphors in the essays of our students. I have examined their usage and have also discussed the ideological values conveyed, by paying attention to socio-cultural representations which are potentially unfair and discriminatory.

I have found that a container schema seems to be very important in this respect as it operates as a unifying mental schema which links in a coherent way several other metaphors such as SPAIN IS A CONTAINER, war/conflict metaphors, liquid and natural disaster metaphors etc. For example, the container schema relates to the war/conflict metaphor, as it makes it possible to depict the host countries as containers vulnerable to attack by an external force, an enemy force which is trying to force its way into its inside space. The walls of the country represented as a container are ideally strong and rigid but also under constant threat of perforation and rupture and therefore in need of continuous support and reinforcement and defence. Thus the container representation activates subliminal fears related to the need to protect what is inside (family and group, territory, resources, jobs etc.) from an “assumed” external enemy/danger that is outside. Container representations can also be related to liquid and natural disaster metaphors (floods and tidal waves etc.) because the emotion of fear can be jointly aroused by disaster and containment scenarios through the perforation of a boundary around the container allowing the inflow or outflow of liquids. The country can therefore be depicted as a container to the point of being filled by immigrants, almost overflowing with thousands of them who are portrayed as trying to come in.

Such figurative uses of a language are ideologically powerful devices. They evoke strong emotions related to subliminal fears that immigration may provoke harmful effects on the population, activating related fears of loss of dominance and control and resistance to social change. As a result, the metaphorical linguistic structures produced seem to reinforce the myth that immigration is excessive and support the argument that it should be controlled, stopped – or even be reversed. Such a negative view has been found to be consistent with the lexical representation of immigration in such negative terms as “problem” (one of the most frequently used words in the essays) as well as with reiterative calls for greater control and adequate management of this phenomenon.

The conceptual metaphors we have been looking at show very well the ideological power of language to represent experience, signalling the potential they have to unify information with human emotions and basic


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instincts aroused by desires, fears etc. Hence they show us the need for a critical attitude and the importance of developing a critical perspective on the question of language and ideological representation. Charteris-Black (2004:42) says that the evaluations that are conveyed by metaphors are important in forming certain ways of looking at the world, so we must be aware of such attitudinal evaluations and maintain a critical stance towards these uses of language:

Critical Metaphor Analysis is a way of revealing underlying ideologies, attitudes and beliefs –and therefore constitutes a vital means of understanding more about the complex relationships between language, thought and social context.[…] Such awareness may lead us to take a critical stance towards these uses of language […]The development of such critical abilities is central, and not peripheral, to those involved in language education. (Charteris-Black 2004: 42)

I could not agree more. In this respect I believe the critical analysis I

have carried out here can be applied to classroom teaching at University level and be a useful tool for pedagogical purposes. Through the analysis of their own language (looking at the values, stereotypes, prejudices they show in their discourse/metaphors), the students can be made aware of issues of ideology in connection with immigration and intercultural relations. Their essays can serve as the basis for a more personal approach that seeks to get them to reflect upon their own moral and ethical responsibility in these matters.

The analysis of their own linguistic choices also seeks to make students aware of how improper certain uses of language are when referring to human beings, how important it is to deconstruct stereotypes and false generalizations ingrained in the linguistic medium that result in a discriminatory representation of certain social groups. Structures that misrepresent the multicultural experience should be highlighted and challenged in the classroom. Indeed, a critical reading of texts, a healthy procedure of vigilance, a responsive and responsible attitude should be encouraged and promoted by teachers and educational institutions alike. Such critical awareness can ultimately lead to solidarity and social change, since it opens up the possibility for alternative, more positive and enriching constructions of reality.

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CHAPTER FOUR

UNDERSTANDING AND OVERCOMING PRAGMATIC FAILURE WHEN INTERPRETING

PHATIC UTTERANCES

MANUEL PADILLA CRUZ

1. Introduction

Pragmatic failure, as Thomas defines it, is “[…] the inability to understand what is meant by what is said” (1983: 93). It occurs when a hearer fails to understand the exact proposition that the speaker intended to communicate with a contextualised utterance or when he fails to capture the intended pragmatic force of an utterance. Two types are normally distinguished: ‘pragmalinguistic’ failure, which arises when a non-native speaker or L2 learner inadequately transfers linguistic strategies from her L1 to the L2, and ‘sociopragmatic’ failure, which is caused by differing perceptions of what counts as appropriate linguistic behaviour in specific contexts (Thomas 1983: 99). While in the first type of pragmatic failure strategy selection, frequency, order or content of strategies or intonation patterns used, among many others, play a crucial role (Riley 2006; Tran 2006), in the second type L2 learners may transfer their L1 rules of speaking or sociocultural competence when performing or understanding communicative acts in their L2 (Takahashi and Beebe 1987; Wolfson 1989; Beebe et al. 1990; Riley 2006). This clearly indicates that there is a cross-linguistic influence in the learners’ L2 discourse and comprehension (Takahashi and Beebe 1993), for their knowledge of a language and culture other than the L2 affects their linguistic production and understanding (Kasper 1992: 207; Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993: 10). Such an influence can surface when learners lack knowledge of the L2 rules of use and hence have to rely on their L1 pragmatics to apply it in their interlanguage (Olshtain and Cohen 1989; Tran 2006).

Over the past decades, pragmatic failure has received due attention

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from many researchers, who have examined the L2 performance of learners of many different languages and cultural backgrounds in an overwhelmingly rich variety of speech acts that includes, but is not limited to, apologies (e.g. Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Olshtain 1983; García 1989; Kasanga and Lwanga-Lumu 2007), compliments (e.g. Nelson et al. 1996), refusals (e.g. Beebe et al. 1990; Kwon 2004), requests (e.g. Blum-Kulka 1982, 1988; Tanaka 1988; Færch and Kasper 1989; Hong 1997; Kasanga 1998), or the expression of gratitude (e.g. Eisenstein and Bodman 1993) in many different interactive contexts (e.g. Hale 1996; Arent 2000; Kasanga 2001). Most of these works focus on the effects that the linguistic behaviour of more or less competent L2 learners may have upon their (non-)native hearers. Their authors seem to agree that, while in some circumstances pragmatic failure may have relatively unimportant consequences and lead to (very) hilarious misunderstandings, in others it does have more serious repercussions and may result in misunderstandings leading to surprise, amazement, frustration, dissatisfaction or even interactive conflict and communication breakdown, since deviations from the expected or appropriate communicative practices in a community “[…] will immediately be regarded as ‘strange’ or –depending on the degree of ‘error’– inexplicable, stupid, crazy, and so on” (Riley 2006: 314). Regarding hearers, what can be found in those works are brief analyses and reflections about their possible or actual reactions to a linguistic behaviour or a style that differs from what they would have expected for a certain context in their culture or sociocultural group.

This paper does not centre on learners’ performance, but on hearers, regardless of whether they are native or non-native. As opposed to the many existing works on pragmatic failure, it reflects on the ways in which hearers can overcome conversational misunderstandings arising from the (mis)use of phatic utterances by L2 learners of English or from an insufficient processing of those utterances. It argues that one of the interpretive strategies available to hearers described by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) –namely, ‘cautious optimism’– can satisfactorily help (non-)native hearers overcome conversational misunderstandings and pragmatic failures when processing utterances that their non-native interlocutors would have expected them to assign a phatic interpretation. It firstly explains what phatic utterances are, how and why utterances receive a phatic interpretation, their importance for social interaction, the tendencies in their usage in the UK and USA and the possible risks that they may involve for interaction. Secondly, based on some of the tenets of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004), it discusses how hearers may achieve phatic interpretations and recover

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social information using the simplest interpretive strategy used in comprehension. Finally, it reflects on how hearers may overcome two types of pragmatic failures arising from the occurrence of those utterances in conversations.

2. The importance and risks of phatic utterances for social interaction

Initially, utterances are assigned a phatic interpretation or taken to be tokens of phatic communion when their propositional content is obvious or trivial, as it does not transmit factual information that significantly improves the hearer’s world view (e.g. Malinowski 1923; Turner 1973; Leech 1974; Hudson 1980; Coulmas 1981; Edmondson and House 1981). For this reason, phatic utterances have been customarily considered linguistic devices that are mainly aimed at maintaining the interactive contact between interlocutors, and one of the most frequent examples of interlocutors’ communicative behaviour when they meet and do not really have anything interesting to say, or just want to avoid the uncomfortable tension that silence may originate (Malinowski 1923).

In relevance-theoretic terms, utterances receive a phatic interpretation when they only ‘make manifest’ assumptions that are already manifest to interlocutors1, or, in other words, when interlocutors are already acquainted with the information that they transmit (Žegarac 1998; Žegarac and Clark 1999). Therefore, the relevance of phatic utterances does not lie on their propositional content, or on the speaker’s ‘informative intention’, but on the very act of speaking. Their relevance resides in the speaker’s ‘communicative intention’, in the fact that she says something to the hearer and thus shows her want to interact with him2.

Phatic utterances are very important linguistic devices for social interaction because they create ties of union between interlocutors (e.g. Leech 1983; Silva 1980; Schneider 1988; Coupland, Coupland and Robinson 1992; Coupland, Robinson and Coupland 1994)3 and transmit

1 The relevance-theoretic notion of ‘manifestness’ alludes to the potentiality of being mentally represented by an individual (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 2 A speaker’s ‘informative intention’ is her intention to make manifest a series of assumptions to the hearer, whilst her ‘communicative intention’ is her intention to make manifest to the hearer that she indeed has that first intention (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 3 For a relevance-theoretic account of these communicative effects, see Padilla Cruz (2005, 2007a).

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indexical information about their social roles, attributes, etc. (Laver 1974, 1975). In addition, they may also implicitly communicate information about the politeness system in which interaction takes place (Padilla Cruz 2004a, 2007b).

Laver (1974, 1975) has shown that the use of phatic utterances in the UK and US obeys various tacitly established interactive norms. When interlocutors are interacting in what Scollon and Wong-Scollon (1995) label a ‘solidarity politeness system’, they normally resort to ‘personal’ phatic utterances, i.e. phatic utterances about themselves (their look, clothes, likes, dislikes, etc.) (1-2). When they are interacting in a ‘deference politeness system’ (Scollon and Wong-Scollon 1995), they tend to use ‘neutral’ phatic utterances, i.e. utterances about different aspects of the spatio-temporal setting where the conversation is taking place (the weather, sports, recent news, etc.) (3-4). Finally, when interlocutors are interacting in a ‘hierarchical politeness system’ (Scollon and Wong-Scollon 1995)4, individuals seem to abide by two other norms. On the one hand, when the more powerful interlocutor addresses the less powerful, the former individual appears to be allowed to use phatic utterances about the latter individual, what Laver (1974, 1975) terms ‘other-oriented’ utterances (5-6). On the other hand, when it is the less powerful individual that addresses the more powerful individual, the inferior may use phatic utterances about herself, i.e. ‘self-oriented’ utterances (7-8), but should avoid other-oriented ones. This enables her to avoid invading the other’s psychological space and originating a possible interactive conflict.

(1) Oh, Mary! I do love your new apartment. (2) That skirt is cute, isn’t it? (3) Boring match yesterday! (4) It seems as if it is going to rain. (5) Wow! What a flat! (6) Oh, my God! Look at that chandelier! Isn’t it great? (7) I prefer a cup of tea in the mornings. (8) Oh, I do not like those muffins. Norms like these must be part of the wide set of cultural

4 Politeness systems are defined on the basis of the values that the sociological variables ‘power’ and ‘social distance’ acquire in interaction. Thus, a solidarity politeness system is characterised by a low value of both variables [-P, -D], a deference politeness system is characterised by a low value of the former variable and a high value of the latter [-P, +D], and a hierarchical politeness system is characterised by a high value of the former and a low or high value of the latter [+P, +/-D].


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metarepresentations that the individuals belonging to a certain socio-cultural group, in this case the British and the Americans, possess (Sperber 1996; Padilla Cruz 2004b, 2004c), just as they store information about what counts as an offence in their community, how they should apologise for it, how they can thank someone for something, welcome someone, etc. Such metarepresentations considerably influence their communicative behaviour and condition their interpretation of subsequent linguistic (or other) behaviour, as they enter and feed the inferential processes intervening in utterance interpretation. Thanks to them, the processing of utterances which, apparently, do not significantly modify their knowledge of the world can induce hearers to draw conclusions about the social reality in which they interact, which makes those utterances worth processing (Padilla Cruz 2004a, 2004b, 2004c). Elsewhere, following recent relevance-theoretic work, I have called those conclusions ‘social effects’ (Padilla Cruz 2008).

Communication is an extremely risky activity because utterances can have many interpretations, even if the speaker intends to communicate only one of them and that interpretation may be clear and straightforward to her. Prompted by the expectations of relevance that an utterance generates, the hearer decodes it, pragmatically enriches the ‘logical form’ that he obtains from its decoding5, assigns a speech-act or propositional-attitude description to it and recovers any implicit content in order to arrive at a specific interpretation6. Under normal circumstances, he does so by following the interpretive path that requires the least cognitive effort possible and results in a satisfactory amount of ‘cognitive effects’7. When he arrives at an ‘optimally relevant’ interpretation of an utterance, he stops his processing and may think that that is the interpretation of the utterance that the speaker may have intended to communicate (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson 1999; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004).

Concerning the phatic interpretation of utterances, there are some linguistic routines or formulae that in many cases make it possible for utterances to be regarded as phatic almost automatically, which consequently facilitates their correct understanding (Edmondson and 5 In relevance-theoretic terms, a ‘logical form’ is a structured set of concepts (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). 6 Although enumerated in this order, these processes need not be performed sequentially, but can take place simultaneously. 7 These are the strengthening of previous information, the contradiction and subsequent rejection of previously held information, or the derivation of new information from the joint interaction of recently processed and already possessed information (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995).

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House 1981; Schneider 1988). Moreover, their appearance in specific conversational phases such as the opening or the closing phase of conversations, or as constituents of fixed or frozen adjacency pairs in those phases, increases the likelihood that hearers perceive them as phatic and correctly interpret them as such (Kasper 1984). That an utterance is correctly interpreted as phatic is also possible because of the activation of the appropriate interactive frames and the selection of an adequate processing strategy –bottom-up or top-down (e.g. Kasper 1984).

This notwithstanding, there is no specific type of utterance that can be said to be inherently phatic. Individuals resort to many comments, remarks or statements with rather diverse contents or topics to engage in phatic communion (Schneider 1988). Besides, phatic utterances are not exclusively restricted to the opening and closing phases of conversations. Therefore, the ‘phaticity’ of utterances is a characteristic that interlocutors have to negotiate as a conversation takes place and unfolds (Coupland, Coupland and Robinson 1992; Coupland, Robinson and Coupland 1994). If phatic utterances do not constitute a class of utterances characterised by special formal properties and do not appear in predictable places in conversations, they may give rise to many misunderstandings and pragmatic failures. To illustrate this, consider the following examples:

(9) This bus is always late! (10) Your new coat is cute. (11) This way is so long! (12) It is cold in here. (13) My legs are not fit for these slopes! Each of these utterances may be interpreted as phatic in a suitable

context. (9) may be perfectly interpreted as phatic, for instance, in a bus stop where two individuals are waiting for a specific bus and they equally know that it is delayed. (10) may be assigned a phatic interpretation if it appears at the opening phase of a conversation or if the hearer is aware that the new, recently bought coat he is wearing at that moment is one of the kind the speaker likes. (11) can have a phatic interpretation in a situation in which two individuals have been walking for a more than reasonable time and the speaker has previously mentioned that it is taking them longer than expected to get to their destination. (12) may equally be phatic if the two interlocutors are already acquainted with the fact that the room where they happen to be is cold. Finally, (13) can be perceived as phatic if the two individuals interacting know that it is hard for the speaker to go up the slopes in question. Nevertheless, in addition to having those phatic interpretations, and provided the necessary contextual factors


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obtain, (9) can be perfectly understood as an genuine complaint about the delay of the bus, (10) as a sincere compliment on the hearer’s new coat, especially if he did not expect the speaker to like it, (11) as an indirect suggestion or request to go a different way, (12) as an indirect request to switch the heater on or to close the window, and (13) as an apology for not being able to follow the other interlocutor’s pace. Under such interpretations, these utterances may also result in cognitive effects that the hearer might not obtain from their phatic interpretations.

These examples show that in many situations any individual may hesitate about the exact interpretation that his interlocutor could have envisaged for utterances likes these. They can perfectly have both a phatic and a non-phatic interpretation, if the necessary conditions apply, as a consequence of the pragmatic ambivalence of utterances (Leech and Thomas 1990; Thomas 1995). If native speakers of a language can certainly have problems when assigning a (non-)phatic interpretation to utterances like these, problems may also arise in interaction between native speakers and learners or in interaction between learners. Consequently, both native and non-native hearers may fail to correctly process utterances that their interlocutors intend to be interpreted as phatic and, in fact, they do so in many circumstances.

The occurrence of some utterances at specific conversational phases can help hearers correctly process those utterances as phatic, but not so in many other cases. Their (non-)native interlocutors may not follow norms and behavioural patterns like those that Laver (1974, 1975) identified when using phatic utterances and choose types of phatic utterances that would not be expected in some social contexts. This may lead hearers to undesired interpretations. In other cases, they may only recover a phatic interpretation of those utterances, stop there their processing, as they would regard that interpretation as optimally relevant, and not exploit those utterances so as to obtain social effects.

All these virtual problems that hearers may find when interpreting phatic utterances should induce us to wonder how they assign phatic interpretations to utterances under normal circumstances, what cognitive strategy/ies they employ to do so and how they can overcome possible interpretation problems or difficulties. The relevance-driven comprehension process (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004) and the cognitive strategies suggested by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) can shed some light on these issues. The strategy of ‘naïve optimism’ can help us understand why individuals accept one correct or erroneous interpretation, while the strategy of ‘cautious optimism’ can help us understand how individuals can overcome pragmatic failures and

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possible conversational misunderstandings originated by a misuse of phatic utterances8. I turn to a discussion of these two strategies in relation to the usage of phatic utterances in the next two sections.

3. Naïve optimism and the phatic interpretation of utterances

Under normal circumstances, a hearer searches for the interpretation of an utterance that seems to him sufficiently relevant. When he finds that interpretation, he thinks that it is the interpretation that the speaker intended to communicate and considers it to be her informative intention. If he does not find an optimally relevant interpretation, communication does not succeed.

When processing utterances, the easiest and simplest cognitive strategy available to hearers is what Sperber (1994) calls naïve optimism. A naïve and optimistic hearer presupposes that his interlocutor is both ‘competent’ –i.e. that she has an adequate command of the grammatical norms and rules of use of her language– and ‘benevolent’ –i.e. that she will not intend to deceive him. As a result, that hearer will take for granted that his interlocutor will try to avoid misunderstandings and guide him to the interpretation that she intends to communicate following the interpretive path that yields the greatest number of cognitive effects in exchange for a reasonable amount of cognitive effort. In turn, a competent and benevolent speaker is one who checks that the information that she intends to communicate will in fact turn out relevant to the hearer, and that he will recover it instead of other possible interpretations.

Recall utterances (9-13) above, which can perfectly have either a phatic or a non-phatic interpretation given the necessary conditions. A competent and benevolent speaker may simply intend to communicate to the hearer with each of those utterances that she just wishes to keep the interactive contact with him. In that case, the complaint interpretation of (9), the compliment interpretation of (10), the suggestion/request interpretation of (11, 12) and the apology interpretation of (13) would be unwarranted. If the hearer is naïve and optimistic, he will follow the interpretive path that provides him with a satisfactory amount of cognitive

8 Sperber (1994) describes a third interpretive strategy called ‘sophisticated understanding’. Since that strategy enables a hearer to recover an interpretation that the speaker does not want or expect him to recover for some reason –she is not benevolent or wants to deceive her interlocutor– it will not be taken into account for the purposes of this paper.


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effects in exchange of an acceptable amount of cognitive effort. During that process, he may realise that he is already aware of what the speaker refers to, since the assumptions that those utterances make manifest are already manifest to himself. Consequently, he may directly conclude that the speaker’s intention when using one of those utterances is precisely that one, as those utterances do not significantly alter his world view, and stop his processing. When he recovers that interpretation and considers it optimally relevant, he will not think of any other possible alternative interpretation, as this would detract from optimal relevance. He will believe that the speaker’s intention is indeed to talk to him just to keep the interactive contact, show a friendly attitude or avoid the unpleasantness of silence in that situation. However, if during that interpretive process he does not realise that the assumptions that those utterances make manifest are already manifest to him, he can perfectly end up recovering an unintended interpretation and considering it optimally relevant.

Although a naïve and optimistic hearer can potentially reach an interpretation along those lines when processing utterances actually intended by the speaker to be interpreted as phatic, he can also obtain social effects regarding, for instance, the sort of social relationship existing between him and the speaker. For a competent and benevolent speaker to transmit information about politeness systems, she must verify that the type of phatic utterance she intends to resort to in a conversation –neutral or personal, self- or other-oriented– corresponds to the type of utterance that can be used in the politeness system that she wishes to establish, maintain or modify with her interlocutor. In other words, she has to access assumptions about the interactive context, infer the politeness system existing between her and the hearer and check that the type of phatic utterance that she intends to use is allowed by the cultural metarepresentations referring to interaction with a particular individual in a specific social context (14). In addition, she must also check that the hearer has an easy and immediate access to those contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations, as they will influence the hearer’s interpretation of the utterance she resorts to and can help him recover or prevent him from recovering that social information. Finally, that competent and benevolent speaker must select the utterance that best matches the politeness system that she wishes to establish, maintain or modify (15), so that the hearer inferentially obtains the desired social effects (16). A naïve and optimistic hearer will obtain those effects if he assumes that the speaker’s intention is to make him recover that social information, i.e. if it is part of her informative intention, and that the only optimally relevant interpretation that she might have wanted to

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communicate is the one that he recovers9. Following the interpretive path that he thinks requires least cognitive effort and yields a reasonable amount of cognitive effects, he will access as many manifest contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations regarding the use of phatic utterances in a particular social relationship as necessary and will infer information about the politeness system that the speaker wishes to establish, maintain or modify. If he does not access such contextual assumptions and cultural metarepresentations, he might not obtain those effects.

(14) a. I do not know if my interlocutor has more power than me.

[contextual assumption] b. My interlocutor and I have not met before. [contextual

assumption] c. There is a deference politeness system between my hearer and me.

[inference] d. In a deference politeness system the appropriate behaviour is to

begin a conversation by means of a neutral phatic utterance. [cultural metarepresentation]

e. In a deference politeness system personal phatic utterances should be avoided. [cultural metarepresentation]

(15) Frosty morning! (16) a. I do not know if my interlocutor has more power than me.

[contextual assumption] b. My interlocutor and I have not met before. [contextual assumption] c. There is a deference politeness system between my interlocutor and me. [inference] d. In a deference politeness system neutral phatic utterances are preferred. [cultural metarepresentation] e. My interlocutor wishes to establish a deference politeness system with me. [inference]

In the examples and situations discussed so far, speakers are supposed to behave both competently, because they command the language they speak and the rules governing the use of phatic utterances, and benevolently, because they do not want to deceive their interlocutors and give them the impression that there exists a politeness system that does not really exists between them. However, speakers do not always behave competently when interacting, for they may not be aware of the constraints

9 As Wilson puts it, “[The speaker] has spoken competently if the first interpretation that [the hearer] finds relevant enough is the intended one; she has spoken benevolently if this interpretation not only seems relevant but is genuinely so” (1999: 137).


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operating on certain linguistic behaviours in specific situations in their culture, take into account some of the features of the situation in which interaction takes place, foresee the contexts that hearers will most easily and quickly access to interpret utterances or select the most adequate utterance that leads hearers to recover specific social information (Sperber 1994: 192). This may bias hearers and make them obtain undesired interpretations. If this is something that can quite frequently happen between native speakers of a language, in the case of interaction between natives and L2 learners who do not have a good command of the target language and its cultural system, or interaction exclusively between L2 learners, the probability that non-native speakers behave incompetently may dramatically increase. As mentioned above, that incompetence can have negative consequences because both native and non-native hearers may recover interpretations that significantly differ from those that their interlocutors might have intended to communicate.

In some cases, an L2 learner may use an utterance expecting the hearer to interpret it as phatic, but may not be aware of some contextual factors that make him process it as non-phatic. Or, viceversa, the L2 learner may expect her interlocutor to process an utterance as non-phatic and is not aware that the assumptions that her utterance makes manifest are already manifest to him, so that he interprets it as phatic. In other cases, L2 learners either do not take into account the values of the sociological variables determining politeness systems or wrongly select a type of phatic utterance that does not correspond to the politeness system that they have established with their interlocutors without the intention to redefine it. The inadequate usage of a specific phatic utterance in a specific politeness system can give rise to pragmatic failures and many conversational misunderstandings in which hearers may recover a series of ‘prejudicial implicatures’ (Escandell Vidal 1996; Jary 1998) that may seriously affect interaction. However, they can overcome them by resorting to another interpretive strategy, which Sperber (1994) terms ‘cautious optimism’.

4. Cautious optimism and pragmatic failure caused by the (mis)use of phatic utterances

When pragmatic failure occurs, a hearer can feel induced to attribute to his interlocutor beliefs –‘prefailure’ beliefs, as Field (2007) calls them– and intentions that she might not actually have. He may do so on the basis of an appreciated mismatch between the linguistic stimulus that the speaker selected to achieve a particular communicative goal and his cultural metarepresentations about interaction. Such metarepresentations

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can encourage the hearer to anticipate that the other individual will behave in a specific way or to expect a certain outcome from her linguistic behaviour in a given situation. If the speaker’s actual behaviour does not correspond to the hearer’s anticipations or expectations, they become the reason for the hearer’s subsequent surprise and frustration, which he tries to justify by attributing some beliefs or intentions to the speaker (Field 2007: 134). In extreme cases, an (erroneous) attribution of beliefs or intentions can even affect the hearer’s perception of the speaker’s personality.

Nevertheless, “[…] there is no compelling reason to conclude that such attributions imply that […] actions are guided by occurrent beliefs” (Field 2007: 133). Misunderstandings arising from pragmatic failure can be reasonably overcome by resorting to cautious optimism. This cognitive strategy is “[...] a special case of competent attribution of intentions” (Sperber 1994:192). By using this strategy, the hearer attributes to the speaker the intention to communicate an interpretation of an utterance that would have achieved an optimal level of relevance and that he would have accessed more directly and with less cognitive effort instead of another interpretation which, at that moment and under specific communicative circumstances, he must accept as the most relevant one. Cautious optimism is necessary when the speaker has not thought of another utterance that leads the hearer to recover the cognitive effects that she intended to produce with less effort, or when she has not taken into account some contextual elements that favour an alternative interpretation instead of the desired one. This strategy enables the hearer to overcome two types of misunderstandings: ‘accidental relevance’ and ‘accidental irrelevance’ (Wilson 1999: 137). In what follows I will discuss how (non-)native hearers can overcome these two types of misunderstandings when processing phatic utterances produced by L2 learners.

4.1. Overcoming accidental relevance of (non-)phatic utterances

Cases of accidental relevance arise when the first interpretation that appears to the hearer to be relevant enough is not the one that the speaker intended to communicate. A naïve and optimistic hearer would accept that first interpretation as optimally relevant and would identify it with the speaker’s informative intention. On the contrary, an optimistic and cautious hearer is able to go a step further and wonder whether the first interpretation that seems to him optimally relevant is in fact the one that the speaker really intended to communicate. If not, he is entitled to consider an alternative interpretation.


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An optimistic and cautious hearer is able to overcome pragmatic failures, in which an L2 learner’s formulation of an utterance ostensively but inadvertently favours an unintended interpretation. In the case of pragmatically ambivalent utterances like (9-13), which can give rise to different competing interpretations, a (non-)native hearer can hesitate between a phatic and a non-phatic interpretation. If he is naïve and optimistic and does not realise that those utterances make manifest assumptions that the L2 learner thinks are already manifest to him, he may assign to those utterances the complaint-, compliment-, suggestion-/request- or apology-interpretations. He will do so if, following the interpretive path that requires least effort and yields an acceptable amount of cognitive effects, those interpretations are the first to come to his mind and he finds them relevant enough. He would accept them and would not think that the L2 learner might have expected him to interpret those utterances differently, just as tokens of phatic communion. On the other hand, if the (non-)native hearer is cautious and optimistic, he may realise that the assumptions that the L2 learner makes manifest to him with those utterances are already manifest to himself, conclude that her intention is to avoid an uncomfortable interactive silence and opt for a phatic interpretation in spite of formulations that may have initially prompted him to accept those other non-phatic interpretations as optimally relevant.

An optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer is also able to overcome those cases in which the L2 learner’s (unfortunate) selection of a type of utterance for a specific social context ostensively but inadvertently makes him draw some unexpected or undesired conclusions. He can refuse the first interpretation of an utterance that appears to him relevant and makes him conclude that the L2 learner’s informative intention is very different from the one which she actually has, and considers another alternative interpretation that enables him to keep the presumption that the learner is behaving benevolently. Nonetheless, he may think that she is incompetent.

In a given politeness system, for which the cultural metarepresentations spread throughout the individuals of a group establish a type of phatic utterance as preferable and adequate, a naïve and optimistic (non-)native hearer could interpret a dispreferred phatic utterance as inadequate on the grounds of those metarepresentations. Thus, in a hierarchical politeness system in which he is the superior and his interlocutor is the inferior, he could expect a self-oriented phatic utterance (17) from the L2 learner. If she addresses him by means of an other-oriented utterance (18), he could find a conclusion such as (19) optimally relevant:

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(17) I can’t stand the traffic in this town! (18) You have arrived late today! (19) My interlocutor is being rude to me. That naïve and optimistic (non-)native hearer could even think that his

interlocutor has not behaved benevolently and, therefore, attribute to her the intention to invade his psychological space, to be rude or impolite on purpose, which would certainly have negative consequences for their social relationship. However, an optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer can consider assumptions such as those in (20) as ‘alternative implicatures’ (Yus Ramos 1999a, 1999b) when processing an utterance such as (18) in that politeness system, instead of considering (19):

(20) a. My interlocutor does not want to be rude/impolite to me; she has

just (unknowingly) chosen a wrong phatic token to begin this conversation. b. My interlocutor thinks she can use an other-oriented phatic token to begin a conversation with me.

That (non-)native hearer could also have found a conclusion like (19)

optimally relevant on the basis of the cultural metarepresentations that he would have accessed. However, he realises that that is not the conclusion that the L2 learner might have intended or expected him to derive and considers an alternative one. Such conclusion makes it possible for him to still see his interlocutor as benevolent, although not fully competent, and prevents him from attributing to her an intention to offend him which she did not actually have.

As can be seen, in cases like these cautious optimism can enable (non-)native hearers to recover the intended interpretation of utterances that may be pragmatically ambivalent in a given communicative situation because the L2 learner has not taken into account some contextual features and has formulated her utterance in a way that favours an alternative, but equally possible, interpretation. This strategy can also enable (non-)native hearers to dismiss an undesired interpretation that could lead them to attribute to their incompetent interlocutors certain prefailure beliefs or intentions that would have guided their actions. If hearers attributed those beliefs or intentions to their interlocutors, they could form an inadequate idea of their interlocutors’ personality.


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4.2. Overcoming accidental irrelevance of phatic utterances

As mentioned above, cautious optimism also makes it possible for the hearer to overcome cases of accidental irrelevance. Such cases arise, for instance, when he thinks that the speaker only transmits information that is already known or when she makes a slip of the tongue (Wilson 1999). In these circumstances, a naïve and optimistic hearer would only consider the linguistic evidence of the utterance and, as a consequence of its apparently low level of informativeness, would not obtain cognitive effects that satisfy his expectations of relevance. On the contrary, an optimistic and cautious hearer notices the apparent irrelevance of an utterance and asks himself which other adequate interpretation the speaker could have intended to communicate so that the utterance would have achieved an optimal level of relevance. This interpretive strategy is also decisive for the interpretation of phatic utterances and the recovery of social effects.

Apparently, phatic utterances only make manifest assumptions that are previously manifest to interlocutors, so such utterances might be considered irrelevant by some individuals. An optimistic and naïve hearer accesses the assumptions that a phatic utterance makes manifest and, since they are already manifest to him, he may think that the L2 learner’s intention is just to keep the interactive contact. From the processing of that utterance he might only obtain what Yus Ramos (1999a, 1999b) calls an ‘involuntary explicature’. That would prevent him from grasping any implicit content that his interlocutor may intend to communicate –in this case, information about their social relationship. On the contrary, when facing an apparent case of irrelevance, an optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer would go one step further and expand his interpretive context, incorporating assumptions referring to both interlocutors’ power, social distance or affect, as well as cultural metarepresentations referring to politeness system and interaction within them. In that way, he can relate those assumptions to the assumptions made manifest by the phatic utterance and obtain social effects that satisfy his expectations of relevance.

Accordingly, an optimistic and cautious (non-)native hearer would expand his context so as to solve the apparent irrelevance of (21) in a context where it is mutually manifest to both interlocutors that the blouse to which the utterance alludes is beautiful, and would move from an interpretation such as (22) to another such as (23). He would do so because of the cultural metarepresentations about the establishment or existence of a particular politeness system and the type of utterances that could be expected in it:

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(21) Beautiful blouse! (22) My interlocutor is willing to communicate with me. (23) My interlocutor may wish to maintain a solidarity politeness system

with me. The speaker’s informative intention may be rather diffuse or difficult

to pin down in some communicative circumstances, so it is the hearer’s task to make an appraisal thereof as exact as possible. She may also make weakly manifest some of the assumptions constituting her informative intention and expect the hearer to use them in order to get the intended interpretation of her utterance. However, the hearer may not use them or use some unintended implicatures on his own responsibility and, hence, misunderstand her utterance. When facing a case of accidental irrelevance, an optimistic and cautious hearer is able to incorporate to his interpretative context cultural metarepresentations that allow him to obtain social effects concerning the politeness system that the speaker intends to establish, maintain or modify, or about the speaker’s (im)polite attitude. This should not mean that a naïve and optimistic hearer is not able to recover those effects in exchange of a reasonable amount of cognitive effort if the utterance generates enough expectations of relevance. If that hearer recovers them, he may attribute the speaker the intention to transmit those assumptions to him.

The speaker’s informative intention is a first-level metarepresentation of another representation formed by the assumptions that she intends to make manifest to the hearer. In turn, her communicative intention is a second-level informative intention, as it is her intention to make mutually manifest her informative intention (Sperber 1994: 193). In linguistic communication the hearer must discover which the speaker’s actual informative intention is. In order to do so, he must carry out an inferential process in which he takes the speaker’s informative intention as a premise and comes to a conclusion about that intention. As a consequence, he will be able to attribute that informative intention to the speaker. In that inferential process, the hearer uses a first-level metarepresentation so as to obtain a second-level metarepresentation:

(24) [S intends [me to believe/think [the blouse is beautiful]]] When interpreting an utterance that appears to be phatic, an optimistic

and naïve (non-)native hearer reaches this second level of metarepresentation. However, an optimistic and cautious hearer takes this second-level metarepresentation as a premise for a new inferential process because he thinks that the interpretation of the utterance that he has


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recovered and finds relevant enough is not the interpretation that his (in)competent interlocutor intended to communicate. Consequently, he searches for another interpretation that is indeed optimally relevant. This means that he rejects the conclusion that the optimistic and naïve hearer would have drawn and considers another possible interpretation. An optimistic and cautious hearer needs another level of metarepresentation that makes it possible for him to solve his interlocutor’s incompetence in the two cases mentioned (Wilson, 1999: 137-138), either because an incompetent or not fully competent learner has selected an utterance that leads him to obtain an undesired interpretation or because that incompetent or not fully competent learner has produced an irrelevant utterance.

Communication is an intentional activity which not only presupposes the existence of an informative intention in one of the interlocutors, but also the existence of an intention that the other individual recognises that very intention or, in other words, her communicative intention (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995; Sperber 1994; Wilson and Sperber 2002, 2004). If a (non-)native hearer assumes that an L2 learner is competent and benevolent, he does not need to metarepresent her thoughts, but to recover an interpretation that he considers relevant and to think that it is the learner’s informative intention. On the contrary, if a (non-)native hearer assumes that the learner is benevolent but incompetent, then he will think that she may have intended to communicate another different interpretation that would have in fact achieved an optimal level of relevance.

5. Conclusion

Most works on pragmatic failure underline the need to develop L2 learners’ ‘metapragmatic awareness’ so as to make them conscious of the importance of correctly knowing their L2 and applying its conventions of use, as well as of the repercussions that an undesired influence of their L1 may have upon their interlocutors’ perception of their personality. Regarding hearers, those works only dwell on the possible or actual evaluations that they could make of their more or less competent interlocutors’ linguistic behaviour, but do not say much about how they could contribute to make interaction smoother and softer by overcoming pragmatic failures, or the cognitive strategies they could resort to in order to do so.

This paper has discussed how hearers can take advantage of one of the interpretive strategies suggested by Sperber (1994) and Wilson (1999) in order to overcome pragmatic failures stemming from an inadequate usage

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of utterances envisaged as phatic by L2 learners. It has argued that cautious optimism is a strategy that can successfully help (non-)native hearers obtain alternative interpretations to other interpretations that, unfortunately, achieve an optimal degree of relevance in certain contexts. Being cautious and optimistic, hearers do not need to attribute to their interlocutors certain prefailure beliefs or intentions that would have allegedly guided their behaviour, an attribution that could induce them to form an erroneous conception of their personality.

L2 learners should therefore be trained to become optimistic and cautious hearers who are be able to metarepresent their interlocutors’ beliefs and intentions and thus consider alternative interpretations of apparently irrelevant utterances that can implicitly communicate additional social information or of utterances that accidentally achieve an optimal level of relevance under an unexpected or undesired interpretation because of a wrong choice of their linguistic form. Teaching them to be cautious and optimistic, teachers will progressively make learners understand that they should not look for alleged beliefs or intentions that could have guided their interlocutors’ linguistic behaviour, but that their behaviour is in some cases the result of an uninformed wrong habit, whose potential consequences they could even ignore.

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Kasanga, L. A. “Requests in English by second language users”. ITL, Review of Applied Linguistics 119-120 (1998): 123-153.

—. “Intercultural sociolinguistics and communication research in South Africa: its relevance to academic settings and the service industry”. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 19 (2001): 253-273.

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Kasper, G. “Pragmatic comprehension in learner-native speaker discourse”. Language Learning 34 (1984): 1-20.

—. “Pragmatic transfer”. Second Language Research 8 (1992): 203-231. Kasper, G. and S. Blum-Kulka (eds.). Interlanguage Pragmatics. New

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Progress 7 (1974): 1-17. —. “Communicative functions of phatic communion”. In Organisation of

Behaviour in Face-to-face Interaction, edited by A. Kendon, R. M. Harris and M. R. Key, 215-238. The Hague: Mouton, 1975.

Leech, G. Semantics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974. —. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Leech, G. and J. Thomas. “Language, meaning and context: pragmatics”.

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Malinowski, B. K. “The problem of meaning in primitive languages”. In The Meaning of Meaning. A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism, edited by C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, 451-510. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1923.

Nelson, G. L., M. Al-Batal and E. Echols. “Arabic and English compliment responses: potential for pragmatic failure”. Applied Linguistics 17 (1996): 411-432.

Olshtain, E. “Sociocultural competence and language transfer: the case of apology”. In Series on Issues on Second Language Research, edited by S. D. Krashen and R. C. Scarcella, 232-249. Rowley: Newbury House, 1983.

Olshtain, E. and A. D. Cohen. “Speech act behaviour across languages”. In Transfer in Language Production, edited by H. W. Dechert and M. Raupach, 53-67. Norwood: Ablex, 1989.

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PART II:

TEACHING LANGUAGES ACROSS CULTURES

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ACQUISITION OF PRAGMATIC COMPETENCE FROM A STRATEGIC

PERSPECTIVE: APOLOGY, A CASE IN POINT

ABDELHADI BELLACHHAB

1. Introduction Within the scope of thirty years Interlanguage Pragmatics (IP henceforth) seduced and still charms a large number of scholars belonging to different areas of research. A hybrid domain, it seeks inspiration particularly in Language Acquisition, Applied Linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and above all, pragmatics. This increasing interest in IP gave rise to considerable interrogations whether in instructional milieus or elsewhere. The eminent importance it received in Language Acquisition literature (Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993; Bardovi-Harlig 1999; Kasper and Rose 1999; Rose 2000; Rose and Kasper 2001) illustrates well, on the one hand, the notable progress in theoretical pragmatics (Austin 1962; Searle 1969, 1976; Leech 1983; Levinson 1983), and proves, on the other hand, the great will to enrich, in a methodical way, studies done before. However, despite the importance of a large scope of studies done in IP they seem to be of a descriptive/comparative nature rather than explanative/ interpretative one, though they sometimes provide, as Bardovi-Harlig (2001:13) notes, “[…] a common analytic framework which facilitates comparison between studies.” Allusion here is made to the interesting quantity of research done within cross-cultural range. Ellis (1994), in this respect, maintains that in spite of the large number of studies having IP as their subject of research few of them tried to deal with the “process” of acquiring pragmatic competence. There is much more interest in IP as a product rather than a process. Therefore, could we still

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hope for a systematic research which attempts to explicit the different acquisitional procedures and mechanisms underlying IP?

2. Study scope

Given the importance that we attach to IP insofar as its development is concerned, our study is part of a body of research taking place within a large and newly created program called CAPSA-Lang1, a program which is located at the crossroads of two disciplinary interfaces:

! The interface between semantic theory and discourse analysis. ! The interface between analytic didactic (the analysis of discursive

practices within didactic communication) and second/foreign language acquisition.

CAPSA-Lang, in fact, has two main objectives which are closely interwoven. The first one seeks developing the links between fundamental research in semantics and pragmatics, on the one hand, and on the other, in second/foreign language acquisition. The second tries to promote methodological programs in French as a Foreign Language (FFL)2 teaching.

Insofar as interpersonal communication is concerned, our research study is, to a large extent, based on Leech’s (1983) view of pragmatics as “interpersonal rhetoric”. This view conceives of interactants as social actors accomplishing their goals not only by satisfying them but also by paying attention to their interpersonal relation with their partners.

Up until now, numerous studies examined apology in instructional contexts3. Most of them, however, tend to investigate IP from a rather narrow perspective limited to whatever has to do with linguistic realisation of apology in a comparative framework without, for all that, trying to give practical explanations of what might underlie apology performance. Some studies, despite their restricted number, offer quite possible clarifications relating to pragmatic competence acquisition and development, either from a discursive (House 1993; Zuengler 1993) or cognitive (Bialystok 1990; Schmidt 1993) point of view.

1 CAPSA-Lang stands for the Acquisition of Argumentative Pragmatic and Semantic Competence. 2 FFL stands for French as a Foreign Language. 3 See Cohen and Olshtain 1981; Fraser 1981; Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Olshtain 1983, 1989; Bergman and Kasper 1993; Trosborg 1995.

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2.1 Objectives

Within the framework of CAPSA-Lang program4, we project three complimentary goals: scientific, pedagogical, and strategic. This study, in fact, tries to offer, in one way or another, some leads of reflexion in the middle of a mass of IP studies. Scientifically speaking, this is an endeavour to test our hypotheses (discussed later on) concerning basically the links between the acquisition of pragmatic and semantic competence. We are therefore looking to determine the cognitive mechanisms responsible for the development of these competencies. From a pedagogic point of view, we tend to promote the elaboration and the conception of a new curriculum, as is suggested by Robinson (2001). First of all, we opt for developing activity units in FFL class based on a more structured integration of speech acts within the whole fabric of the curriculum, a structured integration which takes into account not only the grammatical dimension of speech act realisation but also the sociocultural one. Secondly, the elaboration of a new curriculum needs organising the activity units in terms of time sequences for the sake of an optimal operation within the learning period. We finally try to focus more than ever on the learner’s role in assimilating (and analysing) a given language other than his/her mother tongue by examining his learning motivations and wants.

Finally, we advocate, in a strategic way, the development of the different links existing between research in semantics, pragmatics, and FFL/FSL5.

2.2 Research questions and assumptions

This study addresses three central questions in connection with the different components of communicative competence (Hymes 1971; Canale and Swain 1980; Canale 1983; Bachman 1990; Bachman and Palmer 1996), mainly pragmatic, semantic, and strategic competence. We thus formulate our main concerns as follows:

! Is there any parallelism between semantic and pragmatic competence? In other words, does second/foreign language learner develop necessary abilities to produce and acknowledge

4 The CAPSA-Lang program was first initiated by O. Galatanu on the occasion of the international symposium “Retour aux variétés avancées dans l’acquisition des langues secondes”, Aston University, Birmingham, June 2006. 5 FSL stands for French as a Second Language.


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discursive sequences including semantic relations, either “normative” or “transgressive” while he/she develops a “functional knowledge” with regard to speech act realisation, and respects the contextual adequacy of linguistic forms?

! Are there any links between strategic and pragmatic competence? ! Is there any relationship between discursive representations and

communicative strategies maintained by second/foreign language learners?

Now that we have presented our research questions, we can then advance three respective assumptions. The assumptions focus particularly on factors responsible for pragmatic competence development in relation with other elements constituting communicative competence, whether a declarative constituent or a procedural one.

Initially, we suggest that a “rich” and “analysed”6 linguistic representation of a certain grammatical rule or a semantic relation (synonymy, hyponymy, etc.) for instance, manifested at the level of discursive constructions, does not alone guarantee pragmatic competence development. Such an assumption implies that a fluid production, even relevant, of speech acts does not reflect necessarily a good mastery of pragmatic competence. The thesis that we put forward here is an allusion to the “appropriateness” criterion advanced by Hymes (1971). Therefore, fluency and relevance at the pragmalinguistic level are two criteria still pending and in need of reinforcement by another criterion, this time, of a sociopragmatic nature. Eventually, we presume that poor grammatical and/or semantic resources are not the only responsible for poor pragmatic competence.

2.3 Theoretical and methodological framework

2.3.1 Theory To do this research study our approach is based on a theoretical framework of a double interface. Two models, we assume, come together in such a way to propose a sort of explanation to the process of meaning construction via learners of FSL/FFL apology realisation.

First of all, Bialystok’s processing model (Bialystok 1983, 1990, 1993) is here considered. It assumes that mastery of communicative competence depends essentially, but not exhaustively, on mastery of two underlying processing components, namely Analysis of linguistic knowledge and

6 The term “analysed” is borrowed from Bialystok (1993).

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Control of linguistic processing. These two components are two cognitive processes acting on mental representations in the sense that they respectively analyse and control learner’s knowledge of language; they are accordingly responsible for linguistic performance; their operation may vary from one learner to another and from one context of language use to another (Bialystok 1990).

As for its goal, this model seeks to fulfil two main functions. First, it aims at describing learner’s language processing aptitude in terms of cognitive mechanisms responsible for language acquisition and use. In other respects, the model attempts to introduce an analysis of language functions in order to determine the needs required from learners (Bialystok 1993).

Insofar as it its functioning is concerned, Bialystok’s model of processing discerns between two cognitive mechanisms:

! Analysis of linguistic knowledge: a process concerned with expliciting and analysing learner’s implicit knowledge. It is a structuring, a restructuring process charged with the analysis and reorganisation of mental representations for the sake of a better comprehensibility.

! Control of linguistic processing: a process to control learner’s attention and then reorient it towards relevant information for appropriate assimilation. A major mechanism of this process is “selective attention” (Bialystok 1990: 125). The main role of this mechanism is to decide between a large amount of information of a competitive nature7. Learner is here to pay attention to only some aspects of information exposed, of course according to its degree of relevance.

The second theoretical model we adopt in this study owes its origins to two approaches: discourse analysis and lexical semantics. This model, called Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities (SAP), conceived and developed by Galatanu since 1999 (Galatanu 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002, 2006) sets up a model of representation, construction, and reconstruction of lexical meaning from the various occurrences of use of a given lexeme (Galatanu 2007: 91). SAP attempts to establish a model of discourse representation as a context for manifestation of semantico-discursive mechanisms of meaning construction and reconstruction of sense (Galatanu 2007: 94).

The representation of the SAP model contains three intertwined layers:

7 A multitude of information about linguistic elements, paralinguistic elements, etc.


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! Core: represents traits of semantic categorization which constitutes its essential properties.

! Stereotypes: stand for an open set of associations of elements from the Core with other representations.

! Argumentative Probabilities (AP): are discursive sequences introducing associations of a given word and any element of its Stereotypes.

2.3.2 Method

This study is based on two types of data collected at the university of Arts and Social Sciences in Beni-Mellal, Morocco. The first type consists of transcripts of data collected by means of videotaped simulated interactions. These simulated role-plays consisted of six scenarios featuring two students enacting roles of different social distances and different social statuses. 20 advanced students in their fourth year of university study at the French language Department participated in this study. This first kind of data is used to analyse learners’ apology realisation; an analysis which permits the examination of interlanguage development.

The second type of data is collected by means of a written questionnaire divided into two sections: one section dedicated to interrogating learners’ declarative knowledge vis-à-vis their representation of the act of apology, and another section devoted to stimulating argumentative associations from students by giving them three words pertaining to “apology”, namely “apology/apologize”, “regret”, and “offense”. The aim behind the use of this questionnaire is trying to establish links between mental representations conveyed by discursive sequences elaborated by learners and the process of L2 acquisition. In other words, what is this relationship existing between learners’ linguistic attitude and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it?

3. Introductory definitions

3.1 Apology Speech acts have been and are still being studied from different perspectives, in reference to different theoretical frameworks, with different methodologies. This variety testifies to the richness of theoretical resources one might adhere to. Within this sort of hybrid approaches, we opt for an eclectic approach for our definition of apologizing. We attempt

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to bring together different theoretical paradigms in order to identify the various aspects characterizing the speech act of apologizing whatever the socio-cultural context may be. In this regard, apologizing can be defined as an expressive act representative of a “remedial exchange” concerned with transforming what we might consider as offending to what might be considered as acceptable (Goffman 1967). Addressed to an offended party, it expresses a communicative intention translated via an illocutionary act, the force of which is to transform what was offensive to what might be forgivable. It is indeed the acknowledgment of such an intention by the offended that apology takes shape. Apologizing is principally a consecutive act which presupposes a prior offending act. Nevertheless, it sometimes presumes a simultaneous or future offense. Whatever apologizing it may be, prior, simultaneous or consecutive, its goal remains the restoration of the ritual equilibrium of interaction. This restoration is carried out by means of symbolically neutralizing the offending act. In fact, when offending someone, we are brought_ if we wish the ritual equilibrium be re-established_ to compensate for our offense. Bergman & Kasper, in this respect, define the speech act of apologizing as “[…] compensatory action to an offense in the doing of which S was causally involved and which is costly to H” (1993: 82).

3.2 Communication strategies

It is undoubtedly admitted that interlanguage is, by definition, a deficient system; a deficiency which raises different problems for learners as far as the expression of certain communicative intentions in L2 is concerned. Facing this sort of dilemma, learners develop a number of linguistic, psycholinguistic, or interactional measures/means to preserve equilibrium and harmony in their interventions, and to fill the gaps that might possibly occur in their communication system. All of these measures are called Communication Strategies. They are a means of problem solving. They are considered as “a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his meaning when faced with some difficulty” (Corder 1977). These strategies can be triggered either by lack of linguistic or sociolinguistic rules, or by a dysfunction at the level of planning and execution of illocutionary goals, both referential and relational (Færch and Kasper 1983). An essential element of strategic competence, communication strategies are systematic compensatory means enabling speakers to “[…]


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manage communicative asymmetry” (Springer 1998: 78); the latter might be subject to certain dysfunctions affecting one or both of the two levels of message production (Levelt 1989), i.e. conceptualization and formulation. At the macroplanning level, learners might make mistakes not only on elaborating their communicative intention in the form of goals, but also on selecting relevant information for transmitting their intention. At the microplanning level, difficulties might occur when trying to structure communicative goals and assigning selected information with the right reference.

4. Apology realisation

4.1 Apology strategies Considerable research on linguistic and communicative strategies used in apologies (Fraser 1981; Cohen and Olshtain 1981, 1993; Olshtain and Cohen 1983; Owen 1983; Trosborg 1987; Holmes 1989; Nonoyama 1993; Meier 1998; Márquez Reiter 2000; Rose 2000; Rojo 2005) resulted in suggesting different strategy classifications. Far from being exhaustive, we will be content with introducing the following classification of apology strategies based on Olshtain and Cohen (1983), a classification adopted by many studies attaining to apology realisation in different languages/cultures.

With the exception of the offender’s willingness not to apologize, there exist generally five strategies summarizing the way we apologize. This strategy set contains two major strategies and three particular ones in the sense that these latter are more context-dependant. The first major strategy, namely the Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID), includes, among others, the formulaic, routinized forms of apology, and explicit performative verbs. The second major one is the expression of responsibility by means of admitting negligence or lack of foresight. Both of these strategies are potentially capable of expressing apology whatever the situation may be. The other three strategies, namely explanation, offer of repair, and promise of forbearance, are particularly situation-specific, and “[…] will semantically reflect the content of the situation” (Olshtain 1989: 157).

In addition to these five strategies, apologies can be intensified or downgraded. The intensification can operate internally as follows:

(1) I am really sorry. Or externally as the following (Olshtain 1989: 158):

(2) I am sorry, but you really shouldn’t get insulted by such remarks.

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Downgrading can take the form of expressing doubt about the severity of the offense, or even its existence (example 2) illustrates downgrading).

4.2 Learners’ apology realisation

4.2.1 Linguistic realisation Our analysis of the first type of data (simulated role-plays) illustrates a predominance quasi total of one of the major strategies of apologizing, notably Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices. These devices oscillate between routinized forms such as expressing remorse as in the following example:

(3) Situation: someone is complaining about the noise made by his/her neighbour. Voisin: eh pauvre voisine! Arrête de faire du bruit! Vous nous avez dérangé. Laissez-nous dormir un peu. Voisine: eh, je suis désolée. Eh, d’accord. Je vais essayer de baisser la musique. Je suis désolée. C’est mon anniversaire.

Or using a performative verb as is exemplified in the following: (4) Situation: a student forgot to bring the book he had borrowed from his/her professor. Professeur: alors, j’espère que vous m’avez ramené mon livre. Étudiant: excusez-moi monsieur, je suis très désolé. Je l’ai oublié.

Secondly, learners tend to explain and justify their offenses; their explanations are usually accompanied by certain devices indicating the illocutionary force of apologizing. Examples 3) and 4) illustrate this compound strategy of apology, combining a major strategy, namely the use of IFIDs (excusez-moi; je suis très désolé), and explanation (je l’ai oublié; c’est mon anniversaire) as a secondary strategy. Our group of learners seemed to manifest a certain interest for internal modification so as to intensify the illocutionary force of their apologies. These intensifying modifications take the form of simple adverbs emphasizing the offender’s degree of sincerity. The example below show the way participants intensified their apologies:

(5) Situation: someone is complaining about the noise made by his/her neighbour. Voisin: mais c’est votre anniversaire. C’est pas mon affaire. Il y a des gens qui dorment et qui vont se réveiller tôt. Donc ils auront du travail. Voisine: d’accord, je suis très désolé, vraiment désolé, mais je vais essayer de baisser la musique.


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Finally, Moroccan learners of French appeal more or less to some offers of repair. The very limited use of this secondary strategy may possibly be due to constraints relative to role-play elaboration; constraints which may unconsciously influence apology realisation. We will see later that the use of this minor strategy, as is the case for other strategies, is subject to influence of no social variable8. That is to say, learners do not manifest any sensitivity to social variables (social distance, social power, severity of offense). Their strategies of apology remain obviously invariable despite the alternation of social variables. 4.2.2 Use of communication strategies It is noteworthy at this stage that the recurrent use, in our data, of a certain apology strategy, especially IFIDs, does not necessarily mean that it is a matter of one and unique communicative intention which is that conveyed by learners. Learners’ communicative intentions may vary in terms of the illocutionary force conceptualized at the macroplanning level; that is, at the level of elaborating intentions into goals. This, in fact, suggests that learners make use of certain semantic formulae such as routinized forms to express a set of varied pragmatic functions. Through our analysis of Moroccan learners’ apology realisation9, we noticed a kind of stability of routinized semantic formulae conveyed during verbal interactions, a stability which aroused our astonishment. We noted that learners, when apologizing, do not react according to situational variations necessitating very likely formal and functional modifications. In spite of the diversification of role-play situations in terms of social variables, learners show a limitation of pragmatic functions corresponding to the same illocutionary act. To compensate for this lack of knowhow relative to the asymmetry between the realisation of a certain pragmatic function and its corresponding realisation form, learners do resort to “reduction strategies” (Faerch and Kasper 1983) serving sometimes to reduce the meaning wanted (functional reduction), and sometimes to simplify formal modes of apology (formal reduction).

8 Different situations with different sociopragmatic criteria are suggested within the framework of role-plays in order to vary apology situations. 9 We contented in our analysis of data of the major aspects prevailing in the apologies of Moroccan learners of French without for all that insisting on doing meticulous classification of their strategies of apology. Our main concern is to study the links existing between the phase of apology conceptualisation and its formulation.

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As far as functional reduction is concerned, learners, despite a sufficient linguistic competence owing to their advanced level, seem to be unable to adapt their apologies according to the different socio-cultural variables easily perceived through role-play situations. It turned out that they do not dare, it seems to be, run the risk of adjusting their realisations according to the social distance of the interlocutors, the social power exercised by one on the other, and the degree of offence severity (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987). This reserved attitude of learners reveals penury on the sociopragmatic level which they make up for by means of the most direct strategy (IFID). Learners enacting the role of offenders prefer threatening their own positive face by functionally reducing their communicative intention, thus apologizing directly, to threatening the offended positive face. Learners tend, while opting for a formal reduction strategy, to use simple expressions, even routinized and conventional. They manifest almost no predisposition to alter or modify their apologies according to the situational information given. It is therefore notable that learners choose simple formulae when apologizing to the detriment of complex and precise ones. To maintain a satisfactory level of fluency during interaction, they opt for reduction strategies and abstain, thus, from elaborating their apologies in terms of complexity and precision. 4.2.3 Apology representation The second type of data collected by written questionnaires enabled us to determine the occurrences of the lexeme “apology/apologize”, first within learners’ discursive sequences, and then in their definitions of the same lexeme. The purpose behind the analysis of learners’ apology representation is to draw links between how apology is represented by learners and how it is actually conveyed and formulated during interaction. In this way, we came out with the following representation of the lexical meaning of apology:


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Core: Positive axiology: emotional and moral S regrets X10 where X is axiologically negative where X relates to the one who regrets S expresses remorse (shows that one is responsible) Stereotypes: S regrets X Then S acknowledges X Then S begs pardon Then S will repair X Then S explains X S expresses remorse Then S feels guilty Then S wants to cease X Then S wants to restore equilibrium Argumentative Probabilities: To apologize Then to acknowledge X Then to feel guilty Then to want to repair X Then to want to cease X Then to beg pardon Figure 5-1: Representation/reconstruction of the meaning of apology (Based on Galatanu’s Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities model)

It is obvious, from this reconstruction of the meaning of apology, that argumentative probabilities (AP), generated through discursive sequences as a result of the association between the core and the stereotype, were activated, and even maintained in the discursive occurrences of learners. We may notice, furthermore, from the argumentative probabilities described above that learners’ representation of apology gathers a varied set of strategies in the form of conceptual entries relevant for the

10 S is the offender, X is the offence.

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realisation of apology. The question to be raised here is thus: does a rich and structured representation secure a correct and appropriate realisation?

5. Discussion

The study we undertake here allows us to approach the process of meaning construction from two different perspectives. It suggests interpretations that might explain or at least explicit, within the sphere of interlanguage, how such a process of meaning construction takes place. From a cognitive point of view, two reasons may explain the excessive use of direct strategies of apology despite variation of social criteria. First of all, learners seem to perform deficient computations vis-à-vis the elaboration and analysis of the situation of communication. The erroneous assessment of this situation is likely to emanate from a deficient or ill-structured representation of the different contextual components constituting the situation. Secondly, in spite of learners’ advanced linguistic competence, they fail to adjust, in an appropriate way, the pragmalinguistic / sociopragmatic coordination; that is to say the adaptation of apology form so as to correspond to the meaning projected. This kind of inadequacy occurs probably because of a misplaced control11 at the level of form/meaning correspondence. From a semantico-discursive point of view, learners seem to circulate a limited set of discursive devices in the form of communication strategies. These strategies served as discursive mechanisms of the activation of the meaning of apology. However, despite the richness relative to the argumentative probabilities activated in learners’ discursive occurrences, and which reveals a rich and stable representation, their actualisation during interaction proves to be quite limited. This, in fact, reflects non analysed representative content insofar as apology realisation in FFL is concerned, especially on the socio-cultural level. To bring up the question of fluency12 that we evoked above and the links between it and pragmatic competence, we will advance two major assumptions. First, we suppose that fluency is characteristic of a high level of control of processing. Second, this latter, as we have seen that with Bialystok (1990, 1993), presuppose a selective attention to information. In other words, control of processing suggests that learners pay attention and 11 Here the term “control” is used in the same way as Bialystok (1993). 12 Fluency is here used in its large sense; it is the result of automatic development of different language routines that, as time goes by, do not require a certain attention, but rather a substitution of algorithmic procedures sensitive to different rules by a processing which depends essentially on memory (Logan 1988).


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select only relevant data from the input they receive. Taking these two assumptions into account, we draw the conclusion that learners when apologizing fail to reach a compromise between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic aspects, a failure illustrated by appealing to reduction strategies. In light of this observation, it seems to us that learners fail to pay attention to the right choices and to necessary relevant information such as social distinctions liable to facilitate learners’ task to apologize appropriately.

6. Conclusion

Throughout this study we attempted to examine the acquisition and the development of apology in French as a Foreign Language (FFL) in terms of three components of communicative competence, i.e. pragmatic, semantic, and strategic competence. The analysis we led here emphasizes, first, the need to set up certain links between these different elements which constitute, together with a pertinent linguistic and discursive knowledge, the backbone of a balanced communicative competence; it emphasizes at the same time the need to meticulously investigate the different cognitive and discursive mechanisms underlying the construction of apology in interaction. The establishment of these links is here to make three tasks easier. First and foremost, it will explain how interlanguage functions, what the main elements involved in this process are, and how they interact with each other. The second task is pedagogic; the answer to these three questions is likely to facilitate the elaboration, design, and development of language curricula. Finally, the need to establish, or to at least localise these links encourages multidisciplinary research collaboration, whether in theoretical or applied research areas. Relating to results obtained through this study, three main points are here clarified. They offer explanations to the problems evoked earlier in this paper. Results indicate that fluency cannot predict an optimal pragmatic competence, especially at the sociopragmatic level. Further, results proved that a semantic knowledge manifested in the discursive construction of lexical meaning of apology needs analysis, structuring, and restructuring on the part of learners. Such a process of knowledge restructuring, be it linguistic, semantic, discursive, pragmatic, or strategic, if performed optimally, may secure an appropriate realisation of apology.

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CHAPTER SIX

LEARNING HOW TO PROMISE: A DIDACTIC APPROACH TO THE TEACHING

OF SPEECH ACTS

CARMEN MAÍZ ARÉVALO

1. Introduction

It goes without saying that speaking a foreign language correctly does not only involve mastering its vocabulary and grammar but also having the ability to interact in a correct way and communicate smoothly while avoiding misunderstandings. In other words, as teachers of English as a foreign language (TEFL), we should certainly focus on our students’ acquisition of linguistic competence but very importantly on their acquisition of pragmatic competence (Hymes 1974) too. In many cases, it is a frequent experience to have very proficient students who do sound rude or impolite even if they do not intend to do so. Teaching speech acts in the EFL classroom is therefore essential if we want our students to “speak English”.

Due to the influence of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEF henceforth) and its highly communicative approach, more and more textbooks are increasingly including what they name “functions of language” or, in pragmatic theory, “speech acts”. These functions are based on what are considered basic communicative needs such as complaining, apologising, asking for information and so on. Most of the textbooks consulted for the present paper include these under the heading of “real English” or “everyday English” among others. On the other hand, current research projects such as CARLA (http://www.carla.umn.edu/speechacts/why.html) are working on corpora of real data to determine the pragmalinguistic reality of speech acts. There seems to exist a shared belief that native English speakers just know intuitively how to interact in their language and should be able to explain

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the social use of the language to the learners. However, this commonly shared belief is not necessarily true; in fact, a native speaker's intuition is sometimes unreliable.

In the present paper, we shall focus on the analysis of a particular speech act–promises–working on approximately a hundred real examples from the British National Corpus (BNC henceforth). The analysis of the examples will help determine the prototypical linguistic realisation of promises in English together with the context where they usually appear, e.g. when they form part of a macro-speech act such as an apology. Secondly, we shall compare these realisations in English with a hundred Spanish examples taken from the Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA henceforth) to observe whether or not the linguistic realisations of this speech act are similar in both languages and how this linguistic transfer can affect students either positively or negatively.

The reason why promises rather than other speech acts have been chosen for this study are mainly two: on the one hand, because promises have generally been neglected in the EFL classroom although they play an important role in macro-speech acts such as apologies–one of the basic speech acts students learn at lower levels –and on the other, because of the cultural differences in English and Spanish regarding the use of promises, which might lead to our students’ failure in pragmatic competence and to instances of impolite –albeit unintended–behaviour on their part.

As for the structure of the chapter, the first two sections deal with the definition of promises as speech acts, their linguistic realisation–at clause level–both in English and Spanish and the way these different realisations can affect our students’ linguistic competence. Section four deals with promises from a pragmatic point of view and analyses the differences in use between Spanish and English while concentrating on how these differences might lead to a failure in pragmatic competence. Finally, section five presents the conclusions of the study and suggests some didactic approaches and pointers to future research.

2. What is a promise?

In Searle’s taxonomy, promises are included within the group of commissive speech acts. In fact, they are frequently considered as the best example of this group since they involve the speaker’s commitment to a future action. Furthermore, this act of commitment to a future action on the part of the speaker is accepted as universal independently of the interlocutors’ cultural origin.

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The force of pledge is universal, for to pledge is to commit oneself strongly to doing something. Just as each possible natural language must give to its speakers adequate means of expressing all the truth functions of the elementary propositions that they can express in that language. (Vanderveken 2001: 36)

However, even though promises are clearly identifiable speech acts,

they have been much neglected in English textbooks1, which–especially at lower levels such as A2 or B1–tend to focus on other speech acts such as requesting, inviting, suggesting, complaining and so on. It could indeed be argued that promises do not belong in this group of “basic survival” speech acts. However, despite the fact that promises as such are apparently a slightly more specific type of speech act, it is also undeniable that they very frequently form part of macro-speech acts. In other words, when native speakers perform speech acts such as apologies or refusals, these macro-speech acts are usually integrated by different micro-speech acts, one of which tends to be promises. In terms of politeness, this is explained by the fact that the addressee’s face has been threatened by the speaker’s refusal or his/her previous actions in the case of apologies. Thus, promises act as a way not only to restore the addressee’s damaged face but also as a reinforcement of positive politeness–i.e. the interest in the addressee’s well-being (Brown and Levinson 1987; Leech 1983) and therefore play a significant role within other speech acts. If expected by the addressee, their absence might be considered as rude behaviour on the part of the speaker and lead to pragmatic failure.

3. Linguistic realisation of promises and students’ linguistic competence

3.1. Linguistic realisation of promises in English

Much has been said about the relationship between form and function in language and it is agreed that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between them, i.e. the same form can fulfil different functions, especially if we take context into account. Some authors even claim that the “[…] surface structure of [...] sentences can be misleading.” (Vanderveken 2001: 26-27). While this might be occasionally true, it is also the case that 1 The textbooks consulted were: Framework (A2), English File (B1), Headway (pre-intermediate), Face to Face (A2) and Clockwise (B1). As for the levels, they are the ones established by the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.


the surface structure is what addressers and addressees use and listen to and there are cases where, even though the deep structure might be the same, the different surface structures also serve different communicative purposes as in the following example:

(i) Irak has been invaded. (ii) The USA has invaded Irak.

In the present paper, we shall adopt the view that there are systematic–

even cognitive–links between speech act types and sentence-types. As argued by Kissine (2005: 1):

Even if it is certainly illusory to seek a one-to-one correspondence between speech act types and sentence-types […], there are, without any doubt, systematic links between the declarative mood and assertive acts, between the imperative mood and directive acts, and between the interrogative mood and questions.

This is particularly evident in the case of promises where the only

possibility of realisation is the declarative mood. Furthermore, the syntactic choices employed in the realisation of promises seem to be relatively limited. As shown by the analysis of the BNC data, it can be claimed that promises in English have the following realisations at clause level:

(i) The most frequent realisation is the use of the performative expression “I promise” followed by an embedded clause whose verbal predicate includes the modal operator will. Alternatively, the embedded clause can become an independent clause with the performative ellipted. However, it seems easier for students to identify certain speech acts with their corresponding performative verbs.

Examples:

I promise you we will look after her (performative verb present) Don’t worry. I’ll help you with your homework (absence of performative)

(ii) The second most frequent realisation is that where the speaker only employs the performative verb, frequently as a preferred response to a previous request by the interlocutor. However, this can be regarded as a different use since it occurs in adjacency pairs, but usually not as an initiating turn (Tsui 1994).

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Examples:

All right, I promise. I promise, she answered with a reassuring smile. I promise, she muttered. (iii) It is also relatively common to find the use of an infinitive after the performative expression. The infinitive is the non-finite form more clearly projected towards the future. This is even reinforced in English by the use of the particle to which iconically shows this future projection.

Examples:

Now I promise to devote myself to bringing down the costs of your mortgages because I believe that people should be able to own their own homes and to own them cheaply. And I promise to help with the washing up.

As shown in the corpus, the structure with infinitive seems to be more

common as a complement of the noun phrase with the noun promise as its head. When this is case, these expressions cannot really be considered as prototypical promises, since they are not speaker-centred and they do not benefit the hearer, on the contrary, their illocutionary force is usually that of a directive: Examples:

All I ask is your promise to allow me safely out of the stockade. But you would have to keep your promise to do it, you know.

(iv) The subordinate clause preceeds the performative verb, which thus becomes rheme. In this case, the promise seems reinforced since the speaker leaves the performative in the final position of the sentence, where it becomes more salient according to the principle of end-focus (Downing 2006). The speaker seems to be reinforcing their commitment while reassuring the hearer, whose expectations are contradicted. On the whole, this structure helps reinforce the commitment of the promise but it is slightly less frequent.


Examples:

I won’t laugh I promise! But I won’t hurt you, I promise. I’ll make it all up to you one day, I promise. I won’t let her get away with this, I promise you. (v) The performative expression is simultaneously theme–i.e. it occupies the initial position of the sentence and rheme–i.e. it is repeated at the end of the sentence. The accumulative effect of performative verbs together with the syntactic preferrence for the two most salient positions in the sentence: the beginning (theme) and the end (end-focus) help reinforce the speaker’s commitment. As expected, this is the least frequent structure (only 2% of the cases)2.

Examples:

I promise I won’t ruin it, I promise I promise you you’ll be pleased, I promise.

To sum up, it can be claimed that there is a major linguistic

realisation of promises in English at clause level, with some variations that help add more emphasis to the commitment. Thus, the most prototypical realisation is:

[performative] + I will + infinitive

As already pointed out, the performative expression “I promise”

can also be extraposed (right-dislocation) or even repeated in order to achieve more emphasis and reinforce the speaker’s commitment. On the other hand, the use of the performative expression by itself is more frequently found when the promise acts as a preferred response in an adjacency pair.

2 Both (iv) and (v) can be considered as variations of the main realisation: ‘performative + embedded clause with will as operator’.

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3.2. Linguistic realisation of promises in Spanish

The first significant difference we observe between English and Spanish data is the fact that in Spanish the most common linguistic realisation is the use of the performative followed by an infinitive, as shown by the following examples from the CREA:

Yo prometo ser un niño ser un niño disciplinado, ordenado y estudioso. Yo prometo someterme del todo, íntegramente a los mandatos de mi maestro, de mis padres y de las Autoridades. (Translation: I promise to be an obedient, tidy and hard-working boy. I promise to submit myself totally, completely to my teacher’s, my parents’ and the authorities’ commands) Para esta noche prometo sudar y un buen montón de ritmo (Translation: For this evening I promise to sweat and a great deal of rythm) Pero hay poetas en los que coincidirían mayoritariamente. Esos poetas me parece que están todos en mi última antología (prometo no reincidir) (Trans: But there are poets they would mostly agree. I think those poets are all included in my latest antology – I promise not to relapse)

As in English, the use of a subordinate clause following the performative

is also common. However, the verb of the subordinate clause can be either a future form–equivalent to English will –or the verbal periphrasis ir a (to be going to), as illustrated by the following examples also quoted from the CREA:

En nombre de todos los competidores prometo que tomaremos parte en estos Juegos Olímpicos respetando y actuando bajo las reglas que los gobiernan. (Translation: On behalf of all the competitors, I promise that we will take part in these Olympic games respecting and acting under their rules.) Yo te prometo que serás la primera persona en conocer la noticia. (Translation: I promise you that you will be the first person to hear the news.) Y, bueno, le prometo que yo droga no voy a tomar (Translation: And well, I promise you that I am not going to take any drugs).

The common use of the periphrasis in Spanish frequently leads

students to transfer these expressions into their English expression of


promises, producing ungrammatical sentences such as: ‘I promise I’m not going to do it again’, which are non-existent in the BNC.

As in English, adjacency pairs also seem to favour the use of the performative in isolation as a preferred response to a previous request or directive. Curiously, the question ¿me lo prometes? (i.e. do you promise?) is never answered simply yes/no in the corpus but with a performative expression, which seems to reinforce the speaker’s commitment towards the addressee. However, it should be pointed out that all these examples in the corpus belong to fictional language–either theatre plays or dialogues in a novel. It is not certain whether the addressee’s responding move may be similar in the case of everyday language, as shown by the following examples from the CREA:

S: ¿De verdad me dirás lo que viene ahora? (Translation: Will you really tell me what’s next?) H: Te lo prometo. (Translation: I promise you)

S: Prométeme que no te irás. Que me darás tiempo para rectificar. H: Te lo prometo. No me iré. Y la niña tampoco. (Translation: S: Promise me you won’t leave. That you’ll give me time to mend it. H: I promise you. I won’t leave. And neither will the child.) Finally, we can also find examples where the performative verb is

followed by a noun phrase in the function of direct object. This is common when the noun forms part of a collocation where the infinitive does not need to be explicitly mentioned since it is easily retrivable for the speaker. As opposed to the previous case, which seems to be particularly related to fictional discourse, this can be found in all registers, as illustrated by the examples below:

Prometo un delantero de categoría. (Translation: I promise a good forward) Prometo una segunda entrega, especialmente jugosa. (Translation: I promise a second part, specially juicy.) Os prometo firmeza y prudencia. (Translation: I promise you firmness and prudence) A mi me traen a Ulises el viento y el oleaje. Lo recibo, lo abrazo, le prometo la juventud eterna. (Translation: Ulysses is brought to me by the wind and the waves. I receive him, hug him, promise him the eternal youth.)

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4. Cultural differences and pragmatic failure

Quite remarkably, one of the first speech acts students of English are required to master is apologies, which form part of the can-do statements at such an early stage at the A2 level in the Common European Framework (2001). However, it is only in Face to Face (A2) that promises are included as part of the whole act of apologising, which is further divided into three main micro-speech acts:

(1) Apologize: I’m sorry to be late (2) Give a reason: I missed my bus to school (3) Promise: I promise it won’t happen again!

Refusals are also macro-speech acts frequently integrated by different

micro-speech acts such as the promise of future acceptance:

(1) Acceptance: I’d love to but (2) Refuse: I’m afraid I can’t go to the cinema with you tonight. (3) Give a reason: I’ve got an exam tomorrow and I must study a lot. (4) Promise: I’ll call you next week and see if we can do something

then.

Clockwise Intermediate points out the fact that “[…] there are different social ‘rules’ in different countries for refusing invitations and requests” (2003: 48) and presents different ways of “saying no” in different cultures to raise students awareness of pragmatic differences. Quite remarkably, one of the Spanish students quoted in the book (ibid.) claims that: “I’d just say no. If they’re your friends, then they’ll understand. If they’re not, then it doesn’t matter anyway.”

However, in the English corpus, we do find examples of apologies as macro-speech acts consisting of different micro-speech acts such as promises:

Example 1. I understand, I said, I promise I’ll always play with you from now on. Example 2. Sorry I wanna read this, I promise I’ll be there in a minute.

Most often, however, Spanish students simply apologise by uttering an

apology without even giving a reason, much less a promise of future compliance. The same can be said of refusals, even at higher levels. The main reason for this absence is mainly cultural. In fact, it is very common in Spanish just to apologise without any further ado and promises are


certainly uncommon as part of Spanish apologies, even if there are some isolated examples in the corpus:

Mi presidencia es transitoria. Yo soy un militar y no estoy capacitado para gobernar. Sólo he pretendido liberar al pueblo de la dictadura y prometo entregar el poder, tan rápido como sea posible, a los que sí están capacitados para gobernar este país. (Translation: My presidence is temporary. I am a soldier and I am not capable of governing a country. I have simply intended to release my people from dictatorship and I promise to give back the power, as soon as possible, to those who are indeed able to rule this country.)

These examples, however, are not only scarce but also belong to a

more formal discourse. Thus, whereas in everyday English apologies and refusals are quite frequently accompanied by promises, they are not in Spanish. This pragmatic negative transference might lead our Spanish students to do exactly the same in English, without realising that native speakers might expect some kind of face repairment and as a result, they might appear as impolite even if they do not intend to do so.

Classroom instruction on speech acts can therefore help learners to improve not only their performance in the foreign language but also their interaction with native speakers, even at lower levels.

6. Conclusions

As shown by the analysis, prototypical promises seem to share very similar linguistic realisations in both languages (use of the infinitive, use of subordinate clauses in future tenses and so on) although percentages reflect that there are quantitative differences regarding the preference for one form instead of another. Thus, whereas Spanish speakers fluctuate between the use of the infinitive and of subordinate clauses in future tenses as well as other syntactic realisations, English speakers clearly seem to favour the use of subordinate clauses with the modal will instead of the infinitive or noun phrases. Table 6-1 sums up the different realisations in numerical terms:

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Spanish English infinitive 28% 11.25% subordinate clause 26% 57.5% only performative 26% 25% noun phrase 16% 6.25% formulaic 4% 0% TOTAL 100% 100%

Table 6-1: Linguistic realisation of ‘promises’ at sentence level in Spanish and English

The comparison of figures shows that in English the preferred

linguistic realisation of promises is the subordinate clause accompanied by a performative expression. Whereas the other realisations are relatively common, they are nonetheless less frequent and varied than in Spanish, which might lead Spanish students to a non-prototypical realisation in most cases and, consequently, to sound “more foreign” and linguistically less competent. Especially at low levels, we should therefore focus on this structure while comparing it to the Spanish ones, in order for our studens to be aware of the differences between the same speech act in the two languages.

Besides their differences regarding linguistic realisations, we should also take seriously into account the pragmatic differences derived from cultural diversity. In general terms, Spanish culture has often been described as more prone to positive politeness–i.e. avoidance of distance– as opposed to the British culture, when on the whole a more negative-politeness approach seems to be preferred in most contexts, as argued by numerous authors such as Hickey (2005) or Márquez Reiter and Placencia (2004), just to quote some of the most recent publications. This different approach to politeness explains why Spanish promises usually act as independent major speech acts since they are in the interest and welfare of the addressee whereas in English, they frequently form part of face-threatening macro-speech acts such as apologies and refusals and function as a repair strategy of the addressee’s damaged face. The absence of promises in Spanish apologies and refusals might lead our students to omit promises when realising these speech acts and to sound impolite even when far from wanting to sound that way.


References Austin, J. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1962. Bach, K. and R. M. Harnish. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts.

Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1979. Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language

Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Council of Europe. Common European Framework of Reference for

Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Downing, A. and P. Locke. A University Course in English Grammar. London: Routledge, 2006.

Grant, C. K. “Promises”. Mind 58 (1949): 359-366. Grice, P. “Meaning”. The Philosophical Review 64 (1957): 377-388. Guerini, M. and C. Castelfranchi. “Promises and threats in persuasion”.

Pragmatics and Cognition Journal 15/2 (2007): 277-311. Hancher, M. “The classification of cooperative illocutionary acts”.

Language in Society 8 (1979): 1-14. Hickey, L. Politeness in Europe. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Hymes, D. Foundations in Sociolinguistics: An Ethnographic Approach.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1974. Kissine, M. “Promises and predictions: deriving deontic commitment from

epistemic possibility”. Proceedings of the 9th International Pragmatics Conference. Riva del Garda, 2004.

Leclerc, A. “Verbal mood & sentence mood in the tradition of universal grammar”. In Essays in Speech Act Theory, edited by D. Vanderveken and S. Kubo, 63-84. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.

Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman, 1983. Márquez Reiter, R. and M. E. Placencia (eds.). Current Trends in the

Pragmatics of Spanish. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Maíz, C. “El sistema dialogal en los Canterbury Tales”. PhD diss.,

Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2001. Pérez Hernández, L. “The directive-commissive continuum”. Miscelánea:

A Journal of English and American Studies 23 (2001): 77-98. Pretz, V. “Promises and threats”. Mind 86 (1977): 578-581. Searle, J. Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 [1969]. Tsui, A. English Conversation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

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Vanderveken, D. “Universal grammar and speech act theory”. In Essays in Speech Act Theory, edited by D. Vanderveken and S. Kubo, 25-62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.

Wierzbicka, A. English Speech Act Verbs. A Semantic Dictionary. New York: Academic Press, 1987.

Corpora

The British National Corpus. (1991). Oxford University Press, Longman, Chambers-Larousse, Lancaster University and British Library. [Available on-line from http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/]

Corpus diacrónico del español. (2007). Real Academia Española de la Lengua: Banco de datos (CORDE). [Available on-line from http://www.rae.es]

Textbooks

Forsyth, W. Clockwise Intermediate. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003 (6th edition).

Goldstein, B. Framework Level 2. London: Richmond Publishing, 2003. Oxenden, C. and C. Latham-Koenig. English File. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2003 (14th edition). Redston, C. and G. Cunningham. Face-to-face Pre-intermediate.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Soars, J and L. Soars. Headway Pre-Intermediate. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1998 (4th edition).

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE INTERLANGUAGE OF COMPLAINTS BY CATALAN LEARNERS OF ENGLISH1

MARIA SABATÉ I DALMAU

1. Introduction Mainstream second language acquisition research traditionally

neglected the importance of intercultural communication, especially when two distinct politeness systems come into play. The importance of pragmatic competence has only recently been addressed, and interlanguage (henceforth IL) pragmatics has been the most recent area of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and L2 teaching to be discovered. This growing issue of interest among second language acquisition (henceforth SLA) researchers can now be found in a multidisciplinary range of fields including social psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, sociology, discourse analysis, translation, business pragmatics, and second and foreign language teaching.

Interlanguage pragmatics (henceforth IP) is gaining a position of its own due to three major factors. Firstly, there is a growing awareness of multilingual societies. Pragmatic competence, which was traditionally thought to be necessary only to avoid breaches of etiquette when interacting with native speakers (henceforth NSs), is now seen as essential for establishing fertile grounds for interaction between interlocutors from different backgrounds. In Murphy and Neu’s words, “[…] perhaps it is past time to also argue for the instruction of native speakers in the understanding of, and tolerance for, non-native speakers’ productions” (1996: 212).

Secondly, migration movement processes have brought about new studies on intercultural communication. Most studies on non-native 1 This project is funded by research grant 429-01-1/07, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, whose support is here acknowledged.

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complaints demonstrate that differences in linguistic behaviour between persons from different backgrounds lead to cross-cultural misunderstanding and stereotyping. Phonological, morphosyntactic or lexical non-target-like performances by non-native speakers (henceforth NNSs) of English are normally regarded as signs of L2 low command, but pragmatic inadequacy is consistently interpreted as rudeness (Barron 2003). Thirdly, globalisation processes are currently leading to an enormous diversity of communicative situations involving the use of English as a lingua franca. This can be seen, for instance, in recent studies on business pragmatics, where IL complaints have become an issue of great importance in the training of multilingual workers in European customer services (cf. Trosborg 2003).

Many of the studies on IL complaints stem from a willingness to demonstrate that linguistic differences between people sharing different politeness systems can lead to intercultural misunderstandings. Most researchers have tried to unveil mutually unfavourable stereotyping in multilingual or migration contexts through the study of IL complaints, because the speech act of complaining is “[…] pregnant with potential for misunderstanding and conflict” (Gershenson 2003: 276). Complaints require a high level of pragmatic competence in any language, both for NSs and NNSs, because they have to do with sorting out the norms of behaviour that have to be shared daily within a society, a family, friends, or multilingual workers. Given their importance in everyday communication, it is considered crucial that L2 speakers master this act in order to avoid the types of stereotyping that have been highlighted in many studies on IL complaints, a summary of which is provided below.

House and Kasper (1981: 158) observed that NSs of English considered German speakers of English ‘impolite’ when carrying out requests and complaints in English. Frescura (1995: 98) found that, when complaining, English-speaking persons in Canada were stereotyped as ‘controlled’, ‘polite’ and ‘calm’ by Italian immigrants, whereas these Italians were judged as ‘rude’ and ‘volatile’ by speakers of other languages in Canada when carrying out the same speech act (henceforth SA). Gershenson studied IL complaint behaviour as realised by Soviet Jewish immigrants to Israel. She encountered that Israelis found the ex-Soviets’ linguistic behaviour “[…] insincere and manipulative, with antipathy and mistrust”, whereas the Russian-speaking newcomers judged the Israelis’ linguistic behaviour as “[…] rude and pushy” (2003: 275). Murphy and Neu (1996) demonstrated that Americans judged complaints by Korean speakers of English as being “[…] too rude, careless, aggressive, non-credible” and “disrespectful”. Finally, Clyne (1994: 50)

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found that Australians called British English immigrants ‘whingeing poms’, because it was believed that they find many things in Australia disagreeable.

This paper analyses the interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English with two main objectives in mind. On the one hand, it attempts to highlight the importance of understanding the non-native production of IL complaints in intercultural communication in depth in order to avoid the kinds of stereotyping outlined above, and, more generally, miscommunication or misunderstanding. On the other hand, this study also provides detailed descriptions of the difficult aspects of the acquisition, development, and mastering of this specific speech act by three groups of Catalan learners of English, which can be understood as pedagogical tools that can hopefully have some practical applications for the teaching of the English complaint system.

In the next section, the research questions and the theoretical assumptions in this cross-sectional study are developed in more detail. In section 3 the speech act of complaining is defined, and a brief overview of some of the previous complaint studies investigating developmental aspects of the acquisition of pragmatic components by non-native speakers is also provided. After the presentation of the specific methodological aspects of this paper (section 4), the findings on the interlanguage of complaints by Catalan learners of English are presented, and three sets of results are discussed in section 5. Finally, the article concludes with the suggestion that optimal convergence toward target-like performance can occur at a proficiency stage, at least for several pragmatic components that constitute the speech act of complaints.

2. Aims of this study and research questions

This cross-sectional study investigates the developmental stages of the acquisition of pragmatic competence and new politeness systems in an L2. More specifically, it focuses on the realisations of the speech act of complaining by three groups of undergraduate Catalan learners of English differing systematically in terms of L2 proficiency, years of exposure to English, and use of English for social purposes. It examines the average number of main complaint strategies per situation and group in 12 different face-threatening contexts and analyses the lexical choices of complaint realisations along the parameters ‘social distance’, ‘power’ and ‘sex’ of the addressee.

This paper also analyses some sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic non-target-like performances. Besides, it investigates any regular

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developmental stages in the acquisition of pragmatic competence by contrasting the learners’ performance at each level. Finally, this study highlights some instances of the learners’ cultural interference and pragmatic transfer from Catalan across levels. For this purpose, it also includes a cross-cultural comparison between the British and the Catalan complaint speech act sets, non-existent in Catalan2 and, in English, in the process of being redefined. In the light of the results of several studies on complaints (cf. Clyne, Ball and Neil 1991; Boxer 1993; Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Frescura 1995; Trosborg 1995; Murphy and Neu 1996; Gershenson 2003; and Geluykens and Kraft 2003) it is hypothesised that: 1. The average number of strategies per situation will increase

progressively with proficiency. 2. All groups will have all the range of strategies that constitute the act

of complaining available, and will use them productively (i.e. an ‘explicit complaint’, an ‘accusation’, a ‘threat’).

3. The groups with a higher level of proficiency are likely to show sociopragmatic non-target-like performance, whereas pragmalinguistic inadequacy is normally associated to lower level learners.

4. There will be a tendency to move from direct to less direct complaint strategy choices with increasing proficiency.

5. The weighting of contextual parameters will be one of the most difficult tasks to master, and it is expected to account for much cultural interference, especially among learners with a high level of L2 linguistic competence.

Within the field of IP, many studies have assumed that NSs’ norms are the adequate target for NNSs, and have explained any difference between NNSs’ and NSs’ performance as faulty and erroneous, a view which underlies the ‘difference=deficit’ hypothesis, so long adhered to in IP research (Kasper 1992). ‘Optimal convergence’ (in order to avoid miscommunication) rather than total convergence toward target language norms appears to be a more desirable goal. In this paper the learners’ behaviour will be described at a point where L2 production is likely to bring about pragmatic transfer and stereotyping, away from a normative approach. Terms such as ‘error’, ‘deviation’ or ‘deficiency’ will not be employed. Finally, the term ‘failure’ will be replaced by the term ‘non-target-like performance’, understood as necessarily interlocutor-alienating.

2 For the scarcity of studies on Catalan speech act sets see Payrató (2003) and Bassols (2001).


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3. Complaints Researchers working on IL complaints show an agreement in that “[…]

the speech act of complaining has been little studied in the field of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics” (Tatsuki 2000: 1003), with two noticeable exceptions: House and Kasper (1981) and Olshtain and Weinbach (1987), cited in Olshtain and Weinbach (1993). Studies on the speech act of complaining started within the field of cross-cultural pragmatics (House and Kasper 1981; Olshtain and Weinbach 1993; Frescura 1995; Murphy and Neu 1996; Gershenson 2003), or within the analysis of the weighting of different sociocultural values by two or more groups of informants from a wide range of linguistic backgrounds (including German, Chinese, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Danish). Most of these investigations are ethnographic in nature and include analyses of whole real life exchanges (e.g. Boxer 1993). The majority of these studies analyse complaints in a single social situation, and on the whole, the set of informants that they include is small and located in a mostly English-speaking country. They all aim at unveiling instances of negative attributions and miscommunication in migration contexts. There is one study that presents an approach to IL complaints from a psychological perspective, too (Tatsuki 2000). Finally, only one study from the field of linguistic anthropology specifically compares IL complaint performance by three groups of learners at three different levels of proficiency (Trosborg 1995).

IL complaint studies come from different fields of research and focus on descriptive findings rather than developmental issues. IL complaint researchers explain scarcity of studies as stemming from the fact that face-threatening acts (FTAs) are more difficult to study than other SAs (Geluykens and Kraft 2003). Other FTAs such as apologies have the advantage that they contain a clearly identifiable IFID (i.e. illocutionary force indicating device), an explicit apology, that can be coded into a lexico-syntactic list forming a closed set of routinised realisations for each language (e.g. ‘Sorry’). In complaints, the IFID and the main strategies that constitute the speech act set for complaining are identifiable. However, a closed list of complaints cannot be conformed because they are generally indirect in their form. All these facts make the definition of a complaint difficult to capture: complaints “[…] elude formal definition” (Edwards 2005: 7). In fact, which coding list for complaints is more adequate and what exactly a complaint is are still an issue of debate. Moreover, complaints have proved to be very difficult to distinguish from other SAs. For instance, Brown and Levinson (1987) regarded complaints,

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criticisms and accusations as distinct from one another, whereas the researchers who have carried out studies with naturally-occurring complaints show that such acts can indeed overlap (cf. Drew 1998, Edwards 2005) .

The definition most researchers have agreed upon was put forward by Olsthain and Weinbach (1993: 108). It has been used for the investigation of complaints intralingually, cross-culturally and in L2 or FL:

In the speech act of complaining, the speaker (S) expresses displeasure, annoyance –censure- as a reaction to a past or ongoing action, the consequences of which are perceived by S as affecting her unfavourably. This complaint is usually addressed to the hearer (H) whom the S holds, at least partially, responsible for the offensive action. According to the notion of complaint that will be followed throughout

this paper, this speech act indicates that the speaker’s wishes do not correspond to those of the hearer. This includes disapproval, criticism, reprimands, accusations and insults as an integral part of complaints in this study (i.e. face to face, speaker to hearer, direct accusatory complaints3). Austin’s classification (1962) already stated that complaints are a ‘statement of reaction’ -‘behabitives’ (Clyne 1994). In this definition, a complaint is in essence post-event, and it has an expressive and an assertive function because it expresses the psychological state of the speaker. Since they express grievance, culpability and negligence (to mention but a few), complaints include some type of moral judgement and censure. A complaint is also anti-hearer (House and Kasper 1981). Thus, it is a conflictive type of illocution (Leech 1983: 104), because it can go counter the goal of maintaining harmony between interactants by breaking ties of affection and co-operation. A complaint goes against the ‘hearer-supportive maxim’, but in turn the complainer is justified because the complainee has already transgressed such maxim by committing an offence. Thus, complaints are described as a struggle to regain one’s face.

So far this description of complaints shows that researchers tended to view them as intrinsically impolite: “[…] to threaten or curse someone in a polite manner is virtually a contradiction in terms” (Leech 1983: 105). However, one can complain and yet remain polite, since it might well be 3 For the purposes of this paper, only the notion of complaint postulated by Olsthain and Weinbach (1993) will be employed here. Complaints which are targeted to a third party, prospective and indirect complaints (cf. Boxer 1993 and Boxer 1996), telephone mediated complaints (cf. Márquez Reiter 2005), or full complaint sequences which include, for instance, counter-complaints (cf. Dersley and Wootton 2000) are out of the scope of this article.


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the case that the appropriate way of complaining is by threatening the other’s face without mitigation. For example, Laforest showed that among family members in Québec complaints are realised by attacking the complainee directly: “[…] the most abrupt realisation of the act of complaining does not seem to bother the participants to any great extent” (2002: 1603).

3.1. The speech act set of complaining

There has been no consensus as to which are the main strategies that constitute the speech act of complaining. Each set revised appears to be data-driven rather than having been checked in a systematised way. In this sense, cross-cultural comparisons and comparisons between IL complaint performances become a difficult task. It is also remarkable that the number of main strategies that have been postulated ranges from four (Murphy and Neu 1996) to eight (Trosborg 1995), and that the type of strategies each researcher includes in the set also seems to be very different from one another. The speech act set employed in this study is the most frequently cited in many IL complaint studies as the baseline to investigate IL features at different levels of proficiency. It is taken from Olshtain and Weinbach (1993: 111) and contains five types of complaint realisations, organised along a continuum according to the degree of face-threat that the complainer takes to express censure. It is not taken as a politeness scale for complaints. The set is summarised in Table 7-1:

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Complaint strategies Examples4

1. Below the level of reproach: a) No explicit mention of offender or offence b) General remark left open to interpretation c) Avoidance of reprimand; no breach of harmony

“Such things happen” “Don’t worry about it, there is no real damage” “M’he adonat que s’ha acabat la llet” [I realised that the milk is finished]

2. Expression of annoyance or disapproval: a) Vague or indirect expressions to avoid conflict b) ‘Wrongness’ or offender unspecified c) General annoyance is clearly expressed

“Such lack of consideration!” “This is really unacceptable behaviour” “Aquesta habitació és una cort de porcs!” [This room is a pigsty!]

3. Explicit complaint: a) Complainee openly blamed b) No instigation of sanctions c) Offender, offence, or both are clearly stated

“You are inconsiderate!” “You shouldn’t have postponed such an operation” “No li hauries d’haver deixat” [You shouldn’t have lent it]

4. Accusation and warning: a) Open face-threat b) Potential sanctions are implied

“Next time I will let you wait for hours!” “Vindré i et pegaré si no calles!” [I’ll come and beat you if you don’t shut up]

5. Immediate threat: a) Complainer openly attacks complainee b) No mitigation

“You’d better pay the money right now!” “You’re an idiot!” “Ets un porc!” [You’re a bastard!]

Table 7-1: The complaint speech act set, summarised from Olshtain and Weinbach (1993: 111)

A complaint can be modified internally by two main types of modality

markers, ‘downgraders’ and ‘upgraders’, which are of crucial importance. However, modality markers are out of the scope of this study5.

4 No codification was encountered in Catalan. Examples in Catalan are taken from Payrató (2003), with the English translation provided in square brackets. 5 For modification in complaints see House and Kasper (1981), Trosborg (1995), Olshtain and Weinbach (1993), Geluykens and Kraft (2003) and Gershenson (2003).


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4. Methodology Five groups of informants participated in this study: a control group of

NSs of British English (GB), a control group of Catalan NSs (CAT), a group of Catalan learners of English at an intermediate (I), an advanced (A), and a proficiency level (P).

30 second-year undergraduate NSs of British English who were undertaking a wide range of degrees, 6 males and 24 females, comprised the corpus for the GB group. Most of them were Erasmus students at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). They had a mean age of 21.2 years and had a basic-intermediate level of Spanish, French, Russian, Greek, Japanese, Italian and Portuguese. 27 third-year undergraduate Catalan NSs also taking a wide range of degrees at the UAB and other Catalan universities, with a mean age of 21.9, 7 males and 20 females, provided the corpus for the Catalan control group. They also spoke several foreign languages at an intermediate-advanced level: English, French, Italian and Galician.

17 undergraduate students of Humanities from the UAB, 9 females and 8 males, with a mean age of 24, who had been studying English for an average of 9.2 years at high-school (7 had attended a language school) and did not use English outside the classroom, comprised the intermediate level corpus. They were taken randomly from two classes of the first year subject ‘Modern Foreign Language (English)’, a weekly 3-hour English course. 5 had been to an English-speaking country for a week (in average), on holidays. They had basic-intermediate knowledge of French, Italian and German. 21 undergraduate students of English Studies at the UAB, taken randomly from two classes of the second-year subject ‘Instrumental English II’, 1 male and 20 females, with a mean age of 20, provided the corpus for the advanced level. They had been studying English for an average of 9.8 years (2 at university). They had spent a month in an English-speaking country, in average, and used English for social purposes. 8 had never been abroad. 14 had studied or were studying EFL in a language school. They received English input for a mean of 4 hours a day. 14 spoke German, French and Italian at a basic-intermediate level. 23 second-cycle students who were finishing their BA in English Studies at the UAB, 3 males and 20 females, with a mean age of 22.1, completed the questionnaire for the proficiency group. They had studied English for 12 years and a half -4.5 at university, in average- and, apart from their university classes 6 hours a day, all except for 3 had been studying in a language school, too. 5 had never been to an English-speaking country; 6 had lived abroad for an academic year and the rest had spent at least a

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month and a half in an English-speaking country. 19 had regular contact with English NSs. In average, they used English 5.3 hours a day. They had basic-intermediate knowledge of French, Italian, Dutch, German, Portuguese and Galician.

Homogeneity of informants was ensured by means of a comprehensive background questionnaire, and the levels of English in the case of the experimental groups were stated according to the university placement tests. They were similarly familiar with the situations provided in the questionnaires, and had the same age and the same experience as university students. Therefore, their answers were considered comparable. It should be acknowledged that there was a gender bias in the two control groups and in two experimental groups, where the females clearly outnumbered the male participants. This might have had an affect on the results that will be presented in section 5. For this reason, no claims on the basis of the learners’ (i.e., the speaker’s) gender have been made in this study.

The corpus comprises 118 open-ended discourse completion tasks (DCTs) with no hearer response6. Informants were allowed to write as much as they wanted, and had the possibility of opting out. They were provided with the vocabulary they did not know, and the researcher monitored the data collection process. Two versions were used: the English version for the British control group and the three experimental groups of Catalan learners (the latter having the instructions in Catalan), and its translation into Catalan for the Catalan control group. The Catalan DCT was validated by a previous pilot study conducted by 6 professors at the UAB and by 3 Catalan undergraduates.

Each questionnaire contained 12 complaint situations already validated by several researchers (House and Kasper 1981, Boxer 1993, Trosborg 1995, Olshtain and Weinbach 1993, Bergman and Kasper 1993, Frescura 1995, Tatsuki 2000, Geluykens and Kraft 2003 and Gershenson 2003). Each referred to manifestations of socially unacceptable behaviour, and was explicitly designed to elicit complaint strategies according to a fixed social setting per situation encompassing all the possible constellations of contexts along the parameters ‘social distance’ (SD) and ‘power’ (or dominance). A third variable was included: the gender of the complainee (not the complainer), on the grounds that “[…] there has been little work on gender-specific realisations of FTAs” (Geluykens and Kraft 2003: 253). ‘Social distance’ is binary-valued: -SD is employed among friends, relatives and co-workers, and +SD among unknown people or acquaintances. The variable ‘social dominance’ has three possible values: 6 For a discussion of the validity of DCTs, see, e.g., Kasper and Dahl (1991).


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x>y for speaker dominant interactions; x<y for hearer dominant interactions and x=y for status equals. Gender is binary-valued (M for males; F for females). Each finished with the prompt “What do you say?”- “Què li dius?”. The twelve situations were as follows (parameter values in brackets): 1. A patient whose new doctor prescribed a wrong dose of medicine and

as a consequence of this developed a rash (+SD; x<y; M). 2. A person who is annoyed by a clerk who took full responsibility for

having his/her passport ready a week before (+SD; x<y; F). 3. A neighbour working on an important presentation who is annoyed by

the noisy party of a new neighbour upstairs (+SD; x=y; F). 4. A customer who has been given the wrong dish by a waitress in an

expensive restaurant (+SD; x>y; F). 5. A student whose flatmate, once again, fails to do his part of the

cleaning, as previously arranged two months ago (-SD; x=y; M). 6. A teacher who lent a book to a student who forgets to bring it back

when the teacher really needs it (-SD; x>y; F). 7. A customer in a bar whose coffee has just been drunk by another

customer, by mistake (+SD; x=y; M). 8. A student whose flatmate took his/her jacket without permission and

was the last person who used it. Later this student finds the jacket in the wardrobe with a stain on it, and strongly suspects that it was his/her flatmate who did it (-SD; x=y; F).

9. An official staff representative talking to his/her manager about a new scheme introduced at work which does not satisfy the staff (-SD; x<y; F).

10. A human resources manager who has to interview a new candidate for a job, but he arrives half an hour late on a busy day (+SD; x>y; M).

11. A head clerk whose tape-recorder has been taken by a clerk and co-worker without permission (-SD; x>y; M).

12. A worker whose superior and co-worker failed to pass on an important message to him/her. (-SD; x<y; M).

5. Analysis and results

5.1. Average number of main complaint strategies per group When analysing the average number of main strategies used by the five

groups in Figure 7-1, it was found that the Catalan patterns of complaint realisations demand almost one more strategy (0.61 in average) per situation than the British English system, the difference between them

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being statistically significant (p = 0.005)7. This is the first point at which the two culture-specific interactional styles diverge. In a cross-cultural comparison between the average number of strategies in Catalan and in British English apologies, it was encountered that the Catalan patterns of behaviour also demanded almost one more strategy per situation when compared to the British system, the two systems differing statistically as well (Sabaté i Dalmau and Curell i Gotor 2007). It was also suggested that the Catalan pragmatic system shows a ‘positive face-based’ tendency, characterised by mutual understanding, common ground, forgiveness, in-group membership, solidarity and directness. By contrast, the British English system has traditionally been classified as negative face-based, characterised by self-effacement, formality, restraint, over-emphasis on power, implicitness and avoidance of conflict (cf. Márquez Reiter 2000).

Average number of Strategies per group

2.311.531.791.511.7

0

0.5

1

1.5

2

2.5

3

*GB *I A *P *CAT

No

Figure 7-1: Average number of main strategies per situation, in each group

In the case of the three experimental groups, the advanced learners

show a similar behaviour when compared to the British group; while the number of main strategies in the intermediate and the proficiency groups is almost identical, they both employ fewer strategies than the British, but

7 Statistics were conducted by means of SPSS 12.0. (*) marks statistical significance. The tests employed were One Way ANOVA with Post Hoc Bonferroni tests. Mean differences were significant at the 0.05 level. Confidence intervals in the error bar graphs were also checked for statistical significance.


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probably due to different reasons. In fact, the performance of these two latter groups is statistically significant even when compared to the Catalan’s average (p = 0.002 and p = 0.003 respectively). The intermediate group appear to be constrained by their procedural pragmalinguistic knowledge when trying to express themselves freely, as illustrated in Situation 3 (noisy party) “Please, silence. I can’t study” (I15)8 or in “Please, you can’t give my book?” (I9) in Situation 8 (forgotten book). By contrast, the proficiency group’s responses suggest that they have a much wider range of linguistic resources. The qualitative data consistently show that their declarative knowledge on embedded clauses, impersonal constructions and modality markers is ready for productive use. However, they might have developed an executive control over the patterns of behaviour of the British pragmatic system and, according to it, use a much lower average number of complaint realisations than in Catalan. Pragmatic behaviour is much more open to conscious modification than syntax or phonology (Trosborg 2003), and NNSs with a high linguistic command of the L2 perceive a greater number of levels of pragmatic components and politeness distinctions than NSs (Murphy and Neu 1996). It could thus be suggested that the proficiency group, on knowing that British values require fewer strategies, try to adjust their L2 production to the extent that they produce even fewer strategies than the target language average.

The advanced group shows a tendency to make use of more strategies to express their intentions and to ensure that they are understood. Olshtain and Weinbach (1993) found a similar behaviour among their intermediate-advanced group, a level described as having the highest degree of variability in their use of strategies. It should be acknowledged that seemingly contradictory results regarding the average number of strategies have been described, too. Trosborg (1995) found that the number of strategies in her three groups of learners was much lower than the average number employed both by the Danish and the English NSs in oral production, and concluded that the number of strategies increases gradually with proficiency. Geluykens and Kraft (2003), by contrast, showed that German speakers of English employed a higher number of main complaint strategies in written production.

8 Capital letter indicates group (I= Intermediate). Number indicates number of informant.

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5.2. Average number of strategies per situation and social parameter

Five situations showed a statistically significant difference among the

five groups: S2 (passport not ready), S5 (cleaning arrangement), S8 (stained jacket), S9 (physical fitness on the job), and S11 (borrowed tape-recorder). The Catalan and the British systems differ highly significantly at S2 (p = 0.000), S5 (p = 0.000) and S8 (p = 0.004), where the GB use little more than one main strategy per situation, and the CAT use more than 2.5 strategies (up to almost 3.5 main strategies), as shown in Figure 7-2. This seems to provide further evidence for the claim that the Catalan patterns of behaviour require more main strategies as a way to establish commonality and appeal for understanding, which are characteristics of a positive face-based system.

The intermediate group differ from the Catalans’ performance at S2 (p = 0.002), S8 (p = 0.008) and S9 (p = 0.010). In the first one, their average number of main strategies is similar to the British, while Catalans use almost two more strategies. The same is encountered in S8, where the intermediate group uses little more than one strategy (less than the British). Their performance in S9 best exemplifies the hypothesis that they are pragmalinguistically constrained. Apart from differing from the Catalan group, they also differ from the British (p = 0.002): both control groups, who behave very similarly in this situation, double the number of strategies employed by the intermediate group, who does not even use one main strategy, in average (they use an average of 0.88 strategies in S9).

The average number of strategies by the advanced group does not differ statistically significantly from the Catalan system in any of the cases. By contrast, they differ from the British at Situations 5 and 9 (p = 0.05 and p = 0.005). In the first case (S5), this can be explained in terms of pragmatic transfer: the advanced learners calque the number of strategies from their L1, since the difference between the GBs’ and the CATs’ average number of strategies in this situation is statistically significant as well9. Advanced learners, therefore, use almost one more strategy than the GB, following the Catalan system. In a study on NSs’ perception of IL apologies by Catalan learners of English, it was demonstrated that the use of more main apology strategies was clearly perceived negatively by the British, and the IL apologies with the highest number of strategies were judged as “[…] too long, exaggerated and too effusive” (Curell i Gotor and 9 If the control group show a statistical significance and any of the experimental groups differ significantly from the target language, it can be stated that a pragmatic transfer is occurring (Maeshiba, Yoshinaga, Kasper and Schmidt, 1996).

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Sabaté i Dalmau 2008). These are precisely features of a culture with a positive face-based orientation, too.

The proficiency group differ from the CAT group at S9 and S11 (p = 0.010 and p = 0.019, respectively). In both situations there is no social distance among interactants, and the addressee is a male. It seems to be the case that the proficiency group, when complaining to either acquaintances or friends, scarcely use one complaint strategy, a behaviour which in S9 is significantly different when compared to the British (p = 0.002). In S11 (borrowed tape-recorder), it seems that they carry out the complaint by means other than complaint realisations; mainly, by using supportive moves which modify complaints externally, such as the aggravating move request for forbearance, as in “Next time, please let me know” (P21). Trosborg (1995) found that the group with the highest proficiency level had the highest number of requests for forbearance, and, in fact, it has been proved that among interactants with an important degree of intimacy, requests are recurrent features in complaints (Laforest 2002).

In S9 (physical fitness on the job), where the manager has the power but at the same time is a co-worker, the proficiency group generally complain straightforwardly with just one more direct strategy, using expressions of appreciation to the addressee, vocatives and in-group markers (e.g. ‘we’), a sign of mutual trust and sincerity. That is, they carry out the complaint with positive-politeness features that seem to unveil socio-cultural values of the Catalan system. By contrast, the GB group use almost two strategies, but they are both ‘off record’: a hint and/or an expression of disapproval, sometimes with impersonal expressions and agent avoiders (i.e. expressions chosen not to mention the offender directly). Their realisations sound more indirect and yet non-imposing and self-effacing; that is, they are conducted by means of negative politeness features. For the purpose of explaining the differences between the performances of these two groups at S9, I will illustrate this case with the following examples, focusing only on the average number of strategies: · Proficiency: “I am sorry to say this Helen, but I think that most of the staff is unhappy about the new scheme of physical fitness. Couldn’t we change it?” (P5). (1 strategy: annoyance) · British: “Hi listen, I just wanted to talk to you about this fitness thing that has been introduced, some of the staff have brought it to my attention that they are not really too happy with the arrangements as they stand at present” (GB5). (2 strategies: hint below the level of reproach and annoyance or disapproval)

The difference between the average number of main strategies used by the GB and by the proficiency group in S11 is not statistically significant.


157

Therefore, the average number of strategies in the proficiency group appears not to be likely to bring about negative attributions. S9 shows more illuminating results. It shall be recalled that the performance of the proficiency group is significantly different when compared to both the Catalans and the British. The fact that the proficiency group distance themselves from both systems seems to suggest that they are somehow aware of some British negative politeness values, and try to redefine their values accordingly, as they do in all the other situations in which there is no difference which is statistically significant. In this specific situation (S9), however, statistics and qualitative examination of their performance have shown that they fall back to their L1 cultural judgements of the social parameters under study, and their average number of strategies in this case results into a sociopragmatic non-target-like performance: the employment of just one strategy seemingly based on the Catalan socio-cultural system.

5.3. Types of main complaint strategies

The initial assumption that the Catalan learners of English would also have all the strategies available has been confirmed: the three groups of learners employ one or a combination of the five main strategies mentioned above when complaining (‘below the level of reproach’, ‘annoyance’, ‘explicit complaint’, ‘accusation’ and ‘threat’), regardless of their lack of linguistic resources. The fact that learners have access to the same range of realisation strategies as the NSs, irrespective of their proficiency level, is well accounted for in many studies on other IL SAs. Among Catalan learners of English, the same was found for apologies (Curell and Sabaté 2007; Sabaté i Dalmau and Curell i Gotor 2007), and for requests (Pérez i Parent 2002).

The complaint realisation choices are similarly distributed in the five groups at first sight. They all carry out the complaint basically off record (by means of choosing expressions ‘below the level of reproach’ and ‘annoyance’), around 47-57%. Around 23-33% of their main strategies are explicit complaints and the rest, 19-22%, are ‘bald on record strategies’ (‘accusations’ and ‘threats’), as illustrated in Figure 7-3:

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Type of Strategies per groups

0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

GB 9.71% 47 .31% 23.40% 9.88% 9.70%

I 11.23% 36 .05% 32.65% 10.89% 9.18%

A 10.54% 36 .99% 29.83% 11.88% 10.76%

P 8.96% 44 .81% 26.18% 9.20% 10.85%

CAT 11.55% 35 .60% 33.29% 10.60% 8.96%

Below the level of reproach

Annoyance *Complaint Accusation Threat

Figure 7-3: Complaint realisation choices per group (%)

Geluykens and Kraft (2003) also found that complaints are performed

‘off record’ by German and British NSs (59.4% and 65.1% respectively). Russians also prefer more indirect complaint realisations (Gershenson 2003). However, in the case of the Catalans and the British in this study, there is indeed a statistically significant difference between groups in their choice of ‘explicit complaints’ (p = 0.000). 57.02% of the British NSs’ choice of strategies is ‘off record’ (‘below the level of reproach’ and ‘annoyance’), whereas Catalans mainly choose ‘annoyance’, 35.6%, and ‘explicit complaints’, 33.29% (47.15% of ‘off record’ strategies). This shows a well-known tendency to be more indirect on the part of the British, and a tendency to be more direct on the part of the Catalans. Pérez i Parent (2002) also found that the requestive behaviour of the British was slightly less direct than that of the Catalans, although the differences between them were not statistically significant.

Implicitness is part of the Anglo-Saxon cultural distinctiveness: “Indirectness in complaints diminishes inhibition and is considered a virtue” by English NSs (Trosborg 2003: 265). It has been hypothesised that, by contrast, openness and explicitness appear to be some of the


159

components that define the Catalan socio-cultural bases (cf., also, Curell and Sabaté 2007). The data show, then, that Catalans have a preference for directness, and the British, for indirectness in complaint behaviour. A post hoc Bonferroni test showed that the British and the Catalan systems diverge precisely in their choice of explicit complaints, a difference which is statistically significant (p = 0.000). As for other complaint strategies, the differences between them are negligible.

The intermediate group’s performance is almost identical to the Catalans’ in terms of directness, and there are no adjustments towards an increase of the use of the less direct strategy ‘annoyance’ in a more target-like manner. This is the group of learners that use the highest number of ‘explicit complaints’, almost the same percentage as in their L1. However, there is a statistically significant difference between the intermediate and the Catalan groups regarding their choice of explicit complaints (p = 0.007), as well as regarding the choice of annoyance (p = 0.023), even though the distribution in percentages of this last strategy is almost identical (36.05% for the intermediate and 35.60% for the Catalans). Therefore, what was formerly hypothesised to be a sociopragmatic transfer of the patterns of distribution of strategy choices from Catalan has proved not to be true. Rather, statistical differences between the intermediate and the Catalan group might tentatively be attributed to the high degree of variability that there seems to exist within subjects in the intermediate group, captured by statistics and error bar charts. In turn, this variability seems to stem from the lowest group’s lack of linguistic resources.

The advanced group does not show any statistically significant difference concerning the type of main strategies, although it should be noted that there is a decrease in their percentage of ‘explicit complaints’ toward target-like usage. When comparing the three groups of learners, the decrease of ‘explicit complaint’ choices seems to occur gradually with increasing proficiency. However, this decrease does not correlate with an increase of ‘off record’ strategies (‘below the level of reproach’ and ‘annoyance’) in the case of the advanced group. By contrast, advanced learners increase ‘bald on record’ strategies (‘accusations’ and ‘threats’), which amount to a 22.64%. They are the most direct group, but, contrary to Trosborg’s results (1995), they do not over-rely on ‘accusations’. Although their choice of complaint realisations is not statistically different when compared to the NSs, they run the risk to be stereotyped or to fail to achieve their intentions, because NNSs normally receive negative attributions when they use more direct strategies: “[…] clearly, non-native speakers tend to be more direct in their complaining behaviour, which may lead to face-saving problems” (Geluykens and Kraft 2003: 256).

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The proficiency group performs in a target-like manner in their complaint choices. This group employs the lowest percentage of ‘explicit complaints’, and differs statistically significantly from the Catalan choice of ‘explicit complaints’ in exactly the same way as the British (p = 0.000). Besides, the proficiency learners are the only ones that show an increase of ‘off record’ strategies (a total of 53.77%), almost like the British. This shows an awareness of the importance of indirectness as an Anglo-Saxon conflict avoidance technique (Márquez Reiter 2000) on the part of this group, and a knowledge of L2 pragmatic and L2 politeness values which is being controlled successfully.

Overall, the results show that an optimal choice of complaint strategies in an L2 can be mastered at a proficiency level, although at a late stage. Trosborg (1995) also found that Danish learners used fewer ‘off record’ strategies than the English, and concluded that levels of directness are one of the most difficult aspects to master in L2 complaints. Contrary to Kasper and Schmidt’s (1996) claims that proficiency has little effect on the learners’ range of strategies, a very gradual pattern toward a shift from more direct to less direct strategy choices seems to have emerged with increasing proficiency.

Before summarising the findings in the conclusions, it should be acknowledged that consistent claims on acquisitional stages of pragmatic competence should include a much wider range of languages. The results presented in this paper also need to be tested with data gathered by means other than DCTs, such as role plays and, ideally, naturally-occurring data. Also, the gender of the complainer should also be included in future studies as a social aspect that might bring about newer and relevant findings on the production of IL complaints in English.

6. Conclusions

The findings presented in this paper seem to suggest that pragmatic

competence is a difficult aspect to master in an L2, particularly if the cultural bases of the L1 have proved to belong to a different politeness culture in which the social parameters under study are differently weighted. At the same time, the results also seem to suggest that optimal convergence toward target-like performance can occur at a proficiency stage, at least for several pragmatic components that constitute the speech act of complaints. On the light that complaints are one of the most challenging, face-threatening speech acts, this is very good news. Besides, the results can have some implications for L2 learning and teaching, which are briefly outlined, too.


161

On the whole, the group of learners with the highest level of proficiency shows an awareness of the importance of indirectness in the Anglo-Saxon world, and seems to be developing an executive control over the weighting of some contextual parameters studied. They adjust their performance accordingly, to the point that they differ significantly from Catalan. This has been seen in their complaint realisation choices, where they are able to distance themselves from Catalan in the five Catalan culture-specific situations that require more explicit complaints. This can indicate that exposure to and experimentation with the set of specific resources that allow for the linguistic realisation of indirectness and implicitness in English as a second or a foreign language could be a starting point and a basic tool for the teaching and gradual acquisition of more general pragmatic components.

It has been shown that an increase in L2 proficiency results in an overall decrease of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic non-target-like (hearer-alienating) performances. This is particularly relevant among intermediate learners, whose main characteristic is their lack of (pragma)linguisic resources: non-optimal use of main complaint realisations across situations, use of more direct politeness features and a high degree of variability when contextual variables come into play. The advanced group appears to illustrate how learners consciously work on putting together their L2 sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge. Sometimes they seem to perform in a target-like manner, as when they lower their usage of explicit complaints. In some other cases, their performance becomes remarkably non-optimal, as when they increase their number of complaint strategies to ensure understanding.

However, the correlation ‘the higher the level of proficiency, the lower the number of non-optimal pragmatic performances’ is neither straightforward nor linear. For instance, the intermediate learners have all the complaint strategies available, and use them productively: they indeed complain. Proficiency learners are not pragmatically successful by default either; instead, they tend to show a complex and wide range of success, from divergence to convergence to L2 optimal performance, as when they fall back to their L1 Catalan system, and use positive-politeness values when handling complaints, as seen in the average number of strategies in Situation 9. Overall, learners in the three groups seem to employ residual transfer of deep cultural elements, which are one of the most difficult aspects to overcome in the long route to the acquisition of any L2 politeness system. On the light of these findings, I suggest that providing the learners of English with specific examples of hearer-alienating performances or ethnolinguistic stereotypes (as found in actual intercultural

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exchanges conducted in English) might then help them develop an awareness of the sociopragmatics of optimal (target-like) IL English. Providing native speakers of English with a list of negative attributes that non-native speakers or learners might face in their encounters with native English speakers might be equally illuminating.

For the time being, I firstly hope to have contributed to redefine what exactly counts as complaints. Also, I expect to have contributed slightly to the study of the Catalan pragmatic system, since today one could complain about its short history. Secondly, I hope to have contributed to strengthening the joint enterprise of both pragmatics and second language acquisition in helping interlanguage pragmatics gain a well-deserved position of its own. Finally, the description of specific interlanguage pragmatic features and cultural interference in a wide range of social contexts across three developmental stages of L2 acquisition will hopefully have become the first step to understand which route L2 learners seem to follow in actual classrooms. I suggest that the detailed descriptions provided here can have some practical applications for the teaching of the English complaint system in ESL and EFL, providing some clues that might be of relevance for second language teachers and for IP researchers alike.

References

Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Barron, A. Acquisition in Interlanguage Pragmatics: Learning How to Do

Things with Words. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Bassols, Margarida. Les Claus de la Pragmàtica. Vic: Eumo, 2001. Bergman M. L. and G. Kasper. “Perception and performance in native and

nonnative apology”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by S. Blum-Kulka and G. Kasper, 82-107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Boxer, D. “Complaints as positive strategies: what the learners need to know”. TESOL Quarterly 27 (1993): 277-299.

—. “Ethnographic interviewing as a research tool in speech act analysis: the case of complaints”. In Speech acts across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language, edited by S. M. Gass and J. Neu, 217-239. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.


Clyne, M. Intercultural Communication at Work: Cultural Values in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.


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Clyne, M., M. Ball and D. Neil. “Intercultural communication at work in Australia: Complaints and apologies in turns”. Multilingua 10/3 (1991): 251-273.

Curell, H. and M. Sabaté. “The production of apologies by proficient Catalan learners of English”. In Studies in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics, edited by P. Garcés Conejos, M. Padilla Cruz, R. Gómez Morón, and L. Fernández Amaya, 76-92. New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007.

Curell i Gotor, H. and M. Sabaté i Dalmau. “Native judgements of L2 learners’ pragmatic transfers: the case of apologies”. In Multilingualism and Applied Comparative Linguistics. Vol. 2: Cross-Cultural Communication, Translation Studies and Multilingual Terminology, edited by F. Boers, J. Darquennes, K. Kerremans and R. Temmerman, 64-82. New Castle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.

Dersley, I. and A. Wootton. “Complaint sequences within antagonistic argument.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 33/4 (2000): 375-406.

Drew, P. “Complaints about transgressions and misconduct”. Research on Language and social Interaction 31 (1998): 295-325.

Edwards, D. “Moaning, whinging and laughing: the subjective side of complaints”. Discourse Studies 7/1 (2005): 5-29.

Frescura, M. “Face orientations in reacting to accusatory complaints: Italian L1, English L1, and Italian as a community language”. Pragmatics and Language Learning 6 (1995): 79-105.

Geluykens, R. and B. Kraft. “Sociocultural variation in native and interlanguage complaints”. In Meaning Through Language Contrast, Vol. 2, edited by K. M. Jaszczolt and K. Turner, 251-261. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003.

Gershenson, O. “Misunderstanding between Israelis and Soviet immigrants: Linguistic and cultural factors”. Multilingua 22 (2003): 275-290.

House, J. and G. Kasper. “Politeness markers in English and German”. In Conversational Routine: Explorations in Standardized Communication Situations and Pre-patterned Speech, edited by F. Coulmas, 157-185. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.

Kasper, G. “Pragmatic transfer”. Second Language Research 8/3 (1992): 203-231.

Kasper, G. and M. Dahl. “Research methods in interlanguage pragmatics”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 13 (1991): 215-247.

Kasper, G. and R. Schmidt. “Developmental issues in interlanguage pragmatics”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18 (1996): 149-169.

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Laforest, M. “Scenes of family life: complaining in everyday conversation”. Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002): 1595-1620.

Leech, G. N. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman, 1983. Maeshiba, N., N. Yoshinaga, G. Kasper and S. Ross. “Transfer and

proficiency in interlanguage apologizing”. In Speech Acts across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language, edited by S. M. Gass and J. Neu, 155-187. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.

Márquez-Reiter, R. “Complaint calls to a caregiver service company: the case of desahogo”. Intercultural Pragmatics 2/4 (2005): 481-514.

—. Linguistic Politeness in Britain and Uruguayan: A Contrastive Study of Requests and Apologies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000.

Mir, M. “Do we all apologize the same? An empirical study on the act of apologizing by Spanish speakers learning English”. In Pragmatics and Language Learning Vol. 3, edited by L. F. Bouton and Y. Kachru, 1-19. Urbana, IL: Division of English as an International Language, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1992.

Murphy, B. and J. Neu. “‘My grade’s too low’: the speech act set of complaining”. In Speech Acts across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in Second Language, edited by S. M. Gass and J. Neu, 191-216. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.

Olshtain, E. and L. Weinbach. “Interlanguage features on the speech act of complaining”. In Interlanguage Pragmatics, edited by G. Kasper and S. Blum-Kulka, 108-122. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Payrató, L. Pragmàtica, discurs i Llengua Oral. Introducció a l’anàlisi funcional de textos. Barcelona: Editorial UOC, 2003.

Pérez i Parent, M. “The production of requests by Catalan learners of English: situational and proficiency effects”. Atlantis 24/2 (2002): 147-168.

Sabaté i Dalmau, M. and H. Curell i Gotor. “From ‘I’m sorried’ to ‘I’m ever so sorry’: acquisitional patterns in L2 apologies by Catalan learners of English”. Intercultural Pragmatics 4/2 (2007): 287-315.

Tatsuki, D. H. “If my complaints could passions move: an interlanguage study of aggression”. Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000): 1003-1017.

Trosborg, A. Interlanguage Pragmatics: Requests, Complaints and Apologies. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995.

—. “The teaching of business pragmatics”. In Pragmatic Competence and Foreign Language Teaching, edited by A. Martínez Flor, E. Usó Juan and A. Fernández Guerra, 247-281. Castelló de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I, 2003.

CHAPTER EIGHT

LEARNER STRATEGIES IN L2 PRAGMATICS: THE CASE OF SPANISH COMPLIMENT

RESPONSES

BRYANT SMITH

1. Introduction

The connection between pragmatics and second language acquisition has seen a great deal of study in various languages by researchers like Fraser (1978), Scarcella and Brunak (1981), Rintell (1981), Brown and Levinson (1987), Koike (1992, 1996), Félix-Brasdefer (2003, 2006) and Huth (2006). One speech act that is particularly of interest to researchers is compliment responses because they require a great deal of pragmatic and cultural knowledge by the speaker and therefore are often a rich source of L2 data. Golato notes that compliment responses are linguistically-rich and that they “[…] have received so much attention from a wide range of researchers working in different fields and with different languages” (2005: 1). She also notes that compliment responses in American English are particularly complex since the recipient is under the constraint of not self praising too much, while at the same time accepting the compliment (Golato 2005: 169).

Research of compliment responses (CR) in Spanish is not as common as that done in English, although Researcher Lorenzo-Dus (2001) found distinctive similarities and differences between CRs performed by English and Spanish speakers in their native languages. Studies on the CRs of language learners are even less abundant. Recently Huth examined the CRs of American learners of German and found, among other things, that “[…] learners display their cultural orientation as they apply the L2 sequences and make the ‘foreign’ sequences a locus for negotiating their own cultural identity” (2006: 2025). Saito and Beecken (1997) studied the interlanguage used in the CRs of American learners of Japanese and noted

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differences in the uses of positive strategies, which expand or explain a compliment, and avoidance strategies, which downgrade or refuse a compliment, demonstrated by the learners.

One way to better understand the CR behavior of L2 students is to examine the CR strategies that the students employ while responding to a compliment. The present study attempts to bring together the research that has been done on this speech act and clarify it by comparing compliment response strategies from English-speaking learners of Spanish at various class levels in a foreign language classroom at the university level. The students were at four stages of learning: beginner, high beginner, intermediate, advanced. Since it has been widely assumed in many foreign language textbooks and methodologies that pragmatic competence in the L2 simply emerges with increased experience with the language, research like the present study helps to clarify issues related to this topic and illustrates that the explicit instruction of and focus on specific speech acts in the L2 might be a more successful approach to foreign language teaching. Since there are many different CRs that one could utilize in any given situation, having a wide variety of CRs is arguably a necessary part of being a successful L2 user. There is a great deal of difference in terms of the quantity of Spanish grammatical structure exposure between the participants in this study. This amount of grammatical exposure, if one is to believe traditional language teaching methodologies, will bring increased pragmatic CR response variation.

The results of this study stand in contrast to traditional teaching methods that assume pragmatic competence will simply emerge in time and illustrate issues for future study. The data presented within show several instances of lower level students using greater variety in CR strategies than their more grammatically advanced peers. This lends evidence to the idea that there is not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between pragmatic and grammatical competences, and that specific instruction is a better predictor of increased CR strategy variety. By identifying the CR strategies of language learners, it is hoped that other issues related to pragmatic acquisition can be better understood. The present study will also propose practical classroom applications of the issues involved in pragmatic acquisition, and will propose issues for further research.

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2. Methodology

Results from a compliment response DCT administered to native English-speaking learners of Spanish at an American university from varying levels were analyzed. The questionnaire was administered to 79 university students from the United States and consisted of four hypothetical situations in which four different people gave a compliment to which the student was prompted to respond in Spanish. Each hypothetical interlocutor has a different power relation to and relationship with the respondent, such as an elderly neighbor or a classmate of the opposite sex as to elicit a number of possible CR strategies. The goal of this was to see at what level, if any, students would be able to vary their strategies depending on their relationship with the interlocutor. The questionnaire featured a brief biographical portion asking the informant’s sex, years studying Spanish, language(s) spoken at home, among other items. Although variables like sex and travel to a Spanish-speaking country were not used in this study, they could possibly be of interest in future study. By asking what languages were spoken at home, native Spanish speakers were eliminated from participating in the study. The results of the DCTs were then analyzed according to the response strategy used. By employing a larger corpus of informants than has been seen in studies of this type, the data in this study helps disambiguate cross-sectional CR strategy use by English speakers. By analyzing the strategies used in responding to compliments, it’s also hoped that teaching strategies can be better tailored to students in order to make their output more pragmatically valid.

A four-part system was developed to classify the compliment response strategies used by the learners. Pomerantz (1978) and Herbert (1986) identified and refined, respectively, categories of American English CRs including (i) acceptances, (ii) agreements/second assessments, and (iii) solution types for two conflicting preferences (questions, comment history, ignoring, etc.) Since no widely-accepted system has been created for Spanish CRs, a new system was developed that proved to be an effective way to organize the current data. Related to these categories created by the abovementioned authors, the following classification system was utilized for the Spanish responses given to compliments: (i) acknowledgements (“gracias” thanks, “sí” yes), (ii) refusal/downplay of compliment (“no es nada” it’s nothing”), (iii) upgrade/explanation of compliment (“es muy bonito” it’s very pretty, “lo compré ayer”, I bought it yesterday), and (iv) return of compliment (“me gusta tu ropa también” I like your clothes too.) From the 79 informants, there were 316 response situations, some of

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which featured more than one response. These responses were analyzed and first classified by category and then compared by level and interlocutor.

3. Results

3.1. Part one The results of these DCTs were first studied in terms of overall

strategy use by the learners and were compared by level. Results indicate that with increased instruction, students are able to produce more grammatically complex compliment responses, but there is little variation in the pragmatic content used throughout the different skill levels. Also, lower level students often used more variability in their CR strategy use than the higher level students. The frequency of use, divided into the four strategies previously mentioned, are examined by level in the following table:

Beginner High beginner

Inter-mediate

High inter-mediate

1. Acknowledg

-ment 69% 55% 51% 61%

2. Refusal/ Downplay .01% .01% 0% 4%

3. Upgrade/ Agreement/Expansion

25% 37% 43% 31%


4. Return Compliment 5% 9% 6% 4%

Table 8-1: Frequency of compliment response use by strategy

These results reveal many things about the CR strategies used by Spanish language students in responding to hypothetical compliments. Regarding the first strategy of acknowledgment, the tendency to simply acknowledge a compliment went down as the classroom level increased. The most common acknowledgement used was “gracias” (thanks) followed by “sí” (yes) and “bien” (good). One can deduce that this reduction in the use of the often grammatically simple acknowledgement was replaced or expanded with lengthier and therefore more grammatically complex forms that were better acquired in higher levels.

The second strategy of refusing or downplaying a compliment was seen only in the first two levels (beginner and high beginner) and by only one participant in each level, and by 4% of participants in the high intermediate level. By the absence of this form in subsequent levels, it can be argued that as the students’ grammatical abilities increased, their ability to vary their strategies and to refuse and/or downgrade a compliment (“no es nada” it’s nothing or “no me gusta” (I don’t like it) did not increase correspondingly. These numbers tend to support my hypothesis that pragmatic ability in terms of the variety of strategies used does not correlate with increased grammatical ability. Although the presence of refusals did not grow incrementally by level, it is important to point out that refusals are present in the two lower levels (0.1%), albeit barely, when pragmatic instruction is present.

The third strategy of upgrading, agreeing with, or expanding a compliment was seen by all four levels, but their percentages do not appear to be as telling as the first two strategies. Examples of this strategy include “es nuevo” (it’s new) or “me gusta también” (I like it too). Not surprisingly, the students’ ability to expand or explain a compliment increased as their grammatical ability did. The most grammatically-advanced group, however, did not show an incrementally higher increase in the use of this strategy over the previous lower levels. One could argue that this supports the idea that increased knowledge of grammar and lexical forms does not lead to increased understanding of pragmatic and culturally-appropriate forms. It can also be argued that a student who is

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pragmatically aware would use a variety of forms in his or her compliment responses, and that this variability would correlate with the grammatical variety.

The fourth and final strategy of returning a compliment was seen with much lower frequency than strategies one and three. Examples of this strategy include “me gusta tu ropa” (I like your clothes) and “eres simpático” (you are nice). As with strategy three, the percentages of use do not seem to move in any particular direction and therefore do not at first glance support the traditional theory of grammatical knowledge breeding pragmatic abilities.

Since all CR strategy is arguably a necessary part of being a successful L2 user, these data show the need for explicit data instruction. The objective of language teaching is to produce well-rounded speakers of a language, which includes grammatical and lexical, as well as pragmatic and cultural knowledge and abilities. These data show that even students who were are considered high intermediate learners with a strong grammatical command and years of L2 instruction are largely unable to vary their CR strategies. It certainly does not seem to be the case that CR strategy variability increases incrementally as the grammatical level increases. In fact, over all, the beginner and high intermediate groups were the most alike in terms of their CR strategy use, despite the drastic differences in their grammatical level. As the interlocutor power relation varied drastically, we see the variety of CRs lacking. There is little difference by level concerning their strategies, aside from the ability to lengthen utterances and not depend solely on often brief acknowledgements in higher classroom levels. There seems to be some backsliding in terms of the strategies employed by the students, perhaps due to the fact that if any pragmatic instruction is included in the classroom, it often occurs relatively early in a student’s foreign language instruction such as when students are familiarized with formal and informal address pronouns. Perhaps this explains why some learners used a greater variety of strategies in earlier levels than in higher ones, when the focus is often on complex grammatical forms such as the subjunctive and the preterit and imperfect aspects of the past. In some cases, the more advanced levels used even fewer strategies than the beginning levels. This phenomenon is of particular interest to researchers and educators since it can reflect a failure in instruction and curriculum and a need for specific, speech act-focused pragmatic instruction at all levels. Further pedagogical implications will be discussed later.


3.2. Part Two

After the strategies used in response to all four situations were analyzed, they were then separated and studied by each specific situation to compare how the four class levels responded to a particular situation. This was done in an attempt to better understand, as Huth (2006) mentions, the cultural orientation of the student. The first situation involved receiving a compliment from a teacher on having done a good job on an assignment. The second question involved a compliment from a classmate of the opposite sex. The third and fourth scenarios involved an elderly friend and a best friend of the same sex, respectively. By choosing imaginary interlocutors of varying sexes, ages, and power levels, different strategies were elicited and a variety of CRs were anticipated. The strategies used in the responses by the informants are classified and separated by class level in the following charts:

Acknowledge 74% Refusal/Downplay 0%

Upgrade/Agreement/Expansion 24% Beginner

Return Compliment 2% Acknowledge 55%

Refusal/Downplay 0% Upgrade/Agreement/Expansion 45%

High beginner


Refusal/Downplay 0% Upgrade/Agreement/Expansion 50% Intermediate



High intermediate

Return Compliment 0% Table 8-2: CR strategies used by level to a teacher

These results show that the high intermediate students were the only informants to use downgrade or refuse a compliment from the teacher (6%) and not surprisingly, the beginner students had the greatest percentage of simple acknowledgements (74%). Only the beginner students returned a compliment (2%) which shows these beginners are able to utilize a strategy that is not employed even by the high

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intermediates. The percentages of expansion/upgrade increase by level, with the exception of the high intermediate students.

Acknowledge 58%

Refusal/Downplay 0% Upgrade/Agreement/Expansion 29% Beginner


Refusal/Downplay 0% Upgrade/Agreement/Expansion 27% High beginner





High intermediate

Return Compliment 5% Table 8-3: CR strategies used by level to a classmate of the opposite sex

In this scenario, the greatest percentages of compliment returning are seen. Perhaps this is not surprising since the power relationship between the interlocutors is equal and a romantic element is possibly present since the participants are of the opposite sex. Again, beginner and high beginner students were able to produce more compliments (18%) than their more grammatically advanced intermediate and high intermediate counterparts [(9%) and (5%) respectively]. Again, refusal/downplays are scarce and only present in the high intermediate sample (9%). Also of interest is the fact that the greatest percentage of acknowledgements came from the intermediate students at (69%).










High intermediate

Return Compliment 9% Table 8-4: CR strategies used by level to an elderly family friend

In this third situation involving responding to compliments from an elderly friend, no student refused or downgraded a compliment. This might reflect the different power relationship between interlocutors and could also indicate that students see this strategy as impolite. Each group had similar percentages of returning compliments, with the intermediate group having the most (10%) and high intermediate slightly behind (9%). Still, the difference t between the beginner and high intermediate groups (6% and 9%, respectively) represents a small change considering the years of study and grammatical ability that separate these two groups.

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High intermediate

Return Compliment 0% Table 8-5: CR strategies used by level to a same-sex best friend

In the final scenario involving a best friend of the same sex, we find that no group returned compliments aside from the high beginner students (8%). The high intermediate students had the most refusals at 9%, while the intermediates, only two levels below, had none. The high beginners had the most acknowledgements (58%) and the least expansions (30%). This is of interest since these findings previously were most common for the beginning group. Once again, while the high beginners did refuse more compliments (9%) than the other groups, this statistic does not seem to reflect a great increase over the two beginner groups who had a refusal percentage of 2% and 5% respectively.

The frequency of use percentages from all four levels were then averaged and these results, which give us a glimpse into the students’ “cultural orientation” are seen in the following chart:


1. Acknowl-edgment

2. Refusal/ Downplay

3. Upgrade/Ex

tension

4. Return Compli-

ment

1. Teacher 59.5% 1.5% 38.5% .5%

2. Classmate (opposite

sex)

60% 2% 26% 12.5%

3. Elderly Friend 56.5% 0% 36% 8%

4. Best friend

(same sex) 53.5% 4%` 40.5% 2%

Table 8-6: Frequency of CR use by strategy and scenario

In her comparative study of compliments and compliment responses of British and Spanish college students, Lorenzo-Dus found that male students upgraded compliments ironically more than female students (2001: 107). Although gender was not considered a factor in the present study, these results tend to support Lorenzo-Dus’ ideas that speakers “[…] bring into their intercultural encounters pre-conceived, often stereotypically negative, evaluations about the other individual’s identity” (2001: 107). The present results indicate that students were most likely to acknowledge (60%) and return a compliment (26%) from someone of the opposite sex. No student downplayed or refused a compliment from an elderly friend, but they were most likely to do so with a best friend (4%). Students were also most likely to expand a compliment from the best friend (40.5%) and least likely to do so with the elderly friend (26%). These results, as well as opportunities for future study, will be discussed further in the following section.

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4. Discussion and Conclusions

This study examines CR strategy use in hopes of better understanding the underlying processes involved in the production of CRs by L2 learners. As students’ classroom level advances and their grammatical repertoire increases, their ability to vary CRs does not seem to increase at the same rate. This is significant because the high intermediate students had often had two years of college level Spanish language education, while the beginners had only weeks. As we have seen, this pragmatic variance at times seems to backslide, perhaps due to an emphasis, if any, on the pragmatics of the L2 culture occurring more in lower levels than in later ones. For one, these results appear to indicate that the often slight pragmatic instruction that occurs in lower levels does lead to increased CR strategy variation which is ultimately necessary to be a successful user of the L2. These findings are particularly relevant since pragmatic competence largely remains an overlooked aspect of second language acquisition in the language classroom. The results of this research illustrate that in the L2 classroom, pragmatic accuracy in the second language often does not simply emerge with grammatical instruction. Instead, these data show that since the beginners and high beginners often employed as many or more differing CR strategies than the intermediate groups, explicit instruction might be a better tool for teaching variation in CRs.

Educators face the difficulty of creating exercises and activities that can develop L2 CR variation. I propose integrating pragmatic aspects of language under the broad category of culture. The idea of teaching culture along with grammatical and lexical aspects of language has been seen since the early translation-focused methods of the early 20th century fell out of fashion. Pragmatics might be more easily accepted by teachers and students if it were incorporated with other cultural aspects of the L2, such as customs and history. The inclusion of specific pragmatic speech act instruction under the category of culture will be less threatening to both teachers and students unfamiliar with linguistic terminology. It is not surprising that pragmatic aspects of language have not received much focus in many language classrooms since grammar and vocabulary are often easier to teach and grade since there is, in most cases, an objectively correct or incorrect answer. Pragmatics and other cultural components of language often require a large amount of sociocultural knowledge by the language teacher, which is not always present.

I suggest that L2 teachers implement activities in the classroom that mimic real-life speech acts like apologies, condolences, and compliment


responses. In many Spanish language classrooms, the pragmatic instruction that is present often centers on second person pronoun use (‘tú’ vs. ‘usted’), with slight attention given to other speech acts. Real-life native examples of compliment responses are vital if students are to eventually use native-like utterances. I believe that if a direct cultural contrast between English and Spanish approaches to speech acts were specifically pointed out, perhaps using a positive/negative politeness model, students would be more apt to see the possible subtle cultural differences between the two languages and less likely to simply transfer their own pragmatic judgments from the L1. It has been my experience in teaching Spanish to Americans that students are often very receptive to humorous examples of the misuse of language, such as saying “Estoy embarazada” (I’m pregnant) instead of the lexically similar I’m embarrassed. Teachers might find success pulling from similar communicative breakdowns that occur in pragmatic inferences from the L1. I think that by using this approach, educators would find students to be receptive and more aware of these pragmatic differences. If teachers and curriculum creators placed a fraction of the emphasis given to grammatical and lexical forms on pragmatic competence, the results would be enlightening. As mentioned before, incorporation of these strategies under a heading of culture might make them more “user friendly” and more likely to be incorporated by teachers into the classroom curriculum.

Since the present research serves as a description of the processes involved in using L2 CRs, the implications for further study are numerous. In further research on cultural CR variation, one could carry out a comparative study of English and Spanish CRs, since, as previously mentioned, definitive data on how Spanish speakers compliment is scarce. By comparing the strategies of the learners, we can attempt to better understand the underlying processes that are involved in the compliment responses that the learners choose to employ. For example, since no American student refused or downplayed a compliment from someone to whom he or she would presumably show a great deal of deference, an elderly neighbor, it might be the case that the English speakers see this response as less deferent than upgrading or extending a compliment, which the informants did the most with those of a low deference level: a friend of the same sex. It might also be the case that native Spanish speakers see the reverse as true: upgrading a compliment shows less deference than refusing one. These are simply hypotheses at this point, but would certainly be worthy of further cross-cultural study to see if English speakers and Spanish speakers have different attitudes towards specific speech act situations.

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Other suggestions for future research in this area are to make the data collection method, or in this case, the questionnaire, even more transparent and easy to understand exactly what is expected of the informant. Perhaps a clearer set of instructions and oral script that does not divulge the investigational goal of the study would be useful. The methods and data presented show ideas and frameworks that will undoubtedly be useful to conduct future study to expand upon the hypotheses laid forth herein. Also in future study, I would like to increase the range of student ability levels to go beyond second-year Spanish courses, and perhaps go all the way up to senior or even graduate level Spanish classes. The approach taken here might also be of interest to researchers attempting to better understand the L2 pragmatics of learners concerning other speech acts like apologies, condolences, and requests.

The topic of compliment responses has been explored a great deal, by researchers like Koike (1992, 1996), Saito and Beecken (1997), Félix-Brasdefer (2003, 2006) and Huth (2006), but its connection to pragmatic acquisition needs further illustration. Saito and Beecken (1997) insist that “[…] none of the research in pragmatic transfer […] has addressed any pedagogical implications for teachers.” Studies concerning Spanish are of particular interest since, as Lorenzo-Dus writes “[…] there have been very few Spanish/English cross cultural studies on the C-CR [compliment–compliment response] speech act.” (2001: 108) Works centering on acquisition of CRs are even more scarce. The results from the present study help to clarify the role of pragmatics in the field of SLA, as well as pedagogical implications like incorporating pragmatic strategies concerning specific speech act situations into the L2 classroom.

References

Al Falasi, H. “Just say ‘thank you’: a study of compliment responses”. Linguistics Journal 2/1 (2001): 28-42.

Bardovi-Harlig, K. and Z Dörnyei. “Do language learners recognize pragmatic violation? Pragmatic versus grammatical awareness in instructed L2 learning”. TESOL Quarterly 21/2. (1998): 233-259.

Blum-Kulka, S. (1987). “Indirectness and politeness in requests: same or different?” Journal of Pragmatics 11 (1987): 131-146.

Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness: Some Universals in language use. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Boyd, P. A. “The development of grammar categories in Spanish by Anglo children learning a second language”. TESOL Quarterly 9 (1975):125-135.


Cohen, A. D. and E. Olshtain. “The production of speech acts by EFL learners”. TESOL Quarterly 27/1 (1993): 33-56.

Citron, J. L. “Can cross-cultural understanding aid second language acquisition? Toward a theory of ethno-lingual relativity”. Applied Linguistics 10 (1984): 209-30.

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. “Declining an invitation: a cross-cultural study of pragmatic strategies in American English and Latin American Spanish”. Multilingua 22 (2003): 225-255.

Félix-Brasdefer, J. C. “Linguistic politeness in Mexico: refusal strategies among male speakers of Mexican Spanish”. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006): 2158-2187.

Fraser, B. “Acquiring social competence in a second language”. RELC Journal 9/2 (1978): 1-21.

—. “Perspectives on politeness”. Journal of Pragmatics 14 (1990): 219-236.

García, C. “Teaching speech act performance: declining an invitation”. Hispania 79/2 (1996): 267-279.

Golato, A. Compliments and Compliment Responses: Grammatical Structure and Sequential Organization. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005

Herbert, R. K. “Say ‘thank you’ – or something”. American Speech 61 (1986): 76-88.

Holtgraves, T. “The linguistic realization of face management: implications for language production and comprehension, person perception, and cross-cultural communication”. Social Psychology Quarterly 55 (1992): 141-159.

Huth, T. “Negotiating structure and culture: L2 learners’ realization of L2 compliment-response sequences in talk-in-talk interaction”. Journal of Pragmatics 38 (2006): 2025-2050.

Koike, D. A. Language and Social Relationship in Brazilian Portuguese. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1992.

—. “Transfer of pragmatic competence and suggestions in Spanish Foreign language learning”. In Speech Acts Across Cultures: Challenges to Communication in a Second Language, edited by S. Gass and J. Neu , 257-281. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.

Lee, C. F. K. “Written requests in emails sent by adult Chinese learners of English”. Language, Culture and Curriculum 17 (2004): 58-72.

Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. New York: Longman, 1983. Lorenzo-Dus, N. “Compliment responses among British and Spanish

university students: a contrastive study”. Journal of Pragmatics 33 (2001): 107-127.

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Márquez Reiter, R. and M. E. Placencia. Spanish Pragmatics. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Márquez Reiter, R. Rainey, and Fulcher. “A comparative study of certainty and conventional indirectness: evidence from British English and Peninsular Spanish”. Applied Linguistics 16/1(2005): 1-31.

Mejías-Bikandi, E. “Assertion and speaker’s intention: a pragmatically based account of mood in Spanish”. Hispania 77 (1994): 892-902.

Omaggio-Hadley, A. Teaching Language in Context. Boston: Heinle, 2001.

Pomerantz, A. “Compliment responses: notes on the co-operation of multiple constraints”. In Studies in the Organization of Conversational Interaction, edited by J. Schenkein, 79-112. New York: Academic, 1978.

Rintell, E. “Sociolinguistic variation and pragmatic ability: a look at learners”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 27 (1981): 11-34.

Saito, H. and M. Beecken. “An approach to instruction of pragmatic aspects: implications of pragmatic transfer by American learners of Japanese”. The Modern Language Journal 81 (1997): 363-377.

Scarcella, R. and J. Brunak. “On speaking politely in a second language”. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 27 (1981): 59-75.

Winitz, H. “Grammaticality judgment as a function of explicit and implicit instruction in Spanish”. The Modern Language Journal 80 (1996): 32-46.

CHAPTER NINE

MODALITY IS MORE THAN MODAL VERBS: A PRAGMATIC APPROACH TO THE TEACHING

OF ADVERBIAL MODALITY

CARMEN MAÍZ ARÉVALO AND JORGE ARÚS HITA

1. Introduction

As teachers of English as a foreign language, we all know how difficult it is for our students to understand and master modality. However, its pervasive role in English makes it a must both for students and teachers from the lowest to the highest levels of learning. In fact, modality has been one of the most widely studied issues in English linguistics, as shown by the extensive bibliography devoted to the topic and exemplified by already classical studies such as those published by Coates (1983), Perkins (1983), Palmer (1990), Westney (1995) and Bybee and Fleischman (1995) or more recent ones such as those by Papafragou (2000), Facchinetti, Krug and Palmer (2003), Facchinetti and Palmer (2004) and Marín Arrese (2004), among others.

It has long been acknowledged that mastering a foreign language is a combination of competences, as stated by the Common European Framework of Reference (2001: 108) according to which, for the realisation of communicative intentions, users/learners need the following competences: linguistic, sociolinguistic and pragmatic. Linguistic competence includes all those elements related to the language itself, such as its phonology, lexis, grammar and vocabulary and so on. On the other hand, sociolinguistic competence is “[…] concerned with the knowledge and skills required to deal with the social dimension of language use” such as “[…] linguistic markers of social relations; politeness conventions;

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expressions of folk-wisdom; register differences, dialect and accent” (2001: 118). Finally, pragmatic competence is concerned with:

The user/learner’s knowledge of the principles according to which messages are: (a) organised, structured and arranged (‘discourse competence’) (b) used to perform communicative functions (‘functional competence’)–i.e. speech acts. (c) sequenced according to interactional and transactional schemata (‘design competence’). (2001: 123)

In the present chapter, we shall be dealing with the three competences

assuming that the correct understanding and use of the modal adverb ‘certainly’ involves mastering the three of them. Indeed, it does not only imply the correct understanding of its different ‘meanings’ but also of its various ‘uses’ and communicative functions –e.g. emphasizing the truth-value of the statement or expressing agreement, among others– in the appropriate context.

Finally, the present chapter also aims at applying the results of the analysis to two core subjects that integrate the syllabus of English studies: Translation and Contrastive Linguistics. In both cases, the present research might help students observe the differences between the expression of modality in Spanish and English and how these differences can be overcome when, for instance, translating a text from one language into the other.

As for the structure of the chapter, section two deals with the definition of modality and its different types while also concentrating on the particular case of ‘certainly’ and its different uses. Section three focuses on the methodology used in the present research. Sections four and five, in turn, concentrate on the analysis of the data and throw some light on the differences between Spanish and English regarding the expression of epistemic modality as well as those problems encountered in the translations of the English originals. The concluding section presents possible pedagogical applications in the light of the previous discussion.

2. Modality

As Palmer (1990) points out, modality is not easy to define. A felicitous attempt, however, can be found in Downing and Locke: “[…] a semantic category which covers such notions as possibility, probability, necessity, volition, obligation and permission” (2006: 380). In this line –also inspired by Perkins (1983), Coates (1983) and Halliday and

Modality Is More than Modal Verbs 183

Matthiessen (2004)– Carretero et al. (2007) as well as Zamorano and Arús (2007) and Maíz and Arús (2008) distinguish the following four different types of modality: a) ‘epistemic’, having to do with the expression of our attitude towards the content of the clause in terms of its higher or lower probability, as in (1) and (2). Epistemic modality also refers to the presentation of the content of a clause as the result of someone’s subjective judgement, as in (3); b) ‘deontic’, concerning the meanings of obligation (4, 5) and permission (6); c) ‘dynamic’, referring to the meanings of capacity (7) and tendency (8); and d) ‘boulomaic’, which conveys the subject’s wishes and intentions (9, 10).

(1) She must be there. (2) It may rain later in the afternoon. (3) In my opinion you’re making a mistake. (4) I must take this pill twice a day. (5) I should work out more. (6) We can park here after eight o’clock. (7) It can rain a lot in May (8) He would visit his grandma everyday after work. (9) He just won’t do it. (10) She no longer wishes to go.

The examples in (1-9) all illustrate expressions of modality through

modal operators, (10) being realised by the lexical auxiliary ‘wish’. It is often the case, however, that modality is expressed by other means, notably adverbial phrases. Perhaps the most complex area of adverbial modality is that of epistemic modality, as reflected by the existence of a large number of publications on the topic, ranging from the treatment of epistemic adverbs within general accounts of adverbial modality (Hoye 1997) or epistemic modality (Holmes 1982) to the study of specific epistemic adverbs (Downing 2001; Wierzbicka 2006; Maíz and Arús 2008, among others).

This paper therefore continues the tradition of the detailed study of specific epistemic adverbs by zeroing in on the case of ‘certainly’. What explains the choice of this particular adverb is the fact that, as will be seen, it presents a number of different possible meanings which both allow the expression of very fine-grained nuances and account for the difficulties that non-native speakers of English, even proficient ones, encounter in the achievement of pragmatic competence. Examples (11) and (12), from our corpus, illustrate two different uses of ‘certainly’ which, unless clearly categorized and explained, would very likely remain unnoticed and therefore inaccessible to non-native speakers.

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(11) I certainly hope you have a much more satisfying explanation than that. (The Da Vinci Code)

(12) “Can I have a word?” “Certainly”. (Sushi for Beginners)

Just trying to figure out the exact meaning of ‘certainly’ in (11) is no easy task. Although it belongs to the class of adverbs that are typically included under the label ‘epistemic’, its elusiveness has been remarked on, for instance by Wierzbicka, who speaks of the “[...] uncertain status” of this adverb (2006: 284). It can be clearly seen that the use of ‘certainly’ in (11) goes beyond the purely epistemic to provide a reinforcement of the intended request for an explanation. Its polysemy becomes all the more blatant if we compare the use in (11) with that of (12), where the adverb seems to become yet more detached from the epistemic meaning. It seems, therefore, worth devoting some time and effort to look into the pragmatics of this word so as to try to lift the veil accountable for its above-mentioned uncertain status.

3. Method

To carry out our task, we first compiled an English corpus of 1,527,806 words corresponding to ten different novels plus their Spanish translations. The design of the corpus is opportunistic, i.e. we used those texts that could be found in electronic format in both English and Spanish. The bilingual character of the corpus is explained by the ultimate goal of our study. Since we want to facilitate the understanding of the uses of ‘certainly’ by Spanish learners, looking at the translations of this adverb should arguably reveal which meanings have a clear parallel in Spanish and which are those whose idiomatic nature makes them harder to translate. The latter are the ones that should pose more problems to Spanish speakers and should therefore receive specific focus.

Once the appropriateness of the translations was evaluated, a second stage consisted in the analysis of the adverb ‘ciertamente’ in Spanish original texts. For that purpose, we used the Real Academia’s Corpus de Referencia del Español Actual (CREA), retrieving data from 75 novels amounting to 5,369,673 words. By choosing only novels, we made sure to keep within the same generic parameters as with the data from the original English texts. The analysis of these data would allow us to see up to what extent ‘certainly’ and ‘ciertamente’ are pragmatically similar and then find the reasons for infelicitous translations from English in stage one. This would in turn enable the design of activities aimed not only at advanced EFL learners but also at Contrastive Linguistics and Translation courses.


4. Data analysis

4.1. Analysis of English data

The analysis of the corpus shows that, although ‘certainly’ retains its epistemic meaning in all the cases, it is possible to distinguish seven different uses as summed up by table 9-1:

Uses: general classification

Uses: more delicate classification

Uses: most delicate classification

Examples

Epistemic proper

He’ll certainly want to know what it is (DV)

To requests ‘Can I have a word?’ ‘Certainly’ (SB)

Response in adjacency-pair To questions

or statements ‘You can make some more, can’t you?…’ ‘Certainly’, said Snape… (HP)

Emphasis on commitment

‘I certainly don’t intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead’ (SV)

Booster

Emphasis on truth-value

Whomever he was hoping to convince, it certainly wasn’t himself (SB)

Real ‘…but no, there is nothing wrong, certainly not!’ (HP)

Other epistemic uses

Agreement

Concessive ‘Certainly, he has been victimized, but we know that all abuse of power is in part the responsibility of the abused (SV)

Table 9-1: Uses of ‘certainly’1

Regarding the main speech acts which integrate the modal adverb ‘certainly’, it can be observed that it frequently relates to the expression of statements, where it helps to modify the speakers’ opinion regarding the truth of the statement itself either by emphasizing (booster) or by slightly diminishing it (epistemic proper).

1 The abbreviations in table 1 stand for the following titles: DV (The Da Vinci Code), SB (Sushi for Beginners), HP (Harry Potter) and SV (The Satanic Verses).

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However, statements are not merely linked to the expression of truth but also to other communicative functions such as agreement. The analysis of the corpus shows that ‘certainly’ is used in the expression of two kinds of agreement: real agreement (typically with the speakers’ previous statements, as in the example in table 9-1) and concessive agreement. Both types help maintain rapport with the interlocutor and, therefore, play a remarkable role as politeness strategies (Brown and Levinson 1987). This is especially obvious in the case of concessive agreement. In fact, when a speaker utters this kind of agreement, the main aim is to diminish the possible threat to the interlocutor’s ‘face’2 since, in fact, both interlocutors know that it is but a mock agreement. However, the absence of this mock agreement might be interpreted by the addressee as a sign of impoliteness and face-threat on the speaker’s part, which is why it is so important for our students to master this kind of uses and, with them, both sociolinguistic and pragmatic competences.

‘Certainly’ is also linked to other speech acts such as commitment (booster). According to Searle’s (1969) classification, commitments are those speech acts through which the speaker commits himself or herself to future action, such as in the case of promises or threats. In this case, the use of ‘certainly’ helps reinforce the speaker’s commitment and adds an important communicative nuance to the speech act by emphasizing the speaker’s willingness to carry out the future action to which s/he has committed.

Closely linked to commissives is the role that ‘certainly’ plays in adjacency pairs as the preferred response to two kinds of speech acts: requests and questions. Both speech acts can be considered within Searle’s (1969) category of ‘directives’ since both involve the speaker wanting the addressee to carry out some kind of action, either verbal –in the case of questions– or non-verbal in the case of requests. In both cases, however, the choice of ‘certainly’ –instead of a simple ‘yes’– helps reinforce the speaker’s commitment to comply with the interlocutor’s directive and thus plays a role as a politeness strategy, i.e. fulfil H’s want for some X (Brown and Levinson 1987).

2 We are referring to Brown and Levinson’s (1978) theory of politeness and its concept of ‘face’ as the image the speaker and other interlocutors have of himself. ‘Face-threatening acts’ are those that can threaten this face by attacking it, as for example in the case of disagreement.


4.2. Analysis of Spanish data

We turn now to the presentation of the data concerning the translations of ‘certainly’ into Spanish as well as the uses of the adverb ‘ciertamente’ in that language. Table 9-2 shows the different translations of ‘certainly’. The U column stands for uses: a refers to epistemic proper, b to adjacency pairs (for illustrative simplicity, and because the translations were similar, both kinds of responses in adjacency pairs, i.e. to questions/statements and to requests, are merged under a single label), c to emphasis on commitment, d to emphasis on truth-value, e to real agreement and f to concessive agreement. The T column stands for total number of uses of each category; the N columns reflect the number of tokens of each translation; the last column indicates de number of times that each kind of ‘certainly’ has been left untranslated. U T Prep. Phrases N Clausal elements N Adverbs N 0 a 14 Con toda seguridad

Con toda certeza Desde luego Sin duda

3 2 2 1

Tenía la certeza de que Era indudable que

1 1

Ciertamente Indefectible- mente

1 1

2

b 24 Desde luego (que no) Por supuesto (que no) En absoluto De ninguna manera De veras

8 2 1 1 1

Puedes estar seguro

1 Ciertamente Claro Cierto

7 1 1

1

c 3 Desde luego 1 - 0 - 0 2 d 27 Desde luego

Por supuesto Sin duda

6 1 1

Claro que Lo cierto es que

1 1

Ciertamente Indudable- mente Claramente Seguramente Sí

7 1 1 1 1

5

e 17 Desde luego Con toda certeza Por supuesto

3 1 1

Lo que sí era seguro Eso sí que no

1 1

Ciertamente Realmente (Y) menos

4 2 1

3

f 8 Desde luego 1 Lo cierto era que 1 Ciertamente Sí

3 1

2

Table 9-2: Spanish translations of ‘certainly’.

Table 9-2 shows that the preferred translation of ‘certainly’ into Spanish is by means of prepositional phrases and adverbs, the latter including an arguably higher number of translations into ‘ciertamente’

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than would in principle have been expected. The most idiomatic –i.e. less influenced by the Source Language– translations are found among adjacency pairs, although there are still seven cases of literal translation. When the translator does not seem to be able to come up with an appropriate translation for the adverb, it is often the case that this is simply not translated (zero-translation). This is found in our corpus mostly in the translations of emphatic ‘certainly’, notably when the emphasis is on the truth-value of the utterance. Taking the literal translation as the least felicitous, we could assign the zero-translation option an intermediate status in the cline of felicity since it certainly seeks to avoid a problematic translation but fails to supply the Spanish version with pragmatic meaning.

Once the problems with the translations of ‘certainly’ have been identified, it is now time to try to find causes for those problems. We have seen that the most arguable translations are those in which ‘certainly’ is literally translated as ‘ciertamente’. To see why this is so, we looked at the different uses of the Spanish adverb in the way specified in section 3 in order to see whether the same pragmatic values can be identified as for its English counterpart. If semantic differences are found, then this could explain the apparent infelicity of literal translations. Table 9-3 shows the results of our research on ‘ciertamente’. There we can see that the same categories can be roughly established for ‘ciertamente’ as we did for ‘certainly’, except for response to requests, for which no case was identified. Also, the cell for emphasis on commitment appears partially greyed because only one example was found, and quite odd-looking, too.


Uses: general classification

Uses: more delicate classification

Uses: most delicate classification

Examples from CREA

Epistemic proper ...la proximidad de unas máquinas que estaban ciertamente por llegar

To requests Response in adjacency-pair

To questions or statements

¿No tiene por el momento ninguna idea? -¿Pues no, ciertamente no.

Emphasis on commitment

... y el pueblo gritó: le buscaremos ciertamente entre las nubes.

Booster

Emphasis on truth-value

Tu Alonso, con su uniforme rojo y amarillo, es ciertamente apuesto y lleno de bizarría

Real Pero debe resultarte desconocido. Y, ciertamente, no sabes quién es

Other epistemic uses

Agreement

Concessive No más que en cualquier convivencia de pareja, ciertamente, pero Iris ya había manifestado sus dotes...

Table 9-3: Uses of ‘ciertamente’ in Spanish originals

Tables 9-4 and 9-5 show the quantitative data concerning the uses of ‘ciertamente’ and ‘certainly’ respectively, for contrastive purposes. The NN column stands for the number of novels source of the data; the T column indicates the number of tokens of the adverb; the R column, the ratio of tokens per total of words; the letters a through f read as in table 9-2, and the numbers indicate the tokens of each type of use. The only difference with table 9-2 is that in this case both kinds of responses in adjacency pairs appear separately, b being response to a request and b’ to a

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statement/question. This is done so on this occasion to reflect the fact that ‘ciertamente’ does not seem to be used in responses to requests, as indicated by the nought in the b column in Table 9-4. A cursory look permits to appreciate that ‘certainly’ appears about half as often as its English counterpart (1 token for every 23,551 words in Spanish vs. 1 token for every 13,512 words in English) and that the most frequent by far is the use for emphasis on truth-value, which contrasts with the English approximate balance between this use and the epistemic proper. NN T

R a b b' c d e F

75 228 1/23551 25 0 6 1 145 31 20 Table 9-4: Types and tokens of ‘ciertamente’ in CREA NN T

R a b b' c d e F

10 165 1/13512 62 5 15 5 57 17 14 Table 9-5: Types and tokens of ‘certainly’ in our corpus.

The last two examples in table 9-3 illustrate a characteristic of ‘ciertamente’ which is missing in ‘certainly’, namely the tendency of the Spanish adverb to be placed in between commas in writing, not only when indicating agreement, as table 9-3 might lead to believe, but also with other pragmatic meanings, notably epistemic proper, as illustrated by (13):

(13) …y una gran compasión por María que no era, ‘ciertamente’, conmiseración.

5. Discussion

As mentioned in the Introduction, one of the aims of the present paper is to apply the results of the analysis to the subjects of Translation and Contrastive Linguistics, currently part of the syllabus in English studies at our university. These two subjects have been chosen given the close relationship they establish between our students’ L1 (Spanish) and L2 (English). As already pointed out, the results show that there is clearly a preference for prepositional and adverbial phrases when translating ‘certainly’ into Spanish as opposed to other options like clausal elements. Thus, among the most frequent prepositional phrases, we find ‘con toda seguridad’ or ‘desde luego’ (both affirmative and negative ‘desde luego


que no’). Regarding adverbial phrases, the most common translation is ‘ciertamente’ (the most direct translation), which clearly predominates independently of the use.

However, even if there are apparently no significant differences regarding the uses of ‘certainly’ and its equivalent translation, a closer analysis reveals that the epistemic proper, the truth-value and the commitment uses seem to pose more problems for the translators, who either opt for unidiomatic translations like ‘indefectiblemente’ or for zero-translation both in truth-value and commitment uses. As suggested in section 4.2, this absence of translation favours a higher degree of idiomaticity in the Spanish version while at the same time depriving the translation of the nuances of meaning conveyed by the modal adverb. In other words, for a reader who does not know the English original, the translation will sound more felicitous and less awkward than ‘ciertamente’ or ‘indefectiblemente’ but the subtle differences between a commitment with or without the modal adverb will also be irretrievable, as illustrated by the following examples:

I sat on Alleluia Cone’s bed and spoke to the superstar, Gibreel. Ooparvala or Neechayvala, he wanted to know, and I didn’t enlighten him; I certainly don’t intend to blab to this confused Chamcha instead. I’m leaving now. The man’s going to sleep. (The Satanic Verses) Translation: Aparecí en la cama de Alleluia Cone y hablé con Gibreel superstar. Ooparvala o Neechayvala, preguntaba él, pero yo no le saqué de dudas; y tampoco quiero contarle nada al desconcertado Chamcha. Ahora me marcho. Él va a acostarse. Tom hoped they were caring for him well. The monk with the cheese had given the impression that they were kindly and capable men. Anyway, they were certainly better able to look after the baby than Tom, who was homeless and penniless. (The Pillars of the Earth) Translation: Tom esperaba que le cuidaran bien. El monje del queso le había dado la impresión de que eran hombres solícitos y capaces. De cualquier manera cuidarían mejor del bebé que Tom, que no tenía hogar ni dinero.

A possible explanation for zero-translation is indeed the fact that, in

these uses, the modal adverb is highly embedded in the predicator (more concretely in the verbal phrase) while this type of constructions is rather

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infrequent in Spanish, which renders the translation more difficult and makes most translators opt for zero-translations.

On the other hand, translations tend to be more idiomatic or felicitous when dealing with adjacency pairs (‘desde luego/desde luego que no’) although ‘ciertamente’ is also very frequently used, resulting in arguably infelicitous translations such as the following two examples:

Tom understood him. -You want to see a sketch. -Yes. -Certainly. Tom returned to his wall, with the bishop’s party in tow (The Pillars of the Earth) Translation: Tom comprendió lo que decía. -¿Os referís a un boceto? –Sí. –Ciertamente. Tom volvió junto al muro que estaba construyendo, con el grupo del obispo detrás. -You two are going out for dinner? Take the car and my driver if you want. -Thank you, sir, but we’ll walk. It’s a lovely evening. -Certainly is. Oh well, have a good time. (The Shell Seekers) Translation: -¿Ustedes dos se van a cenar? Llévense mi coche y mi chofer, si quieren. -Gracias, señor, pero preferimos caminar. Hace una noche preciosa. -Ciertamente lo es. Bien, que se diviertan.

As opposed to the cases discussed above, the use of ‘certainly’ in

adjacency pairs is not embedded within the predicator but frequently stands on its own, which makes it easier to translate with a prepositional or adverbial phrase. Thus, out of twenty-four cases, there is only one example of zero-translation in adjacency pairs.

Summing it all up, it can therefore be argued that there are three main tendencies when translating ‘certainly’ into Spanish in what could be defined as a continuum of ‘felicitous translations’:

(i) Idiomatic translation (especially in the case of adjacency pairs). (ii) Zero-translation (in cases like commitment, truth-value or epistemic

proper uses), which renders the translations less awkward but deprives them of their original and more subtle meanings.


(iii) Literal translation (certainly/ciertamente), which very often leads to infelicitous translations as illustrated by the examples above.

As a follow-up to our discussion, the next section suggests possible pedagogical applications and offers some pointers to future research.

6. Conclusions

The findings concerning the adverbs ‘certainly’ and ‘ciertamente’, both in isolation and contrastively, lend themselves to a number of pedagogical applications of pragmatic nature addressed not only to EFL learners but also to students of other subjects, notably those part of the English Studies curriculum at university. There are two subjects in particular which may benefit from the research presented on the previous pages, namely Contrastive Linguistics and Translation. In this section we are going to suggest activities for these two subjects in the light of the insights gained from our research.

For Contrastive Linguistics, a first activity involves the following steps:

a) Students are shown a number of selected samples from the English and the Spanish corpora –i.e. using texts in the original version. These samples will consist of clear-cut tokens of the different categories identified in our research for each adverb, such as the ones included in tables 9-1 and 9-3 above.

b) Students discuss the pragmatic uses of ‘certainly’ and ‘ciertamente’, decide how they coincide and how they differ and, ultimately, create a categorization of uses of the adverbs. The instructors, being in the know of the classifications and findings here presented, can safely monitor students’ progress.

c) Once students are familiar with the procedure, they are requested to follow the same steps to contrast other epistemic adverbs of similar degree –such as ‘surely’, ‘absolutely’, ‘definitely’, etc. For that purpose, the class is divided into small groups and each one of them is assigned a different adverb to work on it as a course paper: students have in this case not only to analyze data but also to compile their own corpus in the first place.

d) The submission of results is ideally accompanied by an oral presentation in which students report on the corpus and the way they have compiled it, the data extracted and the analysis thereof, as well as on their findings.

e) After all presentations are made, there are grounds for an interesting class discussion in terms of the pragmatic contrast of English and

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Spanish in the use of adverbs associated with the expression of high epistemic modality. This sort of activity is beneficial to students not only for contrastive and pragmatic purposes but also for the development of their research skills.

Another obvious area of application is that of Translation Studies, for which the following activity is suggested:

a) Students, using our corpus, discuss the intended meaning of clauses with ‘certainly’.

b) In the light of the previous discussion, students assess the felicity of the translations into Spanish. In the case of infelicitous translations, students are requested to suggest better ways of conveying the intended meaning in Spanish.

c) Students are invited to translate other texts containing ‘certainly’. In order to make this activity as complete as the one outlined above for Contrastive Linguistics, students could be given the assignment of compiling their own collection of data.

These are but two examples of the potential pedagogical benefits of the pragmatically oriented research presented on these pages. The activities here outlined will be implemented in the near future in the subjects specified. The main difficulty that can be anticipated resides in the fact that these activities rely heavily on the capacity of students to draw conclusions from the examination of data, and this is a factor subject to great fluctuation. In any case, and given the hands-on nature of these activities, they are a good way of motivating students to take a more active part in the learning process, in this case the learning of pragmatic issues. It is therefore expected that their implementation will render fruitful results which may in turn serve as a springboard to the design of other activities.

References

Austin, J. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.

Bach, K. and R. M. Harnish. Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1979.

Brown, P. and S. C. Levinson. Politeness. Some Universals in Language Use. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.

Bybee, J. and S. Fleischman (eds.). Modality in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995.

Carretero, M., J. R. Zamorano, F. Nieto, C. Alonso, J. Arús and A. Villamil. “An approach to modality for higher education students of English”. In Panorama de las lenguas en la enseñanza superior


(Proceedings of the IV ACLES Conference), edited by M. Genís, E. Orduna and D. García Ramos, 91-101. Hoyo de Manzanares: Universidad Antonio de Nebrija, 2007.

Coates, J. The Semantics of the Modal Auxiliaries. London: Croom Helm, 1983.

Council of Europe. Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, teaching, assessment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Downing, A. “‘Surely you knew!’: Surely as a marker of evidenciality and stance”. Functions of Language 8/2 (2001): 251-282.

Downing, A. and P. Locke. A University Course in English Grammar. London: Routledge, 2006.

Facchinetti, R. and F. R. Palmer (eds.). English Modality in Perspective: Genre Analysis and Contrastive Studies. Frankfurt an Main: Peter Lang, 2004.

Facchinetti, R., M. G. Krug and F. R. Palmer (eds.). Modality in Contemporary English (Topics in English Linguistics 44). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003.

Grice, P. “Meaning”. The Philosophical Review 64 (1957): 377-388. Halliday, M. A. K. and C. M. I. M. Matthiessen. An Introduction to

Functional Grammar. 3rd edition. London: Arnold, 2004. Holmes, J. “Expressing Doubt and Certainty in English”. RELC Journal

4/2 (1982): 9-28. Hoye, L. F. Modals and Adverbs in English. London: Longman, 1997. Kärkkäinen, E. Epistemic stance in English conversation. Amsterdam:

John Benjamins, 2003. Leech, G. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Routledge, 1983. Maíz, C. and J. Arús. “Towards a diachronic study of modal adverbs: a

case study of certainly”. Philologia VI (2008): 17-26 . Marín Arrese, J. (ed.). Perspectives on Evidentiality and Modality in

English and Spanish. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2004. Palmer, F. R. Modality and the English modals. 2nd edition. London:

Longman, 1990. Papafragou, A. Modality: Issues in the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface.

Oxford: Elsevier, 2000. Perkins, M. Modal Expressions in English. London: Pinter, 1983. Searle, J. Expression and Meaning. Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1969] 1979. Vanderveken, D. “Universal grammar and speech act theory”. In Essays in

Speech Act Theory, edited by Vanderveken, D. and S. Kubo, 25-62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001.

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Westney, P. Modals and Periphrastics in English. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1995.

Wierzbicka, A. English Speech Act Verbs. A Semantic Dictionary. New York: Academic Press, 1987.

—. English, Meaning and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Zamorano J.R. and J. Arús. “Modalities in contrast: where and why

Spanish ESL learners struggle with the expression of modality in English”. In Aprendizaje de lenguas, uso del lenguaje y modelación cognitiva: perspectivas aplicadas entre disciplinas, edited by R. Mairal et al., 813-818. Madrid: UNED, 2007.

Corpora

The British National Corpus. Oxford University Press, Longman, Chambers-Larousse, Lancaster University and British Library: http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/ (accessed 2 June 2008)

Corpus de referencia del español actual. Real Academia Española de la Lengua: Banco de datos (CREA): http://www.rae.es (accessed 2 June 2008)

Primary sources of our corpus

Brown, D. The Da Vinci Code. London: Corgi Books, 2003. Follet, K. The Pillars of the Earth. London: Penguin Group, 1989. Haddon, M. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Midnight-time. New

York: Knopf Publishing Group, 2004. Irving, J. The Fourth Hand. New York: Random House, 2001. Keyes, M. Sushi for Beginners. London: Penguin, 2000. McCourt, F. Angela’s Ashes. London: Flamingo, 1999. Ondaatje, M. The English Patient. London: Picador, 1993. Pilcher, R. The Shell Seekers. London: Thomas Dunne Books, 1987. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the order of the phoenix. Vancouver, BC:

Raincoast Books, 2003. Rushdie, S. The Satanic Verses. London: Picador, 2000.

PART III:

INTERCULTURAL ASPECTS OF COMMUNICATION

CHAPTER TEN

INTERCULTURAL PRAGMATICS IN ACADEMIC CURRICULUM - A HARD NUT TO CRACK?

BEATA KARPI!SKA-MUSIA"

1. Introduction

The modern world, saturated with change and variety, puts foreign language teachers in a very demanding position of multi-competent educators. They are expected not only to teach the language and about the language, but also to make students aware of multifarious, culturally grounded standards of behavior. Intercultural pragmatics is a branch in which a connection between the system of values and language used, and the way these culturally determined values affect communication breakdown or success, can be easily discernible. The knowledge of communication phenomena, such as theory of speech acts, pragmatic failure, politeness formulae or paralinguistic aspects, to mention just a few, is a vital element of linguistic training and obviously helps the students become more competent language users and language teachers. It is equally substantial for people who learn a foreign language for private or vocational reasons, as for trainee student teachers planning a career in a teaching profession.

The analysis made in this article focuses on the second group of learners, i.e. student teachers studying English for their BA degree at the Foreign Language Teacher Training Department of Gdansk University in Poland. It is my intention to discuss the results of a research carried out among students and teachers, in which their approach towards the meaning, contents, importance and practical application of training intercultural awareness via intercultural pragmatics was tested. It is already common knowledge that transformational processes in methodology of teaching languages do not refer only to methodological solutions and updated techniques. They find even more vivid reflection in

Intercultural Pragmatics in the Curriculum – A Hard Nut to Crack? 199

the psychological switch the teachers must be subjected to in order to develop skills and attitudes being applicable and useful in multicultural educational environments. In the context of an auto-evaluative trip into their own selves, the teachers have been questioned about their understanding of and position ascribed to intercultural competence in foreign language education at a university level. The same questionnaires, which were to evaluate if it is wisdom, experience or rather personal attitude to fluctuating educational demands that contribute to the development of intercultural competence, have been distributed among students. They were supposed to answer identical questions evaluating their idea and self-assessment concerning the fact of being linguistically and cognitively prepared for intercultural encounters in teaching domains. Intercultural Communicative Competence, a term ascribed by Michael Byram (1997) to the skills considered crucial in this process, will be frequently referred to during my assessment of results achieved from the respondents.

Summing up, the main thesis of this article could be formulated twofold. Firstly, intercultural pragmatic competence of teachers, being presently a highly valued asset of academic education, is not only a matter of their skills (linguistic, cognitive, paralinguistic and pragmatic) and knowledge (about culture and people), but also, if not mainly, of their open attitude towards social change and cultural variety. Secondly, the course of linguistics as an academic subject should be appreciated more as the arena where intercultural pragmatics can be lectured and taught. As research shows, many teachers still have a vague idea about applicability of intercultural training – both in the sense of attitude and in the sense of suitability of linguistics as a subject instructing about the sources of pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic failure in cross-cultural communication. A comparative analysis of students’ and teachers’ opinions on particular variables should provide additional interesting conclusions as to the applicability of intercultural pragmatics in the academic curriculum of philological studies. To provide some theoretical background, a brief look shall be cast upon the way in which some globalization processes have caused a shift in educational goals.

1.1. A few aspects of global reality and their implication for foreign language didactics

Jennifer Gidley (2000) in her analysis of globalization effects on the learning societies, or rather on the attempts to create free, stimulating and modern environment for acquiring knowledge globally, criticizes mass

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education as the most powerful method of negative enculturation. According to her, whenever one cultural system, in her studies mainly American, tries to transplant certain models of teaching or learning onto another culture, the only outcome is cultural hegemony and social clashes instead of improvement and raised standards of knowing. Such phenomena, being the fact observable through the last decades in America, must have led to some negative outcomes. These major ‘side-effects’ of globalization are mainly reflected in some shifts in a value system. The way values transform affects enormously both linguistic and non-linguistic human interaction on personal and educational niveau. In order to see this connection, let me first draw on a few basic factors which, according to Gidley (2000), disturbed the smooth process of creating a perfect, homogenous and global world. The following three of them, by their being quite universal and spreading quickly all over the world, seem to be most relevant to the change in methodology of teaching: the triumph of individualism over collectivism, the colonization of ‘Mass Imagination’ and the secularization of culture.

Not to disrespect the positive achievements, i.e. fighting for minority rights, too extreme individualism is claimed to have negatively affected family structure. The reason is that collective responsibility has been replaced by the dominance of rights of an individual. The consequent shifts in male-female relationships may have had their negative outcome in deepened communication breakdown. The general self-centered orientation winning over co-operation, be it between ethnic minorities and majorities, teachers and students, partners or children and parents, must have resulted in the need to build a new code of behavior patterns and, in case of education, to develop a new methodological set of tools which would allow people to interact on various levels of communication.

Gidley also claims that the interactive electronic games, which were originally produced in order to desensitize emotionally soldiers planning to go to a battlefield, have thrown the traditional folk tales or stories to the outskirts of the youth’s interest and imagination. The ease, with which the interactive media influence the mass of youngsters and children’s minds, too often wins over more tedious, but also more demanding and productive mental activities accompanying reading, writing or listening to the stories. However true it might be, the susceptibility to the media is an unquestionably modern fact to be included in methodologies of learning and teaching.

Finally, secular values are said to have dominated spiritual values represented by religion. Sometimes they are being practiced parallel to traditional religions. The consequent secularization of education is claimed


to have deprived young people of a chance to get inspired by community organizations and thus throws them into the other ways of ‘togetherness’.

Although they are only a tip of an iceberg in a wide globalist discourse, the above tendencies have caused, as Gidley (2005: 5) writes: “[…] that many young people in the industrialized world have become fearful of the future, disempowered and disenchanted by the education system.” In the face of such a situation, some changes would be highly required so that the truly learning society had a chance to develop. First of all, it had to be stated the participants of educational processes should recognize and accept life-long learning as their leading principle. The experience of the above mentioned social changes leads also to another conclusion: it is transformation that becomes a key-word for modern reality and thus, consequently, for modern education. Value systems, tradition, learning and knowledge are no longer stable (Bauman 2006). Neither, as I try to argue below, is wisdom. Something that causes this situation is a construct impossible to eliminate - cultural diversity.

The general conclusion, although by no means exhaustive, can be affirmative. The unquestionable fact of cultural diversity, being seemingly the hindrance in the process of globalization, is a positive and motivating factor in the processes of transforming value systems. These transformations must precede the processes of adaptation, differentiation and acculturation. Cultural diversity simply enables and promotes the development of human identities. Papastephanou (2005: 534) concludes:

Culturally, it (globalization) is intervening dramatically in the (re)shaping of identities and self-conceptions, the premises of human encounter and exchange of world-interpretations and the frame of diverse sensitivities, creativities and responses to aesthetic experience.

1.2. Wisdom reclaimed and proved invalid again

The growing awareness of cultural diversity is a big step in the direction of creating a learning society based on wisdom. As unification has proved invalid, diverse communities should make use of their idiosyncrasies in a positive and fruitful way. Although globalization on the level of cultural identities has turned out much more complex than expected, it may have helped to become more sensitive to the Other in cross-cultural encounters. To do so, however, individuals had to reclaim wisdom and give it proper status in societal and educational terms. In order to accept or reject, adapt and acculturate or alienate, people have to know the differences and be ready to observe them. So they need a specific knowledge which lets them become aware of what constitutes

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differences or similarities. This is one of the reasons why pedagogues and researchers have started to promote more holistic, integrated teaching methods. They have supported students’ autonomy, introduced problem-solving tasks, promoted social skills and developed alternative methodological techniques aimed at making a learning process multidimensional, multi-sensory and effective. Language skills have been trained and knowledge based on information has been ‘sold’. This kind of wisdom, identified with the growing awareness of how to cope with diversity, was certainly very meaningful and essential for building a more educated ‘knowledge society.’

However, global reality has in the meantime undermined the potential of this kind of wisdom. According to Barnett (2004), the present social reality can be described as the world saturated with change, uncertainty and fragmentation. Sociologists (e.g. Bauman 2006, 2007) use the words: ‘fluidity’, ‘liquid modernity’, ‘fragility’, or ‘risk’ in order to highlight its features. Under these circumstances ‘wisdom’ understood as ‘knowledge’ and ‘skills’ (Byram 1997), would not suffice in order to become a competent intercultural speaker, all the more intercultural teacher of foreign languages. Knowledge needs to be constantly updated in order to catch up with the coming innovations. Skills have to be trained repeatedly, depending on the validity and effectiveness reached. As the reality is ‘fluid’, the future is unknown and unpredictable. This fact enforces constant adaptation processes. And this is why the third component of intercultural pragmatic competence, classified by Byram (1997) as ‘attitudes’,!gains prior importance. Those who aspire to be interculturally competent must first of all perform an open and flexible attitude towards the described fluctuating world of people with their diverse value systems and learning styles. This requirement refers to a great number of language educators who play a role of mediators between cultures and languages. They are unavoidably subjected to the transformation of their own ‘selves’, both as people and as teachers. Analogically, what deserves parallel attention is also the transformation of the learners’ selves compelled to deal with multicultural learning environment. The main goal of education should be then to adapt to and to follow the needs of such newly formulated educational requirements.

2. Intercultural competence and intercultural education in the context of language and culture

Michael Byram (Byram, Gribkova, Starkey 2002: 5) defines ‘intercultural dimension’ in foreign language teaching as the orientation


which “[…] aims to develop learners as intercultural speakers or mediators who are able to engage with complexity and multiple identities and to avoid the stereotyping which accompanies perceiving someone through a single identity”. An obvious requirement in this process is reaching, both by the teachers and students, intercultural competence, i.e. “[…] the ability to ensure a shared understanding by people of different social identities, and […] to interact with people as complex human beings with multiple identities and their own individuality” (Byram, Gribkova, Starkey 2002: 5). For that goal knowledge and skills (understood solely as cultural knowledge and communicative skills) are insufficient. As has already been mentioned above, it is rather attitudes towards values and towards ‘Otherness’ that open an individual for new experiences and allow him to explore new identities. Pragmatic competence achieved via learning more about linguistic pragmatics is an additional and highly demandable marker of intercultural competence. In order to highlight the relation between linguistic pragmatics and intercultural competence, I would like to refer to the components of Intercultural Communicative Competence as they are enumerated in The Common European Framework of Reference for Foreign Languages (2001), and named by Byram savoirs. 1. Knowledge (savoir) of both social processes and their illustrations, i.e. about how other people are likely to perceive us, what the norms of social interaction are. It is not only the knowledge about the country’s customs (4F’s: Festivals, Folklore, Food, Fashion), but rather the awareness of how its people get involved with each other and with the representatives of other cultures. The Common European Framework includes also here socio-cultural knowledge and paralinguistic knowledge (about non-verbal communication). In order to acquire this knowledge, the following skills are needed: 2. Skills of interpreting and relating (savoir comprendre) perceived as an ability to ‘read’ and decode the documents or social events and relate them to those from another cultural reality. 3. Skills of discovery and interaction (savoir apprendre/faire) seen as an ability to acquire new knowledge from surrounding cultural practices, to operate with this knowledge and use it for the sake of real-time communication and interaction. The Common European Framework of Reference distinguishes savoir apprendre from savoir faire, the first being the ability to observe, learn and adapt new knowledge/experience to ones already possessed, and the second one being more like technical know-how, practical awareness of how daily activities are performed.

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4. Intercultural Attitudes (savoir etre) defined as curiosity and openness, readiness to suspend disbelief about other cultures and belief about one’s own. Developing this attitude means, as Byram describes it,

a willingness to relativise one’s own values, beliefs and behaviors, not to assume that they are the only possible and naturally correct ones, and to be able to see how they might look from an outsider’s perspective who has a different set of values […]. This can be called the ability to ‘decentre’. (Byram, Gribkova, Starkey 2002: 7)!

The Common European Framework of Reference describes savoir etre as ‘personal skills’ connected directly with individual set of values, motivation to act and personal features decisive for more or less successful social interaction. 5. Critical cultural awareness (savoir s’engager) understood as an ability to evaluate critically perspectives, practices and products in one’s own and other cultures and countries.

Confronted with such a wide range of required knowledge, skills and attitudes, developing intercultural competence appears to be quite a demanding and difficult task. In methodological sense, it promotes a critical approach not only to different realities, but also to teaching materials, topics of lessons and opinions expressed by both teachers and students. It is justified to claim that due to this approach, critical pedagogy has a good chance to answer the questions of education of the future. Critical pedagogy poses a question of

how to construct a theory and practice of education that can, on the one hand, account for why some disadvantaged students fail to ‘succeed’ in school and, on the other, develop ways of teaching that offer greater possibilities to people of color, ethnic minorities, working-class students, women, gays and lesbians, and others, not only in order that they might have a better chance of ‘success’ in the ways traditionally defined by education but also in order that these definitions of success, both within schools and beyond, can be changed. (Pennycook 1994: 297) In this way, critical pedagogy seems to explain also the teacher’s role

in the whole process of change for the future. In their mental approach, as Pennycook (1994) argues, teachers should leave behind any prejudice and attempts to complete the old-fashioned curricular goals. They should teach towards a different version of a curriculum and a different vision of a learning society. Last but not least, they “[…] should see English language


teaching as connected to the construction of social difference and the struggle for voice.” (Pennycook 1994: 299)

However, many of these quite practical assumptions remain theory when it comes to putting them into educational practice of language teaching. A huge load of methodological work has already been done for introducing cultural elements into language teaching. It shows, however, mainly in writing new textbooks filled with symbols of foreign cultures, using drama exercises for presenting traditions or food or, which is actually very good, extending the scope of cultural academic exchange. Not to disregard the importance of this methodological turn, there is still a gap in the formal academic curricula when it comes to the crucial element of intercultural competence, namely intercultural pragmatics. Paradoxically, the focus on the transformation of knowledge, skills and attitudes has somehow diluted its importance on the way.

The intercultural dimension of pragmatic competence, or, to put it differently, the pragmatic dimension of intercultural competence, relates closely to the linguistic awareness and is very meaningful for developing intercultural competence in Byram’s sense. It is language in its use (i.e. pragmatics) that allows to observe, decode, interpret and relate the cultural phenomena by providing linguistic tools and unfolding mechanisms prone to linguistic analysis.

3. Intercultural pragmatic competence of foreign language teachers: pedagogical and ethno-methodological

perspectives

3.1. Pedagogical dimension of linguistic pragmatics !

As mentioned above, linguistic pragmatics is the area in which cultural differences have a chance to become most vivid, and the ability to teach about their influence on mutual understanding should be a top skill of language educators. In order for the teachers to teach intercultural pragmatic competence, they themselves should undergo two types of learning: a! social (sociolinguistic) one, which means learning how to operate with the language in social communication (i.e. using paralinguistic codes of non-verbal behavior, verbal styles and language structures, being aware of speech acts and their diverse types), and a personal one, which deals more with their own character features and abilities to adapt, to extemporize and to transgress. This division is to some extent analogous to the macro- and micro-scale interpretation of culture introduced by Anita Fetzer (2003), where macro-scale points to

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“interdependence between language, context and culture”, and micro-scale treats an individual as a “social actor who creates social reality around him”. The function of linguistic pragmatics is to give some frames to chaotic and culturally diversified communication occurring between people. As Phipps and Guilherme notice:

Those of us in the field of language and intercultural communication are constantly in situations where we are negotiating power, watching it shift and play between all our encounters as we use words from different languages, as we language in our own tongue and we attempt […] to reach out to others, and to communicate. (Phipps and Guilherme 2004: 2)

In special search for meaning in intercultural communication, in which a filter of pragmatics is supposed to help us, it may be quoted after Derrida: “Our work with words […] has to be based not in the facticity of meanings expressed as words, but in the hope that we can use language in the belief that […] meaning may indeed be made” (Phipps and Guilherme 2004: 2). Thus, the substantiality of interpretative and analytical, meta-linguistic skills has been underlined. Coming to a conclusion about the pedagogical dimension of linguistic pragmatics, it is reasonable to refer again to critical pedagogy. Developing critical view of one’s own and the Other’s value-governed patterns of behavior, as well as being able to recognize the ways in which discourses shape and reflect social realities of speech communities, help to be an Intercultural Speaker and conscious teacher of a foreign language and culture. By opening the door to cultural diversity, the epistemic value of individual speakers’ meanings (Grundy 2006) has in the meantime been given the floor. To be able to cope with these epistemic meanings, i.e. to communicate cross-culturally, people need to be instructed by qualified and pragmatically competent foreign language educators.

3.2 Ethnography of speaking as a theoretical background of a research project

Another approach which turns out useful while analyzing intercultural pragmatic competence is ethnography of speaking. It is common knowledge that the community’s culture and ethnicity are tightly and reciprocally interwoven with its language. As Anita Fetzer (2003) explains, “Ethnomethodology interprets communication and communication acts as dynamic processes in which both linguistic context and socio-cultural context permanently interact with relevant constituents of communicative encounters”. There is no chance to separate socio-cultural


elements of a given culture from their linguistic realization, especially when learning is understood as ‘dialogic’ in nature (after Creese 2005). There is not much novelty in saying that in any linguistic encounter both interlocutors are subjects to the process of learning (about the Other) and teaching (about themselves). The negotiation of meanings that takes place between them is the object of ethnographic analysis. From the theoretical point of view, the ethnography of communication pinpoints two interesting approaches to communicative events: etic and emic ones (Creese 2005). The notions take their origin from a parallel between phonetic and phonemic in phonology. The etic focus in ethnography of communication describes the universal components and functions of speech events which allow any categorization. It seems to represent a structural, socially contextualized aspect of communication subsystems, just as phonetics describes the sounds or their types in a framed, categorized and isolated manner. The emic approach describes the local meaning-making processes of participant’s language-in-use. In other words, it refers to the already mentioned epistemic value of an individual speech event, which may be different every time different speakers participate in it, just as the system of sounds may differ depending on their phonological realization. Thus, ethno-methodological approach to communication, especially its emic orientation, appears unquestionably useful in analyzing the pragmatic aspect of teaching this communication across cultures.

4. Description of the research project

The research was carried out in June 2007 and constitutes a preliminary part of a wider PhD project. Its aim was to analyze the intercultural pragmatic awareness as a valid denominator of pragmatic competence performed by the teachers and trainee student teachers at the Foreign Language Teacher Training Department of Gda#sk University. It was based on a questionnaire distributed among seven teachers who had been working at this institution for up to several years and 75 students (1st, 2nd and 3rd year of BA studies). The teachers lecture different subjects, such as British literature, methodology of teaching English, practical language skills, linguistics and early school didactics. The limited number of questionnaires received from the teachers, as well as the type of questions, imposes a qualitative analysis, which gave some preliminary picture of how the respondents valued intercultural skills and intercultural competence as parts of a formal curriculum. The number of students who responded to the questionnaire is remarkably bigger, which additionally

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allows to observe the evolution of their opinions concerning the subject matter which took place in the course of their studies. The character of this research in its ‘teacher part’ bears some resemblance to big international projects, such as the above quoted Incorporating intercultural communicative competence in language teacher education (Lazar 2003) or Foreign Language Teachers and Intercultural Competence. An International Investigation led by Lies Sercu, Ewa Bandura and others (2005). It has, however, a much more local dimension. These international projects involved many countries, in which the attitude of teachers to making their own methodological workshops more intercultural was put under analysis. Research presented below is in this sense a study on a micro-scale, which has also other implications. It concerns people who are neither international speakers of English nor native speakers of it. Multiple linguistic identities and multiculturalism are phenomena they do not deal with on a daily basis. This is why!it is presumably more difficult for them to ‘feel’ multiculturalism, this fact being a reason for treating this issue still in terms of theory. The project has been planned to test whether, in spite of this ‘localism’, Polish teachers are appreciative of intercultural competence as a denominator of complete language training (variable 1).

4.1. Underlying assumptions

A few underlying assumptions of this project still deserve mentioning here. They are the following: ! A foreign language classroom is also a setting for intercultural

communication ! Language undergoes evolution from literary, easy to learn meaning

to ‘speaker’s meaning’, i.e. inferred meaning. It means that it acquires an epistemic value in each encounter, shaped by so called pragmatic strengthening (Grundy 2006).

! Following Gudykunst’s Uncertainty/Anxiety Management Theory (Gudykunst and Hammer 1988) in which anxiety is treated as a crucial component of any new human relationships, the basic idea of how to cope with interpersonal problems in cross-cultural communication is to acquire skills of tolerating ambiguities and interpreting the behavior of others. It is my firm belief that this can be achieved by mastering knowledge and sills of linguistic pragmatics, which as a part of general linguistics allows the speakers to infer, to imply and to decode the speaker’s meaning in intercultural encounters.


! It is in the first place the teacher who should possess cognitive abilities to decode and interpret the above for the students. In fact, even more essential than the skills and knowledge is the teachers’ attitude towards change and their openness to life-long learning.

! The objectives of this research are, subsequently, the comparative evaluation of attitudes, institutional background and methodology of teaching intercultural competence more than looking for final solutions and giving final answers. This goes in line with the theory that gaining intercultural pragmatic competence is a process and not a task to be completed once and for all (Byram, Gribkova and Starkey 2002)

4.2. Description of the questionnaire and variables tested

The questionnaire consisted of 19 questions, which referred to a few problematic areas, such as the meaning and importance of intercultural awareness in foreign language didactics, teachers’ and students’ perceptions as to their own readiness to get more inter-culturally sensitized, the possibility to incorporate intercultural elements into language teaching and checking the factual techniques applied to this purpose (or considered to be suitable). The questions referred also to the suitability of particular subjects for teaching intercultural competence and the most favorable features of a teacher aspiring to be an Intercultural Speaker (Jaeger 2001, Karpi#ska-Musia$ 2006). The last issue has not been, however, discussed in this particular analysis. This article focuses on four variables encompassed in a group of topical questions. The variables are the following: Variable 1: deals more or less directly with the very understanding of what intercultural content and intercultural awareness mean for students and teachers, and how they evaluate its importance in foreign language didactics. Variable 2: self-evaluation of teachers and students as to their own intercultural competence (students’ perception of the lecturers’ level of their intercultural competence (IC), lecturers’ perception of their own beliefs concerning their IC, as well as lecturers’ perception of the students’ level of their IC, or their ‘readiness’ to become more cross-culturally sensitized). Variable 3: evaluation of institutional background, i.e. which subjects are considered to be the least or the most suitable for incorporating intercultural training, and whether there are syllabi which provide guidelines and materials to work on.

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Variable 4: evaluation of methodology, i.e. which techniques are (or are not) used by the teachers in order to develop intercultural competence in students (students evaluated here the materials and methods used to teach intercultural competence at heir institution, whereas lecturers evaluated methods and tools they have at their disposal at work).

Variable 1 DEFINITION

What does intercultural awareness mean for you? (4F’s approach , 5C’s approach) Do you find ‘cross-cultural sensitivity/ awareness’ an important element to be taught to the teachers of foreign languages?

Variable 2 SELF-EVALUATION OF LECTURERS AND STUDENTS

Are you/the students/the teachers ‘ready’ to become interculturally sensitized? What do they need for that?

Variable 3 EVALUATING INSTITUTIONAL BACKGROUND

Subjects which should introduce intercultural knowledge best are..: Is intercultural knowledge already introduced in the syllabi of particular subjects? Do the materials used promote cultural stereotypes?

Variable 4 EVALUATION OF METHODOLOGY

Are cognitive techniques (such as...) teaching IC applied by all the Ts, by some, not at all Most frequent techniques applied and directed at training pragmatic competence are….

Table 10-1: Characterization of variables – chosen questions

5. Findings within variable 1: definition and importance of intercultural contents in foreign language

education

5.1. Opinions of students and teachers

Within variable 1 the major conclusion concerning the students seems to be the fact that understanding of what intercultural awareness/competence means for them shifted from the 4F’s approach (i.e. traditional knowledge of Landeskunde and Civilization) presented in the beginning of their studies to that of 5C’s (a comparative language based approach towards


learning culture) by the end of their learning process. It may indicate the successive growth of both the intercultural awareness itself, as well as of the ability to perceive its presence in the curriculum. As for the teachers, the question about the very quintessence of intercultural contents and intercultural competence was treated by the respondents variously. Only one respondent pointed to the relevance of linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors next to the theoretical knowledge about the target culture for gaining intercultural competence. Another person enumerated multicultural environments and bilingual children as the major target recipients in case of which intercultural training makes sense. The remaining respondents underlined only the necessity of adding theoretical cultural knowledge to training linguistic competence.

5.2. Comparative conclusions

The most crucial conclusion of this part seems to be that the majority of teachers still treat teaching culture, and thus also intercultural competence, in terms of 4F’s (Food, Fashion, Festivals and Folklore). The 5C’s approach (Communication, Cultures, Connections, Comparisons and Communities), which concentrates on critical, comparative and open analysis of the ‘Other’, is visibly neglected. A similar conclusion has been drawn by Lies Sercu, who writes:

[…] the overall impression is that in actual teaching practice, teachers prefer traditional teacher-directed approaches geared towards the enhancement of pupils’ familiarity with the foreign culture, not approaches directed towards the full attainment of intercultural competence, with its cognitive, attitudinal and skills components!(Sercu et al. 2005: 11).

The preference of 4F’s approach is also evident in the Polish teachers’ opinion of what knowledge students are still lacking: it is overly the knowledge of culture (area studies) and not of the mechanisms of communication (linguistics). The students’ opinion!goes in line with that of the teachers. Especially in the beginning of their study, they seem to perceive learning intercultural knowledge as learning the knowledge about traditions and history, literature and political or educational systems of a target culture. However, the longer they study, the more aware of the significance of pragmatic analysis they appear. They start realizing that getting a better access to multicultural realities means developing their linguistic pragmatic competence.

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6. Findings within variable 2: evaluation of teachers and students as to the level of their own intercultural

awareness

6.1. Opinions of students and teachers The students’ responses show that the perception of their readiness to

become cross-culturally sensitized seems to be the lowest in the middle year of BA studies in order to go higher in the 3rd year, which confirms the change of opinion what intercultural competence means. Interestingly, if the students did not feel ready to acquire IC, it would be rather the lack of communicative skills and knowledge which they would miss and not knowledge of literature and culture. This opinion suggests that 4F’s oriented teaching dominates in the curricula.!What needs improvement or completion constitutes 5C’s knowledge and skills. It also confirmed the growing awareness of what intercultural contents and competence included except for area studies. As to the importance of intercultural sensitizing, all the questioned teachers agreed that it was an important element of foreign language didactics. They also agreed that students were ready to develop their intercultural awareness. The majority, however, pointed again to traditional knowledge of culture as something the students need to develop. In this aspect the opinion of teachers differed from the one of students. The latter seemed to feel well educated within area studies, but deprived of a deeper linguistic, paralinguistic and pragmatic insight.


The differences in opinions as to being ready for deeper intercultural awareness go back to the question of what in fact intercultural awareness and competence mean. Both groups of respondents agreed on the importance of developing intercultural awareness; they differed, however, as to what elements of it needed improvement and deserved more attention in the academic curriculum.


7. Findings within variable 3: evaluation of institutional background

7.1. Opinions of students and teachers

This variable concerned the materials used and the subjects lectured at

the department. The respondents were asked to evaluate which subjects they considered most suitable for incorporating elements of pragmatic intercultural competence, as well as to state if materials used were reinforcing or fighting off cultural stereotypes. As for the latter, the majority of answers confirmed the neutral character of textbooks and materials. When it comes to the subjects, it was linguistics and cultural studies (area studies) which have been indicated by students mostly as the subjects which introduce IC elements (rarely by the 1st year students and more frequently by 2nd and 3rd year students). Practical grammar appears, although seldom, as the subject with IC potentials. An interesting fact is that methodology of teaching English and didactics of teaching are mentioned as subjects in which intercultural contents are not or cannot be introduced (which I find quite alarming, as they might be perfect areas where cross-cultural linguistic elements could be shown as useful for teaching international audiences).

The question whether the teachers incorporate elements of intercultural training in their classes (of different sort) was answered by them positively, with one exception. The person who answered negatively explained that the reason for not having any intercultural orientation in the lectured subject was its non-existence in a syllabus. This person teaches linguistics and consistently claims that incorporation of intercultural knowledge into this subject would not be feasible. Another respondent, who also teaches linguistics, has a similar opinion, although at the same time was the only one among the questioned teachers who considered linguistic and paralinguistic behaviors as carriers of intercultural knowledge. This contradiction highlights the gaps in a formal syllabus, as well unravels the still undiscovered path on which intercultural elements may be transferred to the linguistic knowledge.


The analysis of institutional background, i.e. the conditions both students and teachers have at their workplace, has given evidence of one important aspect of educational reality: students and teachers differ slightly as to what subjects might be used to teach intercultural awareness

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and competence interdisciplinary. Students point to linguistics, whereas teachers focus more on literature, area studies and practical language learning. Secondly, there is a gap in syllabi provided for particular courses. The responses of teachers suggest strongly that the syllabi of subjects lectured do not cover the issues of intercultural awareness, and quote this fact as the reason for their giving up teaching it in their classes. Last but not least, the teachers show little awareness (or willingness?) to ‘smuggle’ the intercultural competence training into their subjects. They might, in fact, do it on their own even without official guidelines. In the context of my argumentation, it is especially troublesome to observe that linguistics is not appreciated enough as a subject providing tools for better intercultural awareness. It is my conviction that cognitive linguistics by its references to cognitive processes of interlocutors, is exceptionally suitable for teaching the skills of making up for potential misuses of language (pragma-linguistic and socio-pragmatic mistakes). Thus, it helps to build one’s intercultural competence not only in a linguistic, but also in a psychological dimension.

8. Findings within variable 4: evaluation of methodology

8.1. The opinions of students and teachers In the opinion of students, using media and authentic texts in a

classroom are the most frequently applied and most successful ways of promoting the knowledge and skills related to cultural awareness and competence. These methods are, according to the students, satisfactorily introduced by lecturers. Also doing research projects and learning from life sources, such as interviews with native speakers, discussions with a foreign guest or immersing in a natural foreign language environment are perceived very positively, although not so frequently applied. Such techniques as simulation games, contrastive analysis, and group work on cultural poster or folk elements are definitely less frequently mentioned or even neglected when it comes to their practical application in a classroom.

Thus, the opinions received from the teachers on this matter could be divided into two categories: (1) the frequency with which specified methodological tools are used (and, on the other hand, omitted) and (2) the relation between techniques used and a subject taught. The second category has appeared as an outcome of a discernible connection between applying by teachers particular methodological tools and the subject taught by them. For example, a literature teacher excludes cultural poster and simulations, but a lecturer of literature and practical language skills,


excludes both of them, as well as ethnographic and research projects. Two teachers teaching methodology and early school didactics do not apply a poster or life sources, but they are ready to use them in the future. Respondents teaching linguistics and grammar are in agreement as to the fact that they do not and will not apply a cultural poster, ethnographic project, simulations and elements of drama.

Table 10-2: Relation between subjects and techniques of teaching culture which are NOT applied


The conclusion that can be driven at is the following: there is generally an agreement between students and teachers as to the practically applied methodology of teaching intercultural contents in the course of the study. Similar techniques are mentioned as the prior ones and similar techniques are given up or considered unsuitable. There is a fairly noticeable consistency in the choices made, some techniques are preferred and other omitted. Teachers keep being attached to media-oriented didactic methods in their teaching processes. The questionnaire has shown that techniques which require a more interdisciplinary approach, such as drama, simulations, cultural poster, interviews (life sources) or ethnographic projects are generally rejected. This fact is an important implication for the reorientation of so far teaching habits. The techniques considered not useful could, when creatively applied, develop skills, widen the knowledge and increase students’ motivation, thus following the major assumptions of intercultural competence as defined by Gudykunst (Gudykunst and Hammer 1988) It is my belief that songs and lyrics may equally well be used in a literature class as in grammar, linguistics, phonetics and listening. Group work focused on making a cultural poster brings in a lot of knowledge about the target culture seen from multiple

Literature Cultural poster, simulation games

Practical language skills Cultural poster, ethnographic and research Projects

Methodology and early school didactics Cultural poster, life-sources possibly used in the future

Grammar and linguistics Cultural poster, ethnographic project, simulations and folk elements

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perspectives, and at the same time it gives ground for training writing and speaking skills. It may even give a chance to analyze different examples of ‘national’ sense of humor. Similarly, doing an ethnographic project might create opportunities for studying history of language, grammatical forms (i.e. in descriptions), having interviews (life sources), analyzing forms of discourse along with training creative writing (i.e. in reports) or practicing phonetics while commenting upon the subsequent stages of the project.

9. Final conclusion and implications for further study – is intercultural pragmatics teachable and learnable at all?

The questionnaire which I distributed among students and teachers allowed me to observe the extent to which opinions on the same issues related to intercultural awareness and its components are shared by these two target groups. It turned out that although these opinions were similar in major aspects of variables tested, there appeared differences which signalize a shift in students’ approach towards the meaning and applicability of intercultural pragmatic competence in the subjects lectured at the university. Within variable 1 both groups perceive teaching cultural elements mainly in terms of 4F’s, but the 3rd year students tend to discover the essentiality of a more critical and comparative, also language oriented character of foreign language education. Within variable 2., both teachers and students agree that students are ready to get more inter-culturally competent, however they differed as to what elements needed more extensive learning: traditional knowledge about culture (teachers) or knowledge of communication mechanisms (students). This is a vital indicator of what was actually missing in the program of teacher training - linguistic pragmatics. As for institutional background, the collected opinions seem to be divided. Students point to area studies (cultural studies) and linguistics, whereas teachers enlist literature, areas studies and practical language learning as the most suitable subjects for training intercultural competence. Such an outcome may suggest a rebirth of interdisciplinary approach towards teaching culture. What is more, teachers seem to be very much dependant on accessible syllabi. These, according to them, do not coordinate linguistic pragmatics with intercultural training. A vicious circle comes into play at this point: there is no teaching due to the lack of syllabi, and the lack of syllabi originates in no teaching.

The last variable, which tested methodology, shows again quite a high range of agreement in opinions. Teachers consistently reject certain methods in their teaching styles, and apply the other. Students evaluate


them accordingly. The fact of being attached to particular methods and unwillingness to try out a more interdisciplinary approach may indicate the teachers’ rather low level of awareness concerning applicability of linguistic pragmatics in cross-cultural training.

Nevertheless, it is worth to ask a question: is intercultural pragmatics learnable and teachable at all? Can we, as teachers, produce a ‘final product’, such as a pragmatically competent teacher? I would comply here with Byram’s opinion that it is a barely achievable goal. Not because it is difficult to define the norms and requirements, but because it is so much related to human factors such as values, character or cultural preferences. The global reality, constantly fluctuating, endlessly creates new challenges for those who aspire to catch up with change. This is why, the acquisition of pragmatic competence is a process and not a final, rule-governed and describable task.

I am personally convinced, however, that it is feasible to ‘crack this nut’ by creating institutional opportunities for the trainee teachers to master a set of pragmatic skills, to develop attitudes which allow a flexible approach to multi-cultural realities and thus to initiate a ‘life long learning’ process of becoming interculturally competent. To reach this goal, students should learn the basics of so called ‘educational linguistics’ (Brumfit 1991, 1997; van Lier 1996) in order to be at ease with such notions as illocution, perlocution, felicity conditions or suprasegmental features, which explain pragmatic failure or success. They should be made aware about how gaze management or postural stands relate to the system of cultural values. Intercultural pragmatic competence is in this sense a complex skill of juggling with differences and dependencies. It can be trained to quite a satisfactory extent not only in a natural surrounding (by total immersion), but also in an artificial educational setting as a university college or philological studies (by linguistic instruction). The university training should at least start this intricate and fascinating process of widening the scope of interrelation between intercultural knowledge and meta-linguistic, paralinguistic and meta-cognitive skills. It can be done in a number of ways, some of the most accessible being various workshops and project work. Within a linguistics course, for example, the teacher could apply a guided exercise in which the students brainstorm their ideas about how intercultural competence could be trained within particular areas of linguistic analysis (such as phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, para-linguistics and pragmatics). Having introduced the meta-language needed to operate theoretically with communicative phenomena, the teacher might even ask them to think of techniques most appropriate for highlighting cross-cultural differences between a native and a foreign

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language. Simulations, drama, interviews or folk elements in a lesson provide a vast arena of activities through which intercultural pragmatic competence may be successfully trained. It is my firm belief that methodology of teaching intercultural pragmatic competence is a precious, very interdisciplinary and promising area for further research on the verge of the sciences such as linguistics, pedagogy, philosophy and psychology.

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Byram, M., B. Gribkova and H. Starkey. Developing the Intercultural Dimension in Language Teaching. A Practical Introduction for Teachers. Strasbourg: Council of Europe, Language Policy Division, 2002.

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Gudykunst, W. B. and M. R. Hammer. “Strangers and hosts: an uncertainty reduction based theory of intercultural adaptation.” In Cross-Cultural Adaptation: Current Approaches, edited by Y. Y. Kim and W. B. Gudykunst, 106-139. New York: Newbury Park 1988.

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Karpi#ska-Musia$, B. ”Intercultural speaker jako odpowied% na wspó$czesne wyzwania globalnego spo$ecze#stwa wiedzy. Analiza procesu nabywania kompetencji mi&dzykulturowej przez ucznia i nauczyciela j&zyków obcych.” In Komunikacja j%zykowa w spo!ecze&stwie informacyjnym, [Intercultural Speaker as the answer to present challenges of a global knowledge society. The analysis of gaining intercultural competence by a student and teacher of foreign languages. In Language Communication in Information Society], edited by J. Krieger-Knieja and U. Paprocka-Piotrowska, 261-272. Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2006.

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Appendix

I attach below the example of practical exercise which could be used with students of cultural linguistics. The task is to evaluate which of the enumerated factors gain priority over the other in case of particular language analysis (phonology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics, para-linguistics, sociolinguistics etc.). The purpose of this activity carried out in groups is to provoke students to relate aspects of language to socio-cultural phenomena and elicit their understanding in this matter. A discussion over the opinions expressed may serve as a device to deepen the awareness of this interrelation and to highlight the interdependent character of language and culture.

AREA OF LANGUAGE UNDER ANALYSIS

Factors interrelated Scale of priority:

1-10 Register/ slang Variety of codes and styles Gender Social status Level of education Knowledge of cultural values Knowledge of folk customs (food, fashion, festivals) and history

Social changes in society Political situation in a country Cross-cultural comparative and analytical approach of both students and a teacher

!

CHAPTER ELEVEN

STEREOTYPING COMMUNICATIVE STYLES IN AND OUT OF THE LANGUAGE

AND CULTURE CLASSROOM: JAPANESE INDIRECTNESS, AMBIGUITY

AND VAGUENESS

BARBARA PIZZICONI

1. Introduction Quite often, in conversation with trainee teachers of Japanese, most of

whom are native speakers of the language, I have heard statements about the Japanese language, to the effect that “Japanese is ambiguous” (‘aimai’) or that Japanese “don’t say things clearly” (‘hakkiri iwanai’). For a language with an exceptionally rich repertoire of devices specialized in marking the speaker’s stance vis-à-vis the proposition or other speech participants (see for example Narrog 2007 on modal markers), statements such as these can appear contradictory. And yet, they are far from unusual. In a study of seventy native speakers of Japanese, Haugh (1998: 40) found that up to 77% of them agreed/strongly agreed with the statement “spoken Japanese is vague”, while only 10% disagreed. Moreover, this view is sustained by native and non-native users alike, and perpetuated not only in popular books about Japan and the Japanese people, but also in many pedagogical grammars, textbooks, and classroom instruction. This paper sets out to deconstruct this discourse and tease apart the truth from the stereotype.

Stereotypes, the result of our ability to ‘typify’ linguistic usages, gestures, clothing, looks (i.e. different semiotic systems), are of course crucial to our ability to learn and function in the world. They allow us to reduce the infinite variations of people, linguistic forms or other entities to a few, manageable, categories. But when, as in language classrooms, we

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aim at developing intercultural awareness or a linguistic competence that goes beyond the recognition of basic formulae and patterns and aspires to facilitate the learner’s appreciation of subtle nuances, stereotypes stand in the way. Effective communication (and learning) crucially depends on the ability to maintain a degree of flexibility whereby novel situations are not invariably reduced to the already known. Overgeneralizations can ‘frame’ the character of a language or a culture, and produce fixed and often crude images which are then hard to shred, hindering, for example, our sensitivity to variability within a culture. Moreover, stereotypes are not neutral representations: they come hand in hand with evaluative judgements that often go undetected but play a huge role in our understanding of what actually goes on during interaction. Such evaluations forestall our understanding of the underlying values that arguably direct certain behaviour, by reflecting more the mindset of the evaluator than the values held by the person evaluated.

Attempts to challenge and deconstruct stereotypes (as can be seen, for example, in the well researched area of gendered language) often aim to highlight the lack of evidence for their existence. But stereotypes do not emerge in a vacuum, and it is somewhat condescending, in my view, not to acknowledge the pervasiveness of such conceptions and explore the modalities of their genesis. The perception of ‘indirectness’, ‘ambiguity’ or ‘vagueness’ on the part of native and non-native users and commentators must be recognized, although accompanied by a great deal of qualification.

This paper assumes that statements about a ‘typical’ Japanese style are psychologically real for many users of the language, i.e. they are the result of genuine perceptions about the way in which communication in Japanese is conducted. It attempts to tease out the factors that may lead to such perceptions, and discuss ways in which we can talk about the Japanese language or the Japanese people in a classroom. I intend to do this by reflecting upon my own experience and perceptions in communication with Japanese speakers, and by exposing, to the best of my diagnostic capacities, the spontaneous responses and analytical reasoning I have made use of in making sense of these interactions. I will be therefore base my discussion on my own feelings and thoughts in two different capacities: as a participant in a communicative event conducted in Japanese, and as a researcher involved in a post-hoc reading of the data.

I begin by presenting some received characterizations of the Japanese style as they are reported in linguistic and ethnographic literature (section 2), and then analyze the notion of ‘indirectness’ in linguistic and behavioural terms (section 3). After that I discuss the dynamics of a

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communicative encounter (section 4), and suggest ways in which impressions and evaluations are formed, on the basis of the evidence available to participants (section 5). Here I attempt to provide an account of evaluative judgements in cognitive terms, by formalizing the interpretive processes involved in terms of inferences drawn from linguistic signs, through the lenses of specific interactional frames, and the socio-cognitive categories of values held by participants. I will whenever possible highlight the relevance of the analysis proposed here to pedagogical issues, and conclude with recommendations for language teachers.

2. Characterizations of the ‘Japanese’1 communicative style

Japanese is overwhelmingly characterized as a language with a distinct preference for ‘indirectness’ (see Lebra 1976; Miller 1994; Kubota 1999 for reviews and critiques). The following excerpt from Patricia Clancy (1986)’s work on the acquisition of Japanese style is a paradigmatic illustration of how Japanese is often characterized in lay, as well as academic, discourse.

It is widely recognized that the communicative style of the Japanese is intuitive and indirect, especially compared with that of Americans. As Azuma et al (1980) have said, a verbal expression among the Japanese is “context dependent, indirect, rich in connotation and evasive in denotation”. The basis of this style is a set of cultural values that emphasize omoiyari, ‘empathy’ over explicit verbal communication. (1980: 213).

Clancy goes on to mention that ‘verbosity’ has traditionally been

looked down in Japan (iwanu ga hana = ‘silence is better than speech’), especially in men speech; that ‘talkativeness’ is equated with insincerity

1 The data presented in this paper is Tokyo Japanese, arguably the standard variety (but see: Long 1999), which is said to form the basis for language instruction. Most of the commentary I report here, including Clancy’s, similarly refer to this variety, although the empirical question remains of whether other varieties of Japanese are also evaluated in a similar way by speakers of other languages. Some of my Japanese informants, for example, talk of the Osaka variety as being considerably more direct and often blunt. This exemplifies the point made in this paper about the need for much more delicate analyses—and descriptions in the classroom—of what counts as “Japanese”.

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and superficiality (1986: 214). When verbal communication does occur, “[…] it will often be inexplicit and indirect”. With regards to its linguistic features, she quotes research by Doi that points out that “[…] the structure of the Japanese language fosters ambiguity in various ways: the language is pro-drop, admits the pragmatic elision of elements retrievable contextually, and allows the omission of the final part of a sentence, which in Japanese corresponds to the main predicate (SOV). All of this conveys the impression that the Japanese are “reserved, cautious, and evasive” (1986: 214). Clancy goes on to comment on the underlying values arguably triggering this style; besides ‘empathy’ mentioned earlier, she refers to the strive toward “social harmony” (which requires the avoidance of “overt expression of conflict”), and the notional distinction between honne (real feelings) vs. tatemae (socially accepted principles). This entails that Japanese speakers are indeed capable of harbouring individual opinions, feelings and thoughts, but that these are underplayed whenever they have the potential to generate friction during social interaction, giving rise to a more anonymous, ‘safe’, style. Consequently, verbal interaction is no more than a ‘mind-reading game’ (sasshi, bp): “In interpreting the response to a direct request, therefore, one must be ready to guess what the speaker probably means, even in spite of what may actually be said” (1986: 216).

Moreover, with regards to the social domain generating all this, she maintains that:

Clearly, the Japanese style of communication can work only in a rather homogenous society in which people actually can anticipate each other’s needs, wants and reactions. Japanese society is, in fact, extremely homogenous […] in Japan, where interpersonal communication relies so heavily upon intuition and empathy, conformity to group norms can be seen as an essential aspect of communicative style […] one striking aspect of the language that is related to conformity is the existence of a great number of fixed verbal formulas […] speakers need only indicate, by means of the right formula, that they are experiencing the right kind of reaction, without expressing any more personal, individualized response. An important goal of socialization in Japan is to promote the unanimity in feeling that will support the norms of verbal agreement and empathy. (1986: 216)

Finally, she characterizes the contrast between American and Japanese styles by the different emphasis on participant responsibility. While American speakers are invested with the responsibility to express their feelings and thoughts clearly and explicitly in their words (hence the popularity of assertiveness training) it is Japanese listeners who have to do


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the job, as they must figure out what the speaker means “regardless of the words used”.

Other accounts of Japanese indirectness link it to the collectivistic nature of Japanese society, or cultural inclinations such as the reliance on tacit communication, the expectation of mutual understanding without the need for open expressions of personal needs and ideas, hierarchy consciousness, a desire for harmony (for a review, see Miyamoto-Tanaka and Bell 1996), and a number of cultural ‘key-words’ such as haragei (lit. “belly art”, or ‘heart-to-heart communication’, a propensity for non-verbal communication), ishin denshin (lit. “from mind to mind”, or telepathic communication), sasshi (“surmise”, “guess”), etc2. Like Clancy’s last excerpt, many of these accounts (most of which are not surprisingly derived from contrastive studies with American English) iconize this style as the product of a homogeneous society, an assumption whose uncritical and ideological nature has been critiqued by Befu (2001), or Kubota (2003), among others.

Anyone with a certain degree of familiarity with Japan or the Japanese language will find some aspects of this commentary undoubtedly true—but some other excessively stereotypical and overgeneralizing. This paper objects to a few major points.

First of all, a model of communication that dichotomizes speaker vs. listener responsibility in exchanging information (see also Okazaki 1993 on such a view) is highly questionable (a reflexive, dialogic, interactionist view of language points to the collaborative, co-constructive and intersubjective nature of discourse structure and meaning representation; see also Clark [1996: 3]: “language use is a form of joint action”3). We could assume however, that this is only another way to say that an indirect style leaves more possibilities open for interpretation than a direct style.

2 It is worth noting that research on writing styles (a different kind of participation framework from that of face-to-face interaction) points to similar perceptions with regards to written styles. Students in a study by Kubota in 1992 (quoted in Connor 1996: 44) judge Japanese and English texts as follows: “Japanese text is indirect, ambiguous, roundabout, illogical, digressive, has the main idea at the end, and contains a long introductory remark and long, complex sentences; English is direct, clear, logical, has the main idea stated at the beginning, and has unity in the paragraph and little digression”. The issue of their generalizability from specific genres or specific examples to overall cultural traits is a highly debated topic (Kubota 1997). 3 “Joint actions” and “joint intentions”, are not just 'my actions/intentions plus your actions/intentions’ but ‘our actions/intentions’ and ‘my role in this is such-and-such’ and ‘your role in this is such-and-such’ (Jackendoff 2007: 172, my italics).

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Secondly, claiming that linguistic features (e.g. the pro-drop nature of the language) have an unmediated impact on the representation of social personae (the consequent perceived evasiveness of Japanese people) suggests a rather deterministic view of language as an independently motivated (and somewhat tyrannical) agent. It presupposes a unilateral effect of language upon culture while neglecting observations on the effects of culture on language. This also entails an unjustified focus on meanings that are explicitly marked and a neglect of inferential mechanisms, conventionalized patterns of elliptical communication, and the fact that meanings are ‘scattered’ in discourse over multiple morpho-syntactic devices.

But generalizations such as we have seen in the passage above are problematic in other, important, ways. One is their extreme essentialization: needless to say, both direct and indirect styles are possible, and attested, in Japanese, depending on the situation, interactional goals, genres (Trent 1997: 423, Matsumoto and Okamoto 2003: 31), etc., and both can, depending on the circumstance, be perceived as ‘marked’ (contrary-to-expectation) behaviour. The indirect style attributed to Japanese speakers as a whole is indeed a recognizable style, but one of many, and its essentialist reduction to the Japanese style (see e.g. Hirokawa 1987; Okabe 1987; Tsujimura 1987) has been attributed to an orientalist discourse subscribed to by Japanese and non-Japanese researchers alike (Kubota 1999, 2003), as well as folk discourse on culture (Haugh 1998; see also Miller 1982: 84 ff. on the contradictions of the stereotypes).

A concomitant issue is the failure, in most accounts, to deconstruct the notion of indirectness, and to recognize the seamless shift from a description of textual features to evaluative, judgmental comments on the quality of talk, that inevitably involves particular standpoints, failing to account for which results in the adoption of biased and ethnocentric positions. The evaluative statement that the preferred communicative style in Japanese is indirect is a relative matter—relative, that is, to the position of the source of the judgement, and the object of comparison. It is clear that in the absence of a comparative measure (be that a different style or a different expectation), indirect talk is just talk (Channell 1994: 4 on ‘vague language’ going unnoticed most of the time). So, along with questions about Japanese language and culture, one should ask questions about the language and culture of the person producing such evaluation, and about the interactional goals allegedly frustrated by indirectness.

Indirectness is of course intrinsically neither good nor bad, but contextually—when social activities and social identities are at stake—it


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can have a positive or negative evaluation (Holtgraves 1997: 6344), respectively: ‘rapport’ (because it opens space for others to fill, Tannen 2005: 255), or ‘manipulation’ (because the inferred meaning can be withdrawn at a later stage), evasiveness, vagueness, etc.

A few challenges to the axiom of Japanese indirectness have come from quantitative studies. Gudykunst et al. (1996) claim that self-construal and personal values are better predictors than nationality in predicting low- or high-context communication styles. Neuliep and Hazelton (1985) investigate Japanese and American compliance-gaining (persuasive) strategies, and find that depending on the situation, Japanese were as likely or significantly more likely to prefer direct requesting strategies than Americans. The three preferred Japanese strategies in fact seemed to be ‘explanation’, ‘direct request’ and, crucially, ‘deceit’ (an unexpected result for the authors, but that, as we will see, makes good sense for the present study). Miyamoto-Tanaka and Bell (1996), in a cross-cultural test of Bavelas et al.’s situational theory of equivocation (see below in section 3), note that Japanese students did not produce more equivocal messages than their American counterparts, and that the communication in which the sender and receiver were not identified (as in common pragmatic omissions in Japanese) were not perceived as ambiguous by task judges. Interestingly, Miller (1994: 46) points out that in intercultural encounters, Japanese and American participants may have post-facto characterized the interactions in stereotypic ways even where such consistent tendencies could not be observed by the researcher. Her observations suggest that ‘objective’ measurements (e.g. of specific linguistic forms alleged to be vehicles of indirectness) that neglect participants’ interactional goals may miss an important component of what causes a message to be perceived as indirect.

In spite of such counterevidence and in the absence of studies focused on participants’ perceptions and evaluations of indirectness, with the bulk of ethnographic commentaries as well popular literature on Japanese culture so overwhelmingly and solidly supporting such stereotypes, it is easy to see how language teachers and teaching materials are compelled to perpetuate the same message (see Kubota 1999; Matsumoto and Okamoto 2003, for calls to raise teachers’ awareness). Language-classroom instruction, which must accommodate the need to provide guidelines for 4 The same of course applies to directness: ‘very direct’ is ‘pushy’ but also ‘competent’ and ‘powerful’. 5 “By leaving maximal information for the hearer to fill in, a speaker is creating involvement by requiring the hearer to participate in sense making” (Tannen 2005: 25).

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conduct in a foreign culture economically, under huge constrains of time and space, is inherently subject to the seductive allure of simplifying statements (a point made very forcefully by critical discourse analysts). But lest we are happy to unwilling support some kind of moral education, we have a duty to unpack the stereotypes.

In this paper I attempt to describe a case of perceived indirectness and evasiveness, and I try to tease out the factors that contribute to such a judgement. I will try to demonstrate that perceptions of indirectness do indeed rest on some observable features of the message that can ‘objectively’ be described as indirect, but that an overall judgement of indirectness can only result from participants’ different understanding of the nature and goal of the activity under way, and the differentially salient interactional values that these activities subsume (even when participants seem to be going through the motions of an activity without any obvious interactional hiccup).

3. The purposes of indirectness

In actual intercultural encounters (as well as in educational and language teaching contexts), charges of indirectness and vagueness against the Japanese language or the Japanese people reveal some sort of communicative problem for which the ‘Japanese style’ is supposed to be responsible. Although a scientific analysis attempts to use this term in an impartial, descriptive way, it too can fail to highlight the argumentative positioning that this evaluation entails, and to address questions such as “what does that indirectness do for a (Japanese) speaker”, “for whom is Japanese indirect or ambiguous”, “what are the purposes it crosses”, etc.

Indirectness is not just lack of something: lack of clarity, transparency, or in the worse case (but this too is attested, see Befu 2001: 37), lack of logic. Something does get communicated by the use of an indirect means, and my claim will be that this is an ideology, i.e. a particular constellation of moral values and norms of (verbal) behaviour. When the same constellation of values is seen to be at work on a large scale we may indeed talk of a cultural tendency, but this is subject to quantitative testing. Here, I will not make any claims about the cultural scope of this style, but will treat it as a widespread style that is certainly widely recognized and actively used by many individuals (in Japan as elsewhere, although I will focus on the devices signalling indirectness in Japanese); I will attempt to describe the ideology it subtends, and speculate about the type of interactional role and social situations likely to trigger it, but will not be able to qualify its statistical frequency.


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Indirectness has traditionally been linked to politeness or facework (Lakoff 1973; Searle 1975; Leech 1983; Brown and Levinson 1987 [1978]; Minami 1987), and therefore to power differential between interlocutors, including relational variables that are assumed to mirror or be subsumed by power differential, such as gender of interlocutors, or institutional roles. But some of these, and other studies, have also pointed out that indirectness is not, or not only, a function of politeness: Kamio (1990, 2002)’s functional analysis relates it to the cognitive notion of ‘information territories’; for Caffi (2007) it is a kind of ‘mitigation’, a device to express uncertainty, caution, consideration, i.e. a way to “[…] attune to others” that, beyond mere considerations of politeness, aims at “avoiding unnecessary risks, responsibilities and conflicts” (2007: 3). While facilitating a ‘smooth’ management of the interaction, it has a payoff for the user as well: it “[…] reduces the risks that the participants may incur on various levels, for instance, the risk of self-contradiction (at a discourse level), the risk of refusal, conflict, or losing face (at a social level) etc.” (2007: 40), However, she also notes the paradox whereby mitigation “presents the speaker as tactful, considerate, obliging, but at the same time calculating, distant, non-immediate”. For Bavelas et al. (1990), indirectness (a trait of the more general notion of ‘equivocation’) is one of the signals of a speaker’s attempt at resolving an interactional tension. They claim that equivocation is an attractive communicative choice when telling an outright lie is troubling, but telling the truth is at odd with self-interest or risks hurting the receiver, or when one must communicate to two groups holding different viewpoints (1996: 224). Hence equivocation seems to be a strategy functional to social alignment and (self-)face-maintenance. For Stubbs (1986) it is related to Goffman’s notion of ‘footing’, and to more general notions of ‘commitment and detachment’ in speaker stance; the significance he attributes to these notions leads him to even ask whether we can think of indirectness merely as a question of ‘style’ if “[…] being explicit changes the meaning” (1986: 6), a point also made by Channell (1994: 13) in her discussion of the social purposes of ‘vague’ language.

In the following discussion I will refer back to these studies and show in what way these functions are evidenced in interpretive processes in interaction.

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4. A conversational excerpt

In this section I present some data from an interview recorded in the autumn of 2005. For reasons of space I will describe only a couple of selected passages and concentrate on one brief excerpt, in particular on the contribution of one of the two participants, by the fictitious name of Ken, which exemplifies some relevant issues. The description will be followed by an analysis of the conversation, and a discussion of the interactional frames that Ken and myself arguably were operating in, and finally will suggest some ways in which we can conceptualize the cognitive representations of social values which the participants may have attributed to each other.

I wish to note that, in the discussion that follows, I understand context not (only) as a set of fixed demographic variables (e.g. male/female; teacher/student) but as the emergent personal stances that participants are intent at projecting, and the variable evaluation of which can result in mismatches and negative evaluative comments. These projected stances entail different opportunities or responsibility for social actions, different degrees of authority over subject matters, and consequently different discursive identities.

4.1. Background

Setting: an ethnographic interview, in which I am interviewing two native Japanese speakers (a male, Ken, and a female, Aya), both students of applied linguistics. I have met both a few weeks earlier, through an introduction by a Japanese colleague, who is their teacher. They know I am an Italian researcher of linguistic politeness based in London, and that I am collecting data about the social evaluation of certain problematic behaviours, including, but not only, intercultural (mis)communication6. Ken is slightly older than Aya, but they are classmates, and I have also met them at several seminars. I have asked their collaboration for a pilot interview, in their double capacity of native Japanese speakers and linguists. The interview is conducted over lunch in the university restaurant.

6 In fact, neither this, nor communicative styles, were the main or only objective of my research. The discussion of the ‘incidents’ mentioned in this paper was an expedient for the study of other linguistic features.


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Topic and task: 15 minutes into the interview I propose to discuss some instances of what I will call ‘deflected communication’7, several variations of which I declare to have experienced many times in Japan. The common tread in these episodes is a situation with three participants: myself and two other speakers of Japanese, one of whom is my friend and the other someone unknown to both (hospital or hotel personnel), or acquaintances of my friend to whom I have just been introduced. In these situations, the third participant does not address me (or does not reply to me) directly, but speaks to or about me addressing my friend instead (note that I do not have particular communicative problems in ordinary daily conversations in Japanese). I ask both my interviewees how they would evaluate such behaviour had they been in my shoes in those circumstances.

My two interviewees respond in a way that, at the time, I perceive as somewhat hesitant, circumspect, and generally noncommittal. My slight frustration derives from my assumptions about the nature of this interview, which I deliberately conducted informally, over lunch in a restaurant (as opposed to college rooms), and which I intend as a collaborative enterprise in which I am the novice (the outsider) and they the experts - possibly underestimating the fact that I am a much more senior academic, who has been introduced to them by their teacher8. I assume they are aware that I need their informed opinion, and although I do not expect them to give me any ‘black and white’ judgements of the behaviours which I have explicitly labelled puzzling and possibly offensive, I feel (with considerable concern for my data collection!) that they are reluctant to volunteer any comments until I explicitly ask them to do so. When they do offer an interpretation, this is generally cast in a ‘generic’ way (i.e. mild judgements such as ‘chotto hen desu ne’ = ‘that’s a bit strange’) or light polite laughter (and possibly lacking the colourful array of judgemental commentaries that I suspect Italian informants would be happy to offer), which does not enable me to appreciate their respective evaluations (i.e. their positioning vis-à-vis some norms of behaviour). I therefore try to trigger an explicit evaluation by attempting to analyze the reasons behind such behaviours, and we join the conversation at this point.

7 See Lebra 1976:122 for other ritualistic forms of mediated communication in Japan. 8 An additional factor affecting this conversation is of course the relationship between Ken (slightly older and senior in school, sempai) and Aya (the kohai), and their relation to me (native vs. non-native, students vs. teacher), and the possible conceptualization of our respective discourse roles: e.g. (main) addressee vs. side participant, in the course of the interview. Gender too could arguably play a role, but I will not discuss these aspects in great detail here.

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4.2. Two excerpts involving evaluations of ‘deflected communication’

Two passages of the conversation are described below. The first begins 14’40’’ and the second 17’30’’ into the conversation (the first five minutes of which I have not recorded). The English translation appears below the text with transcription and glosses9.

In the first, we are talking about a nurse in a Tokyo hospital, who—although I feel perfectly capable of sustaining a conversation—responds ‘to’ me and talks ‘to’ me by addressing instead the friend who I brought along. 0 INT dono shinri ga hataraite iru to omoimasu ka […] which reasoning NOM be at work QT think Q 1 Sono kangofu san ga dooshite watashi no tomodachi dake wo mite ha-

That nurse NOM why my friend only OBJ look 2 doo kaishaku shimasu ka. (RCST) how interpret Q 3 KEN sore wo mite desu ka? That OBJ look POL Q 4 INT ee. Nande watashi no me wo sakete tomodachi ni = hanas = Yes. Why my eye OBJ avoid friend speak 5 KEN = tabun =…sono baai dattara tabun.. nihongo no Maybe that case be COND maybe Japanese 6 mondai ja nakute…honto ni, isshokenmei hanashite iru kedo,

problem not truly endeavor speak but 7 komyunikenshon wa.. dekite nai n dattara.. shikataganai ka na

communication NOM succeed NEG N be COND no way Q FP 8 toiu no wa aru ka mo shirenai desu kedo, komyunikeshon wa

QT NOM TOP be perhaps POL but communication TOP 9 kihontekini torete iru…itte ru koto wa wakaru <2>

fundamentally succeed say things TOP understand 10 tte iu zentei dattara…narete nai kara … da to omou n desu yo//

QT premise be COND be used to NEG because is Q think NOM POL FP

9 INT: interviewer; KEN: male interviewee, AYA: female interviewee. COND: conditional, FP: clause/sentence final particle, HES: hesitation marker, NEG: negative, N: nominalizer; NOM: nominative, OBJ: direct object; PAST: past tense marker, POL: polite marker, Q: question marker, QT: quotation marker, RCST: recast (the truncated word is marked by “-“); TOP: topic, @: laughter, /: slight fall, //: final fall. Numbers in angular brackets indicate a pause of X seconds. …: indicates pauses greater than 0.5 seconds; a colon indicates lengthening. […] indicates a few lines omitted as they were repetitions, or, as in line 0 of the English translation, words added to the translated version.


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11 INT e? gaikokujin ni? what foreigner 12 KEN ee// yes 13 INT a soo desu ka// …aa// Is that so POL Q I see 14 KEN kocchi no hoo wo mite iru to anshin suru to ka@@ this way OBJ look feel reassured something like 15 INT aa// I see 16 AYA sore:mo aru ka na to iu no to..tsukisoi ga sono hito ga tsuite kite iru

That too to be Q FP QT N and escort NOM this person NOM be with 17 joo:kyoo: dato: nanka kanja san: ga..wo kodomo atsukai janai n desu

situation be if maybe patient NOM OBJ child treat be NEG N POL 18 kedo, nanka so iu no tte iu no wa, mo- tatoeba.. roo:jin ni.. oyome

but maybe that case QT NOM TOP RCST for ex. elderly daughter in law 19 san ga tuite kite itara oyome san ni dake: mite hanasu to ka, ano:

NOM accompany if daughter in law only look speak etc . HES 20 kookoosei no ko ni okaasan ga tsuite iru to ka, tte ittara okaasan ni dake

student mother accompany etc. in case mother only 21 hanasu toka tte iu no wa…sugoi shitsurei na koto da kedo aru yoo na

speak etc. Q N TOP very rude thing be but is like 22 ki ga suru n desu yo:

have a feeling N POL FP 23 INT tashika ni ne..watashi wa memai ga suru kara itta n de atte, yappari true FP I TOP dizzy be because NOM be in fact 24 chotto bokete ta ndesu yo, tashika ni ano: sore ga miete ta no

a little dazed PAST N POL FP true HES that nom show PAST N 25 kamo shirenai…tomodachi ga soo iu fuuni setsumei shita n desu ne

perhaps friend NOM that way explain PAST N POL FP 26 …ano…yappari tsukisoi no hito ni hanashita hooga anzen da to ka…

well after all escort person speak better safe is etc. 27 soitta bamen =kara=

such circumstances from 28 AYA =nanka= de mo, anzen da janakute…nanka soko dewa...nanikashira no

maybe but safe be NEG maybe there TOP some sort 29 koo: shinri ga..nanka <6> aru yoona ki ga shimasu ne:

such reasoning maybe there is like have an impression FP 0 INT what sort of reasoning do you think is [behind] this? […] 1-2 Why is the nurse only looking at my friend? How would you interpret

this? 3 KEN if I were to witness something like that? 4 INT yes. Why would she avoid my gaze and only talk to my friend? 5 KEN maybe…in such a case, if it’s not a problem with the language… if you

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6-7 are truly making an effort to speak but communication is failing, it’s 8 possible that one would give up, but if communication is taking 9-10 place...and she understood what you were saying <2> if that were the

case…I think…it’s because…she’s not used to [it]. 11 INT to what? Foreigners? 12 KEN yes. 13 INT Oh I see. 14 KEN Looking at your friend she would feel reassured, or something like that. 15 INT I see. 16 AYA That too may be possible, but also…maybe when one brings someone 17-18 along, it’s not exactly like you treat the patient as a child but…somehow

in cases like that…for example if there’s an elderly person accompanied 19-20 by his daughter in law, you might only speak and make eye contact with

her, if you had a high school child accompanied by his mother you might 21-22 speak to his mother…that would be really rude, but I have the feeling

that something like that could happen. 23 INT certainly I did say that I was feeling dizzy, and I was in a bit of a daze, 24-25 certainly…it is possible that that was apparent…my friend explained it 26 like this…like, after all…it’s safer to speak to the person accompanying 27 someone… =from these circumstances. = 28 AYA = maybe =, but…not ‘safer’…perhaps in that case…[there would be] 29 something like a reasoning of some kind <6> I have the feeling that there

could be [something like that...]

A few minutes later, we begin discussing another, similar, case: I am talking to two people, one of whom is my friend, and the other an acquaintance of my friend, when the latter asks my friend a question about me: “when does she (=me) return to Italy?” 30 INT sorewa yappari kekkoo ki ni natte @@ kanojo wa itsu itaria ni

that quite be annoyed she TOP when Italy 31 kaeru n desu ka @@

return NOM COP Q 32 KEN nanka chokusetu hanashitara <2> shitsurei ni naru n janai ka tte

well directly speak COND rude become NOM be NEG Q QT 33 omotte iru hito mo iru to omou n desu yo ne, nanka…

think people too there are QT think NOM POL FP FP, something 34 INT shitashisugite…

too familiar 35 KEN nn, nanka, konna ni wakatte nai no ni, kyuuni,chokusetsu

ehrm maybe, in this way understand NEG though suddenly directly 36 hanashikakeru to.. furanku ni nari sugiru yoo na kanji ni

address COND forthright become too much sort of feeling 37 nacchau kara <3> become because


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38 AYA = sore mo aru: ka: mo: shirenai: = that too be it is possible

39 KEN = hai, de, chokusetsu hanasanai to = kaette shitsureina kanji ni yes and directly talk NEG COND rather rude feeling

40 nacchau tte iu no wa.. aru yoona ki ga shimasu ne. become QT NOM TOP there is something like have a feeling FP

41 INT aa, yappari nanka watashini mushiro kyori wo tamotte hoshii to/ I see, perhaps in a way me rather distance keep want to QT

42 KEN nn, tamotte hoshii no ka, tamotoo to shite iru dake nano ka/ yeah keep want (you) to NOM Q, keep intend to only be NOM Q

30 INT I was a bit annoyed, [by his asking my friend] “When does she go 31 back to Italy?” 32 KEN (It’s that) I think that there are also people who may possibly think it 33 could be rude to speak directly, you know? I mean… 34 INT [it would be] too familiar… 35 KEN well, mmhh… [they avoid speaking directly] since if you suddenly 36-37 address someone directly despite not knowing [that person] well

enough, then it sounds as though one may have become too ‘casual’…yes…and…

38 AYA yes, that too is possible 39 KEN yes, and on the other hand if one does not address that person 40 directly, on the contrary I have the feeling that in some cases it could

possibly be considered somewhat rude… 41 INT ah, so they think they’d prefer me to keep a certain distance 42 KEN well… mmhh…[I wonder whether]…they want you to keep a distance, or they are rather trying to keep a distance…

4.3. Analysis

Is it possible to pin down my perception of evasiveness to some specific elements of this verbal exchange? Looking at the last excerpt, I think that Ken’s contribution contains several elements that we could call, following Caffi (2007), ‘mitigating’ forms. For Caffi, “[…] the basic function of mitigators is deresponsibilization with respect to both content and addressee.” (2007: 88). Ken uses mitigators in statements that mark his own standpoint: “…aru yoona kanji ga shimasu ne.” (= I have the feeling that perhaps it could be said that…, in line 40) as well as that of other people: “naru n ja nai ka to omotte iru hito” (‘people who could possibly think…’, in lines 32-33), “furanku ni nari sugiru yoo na kanji” (‘a feeling that it could possibly be too casual [=lit. frank] to…’, in line 36), which all convey a sense of epistemic distancing or ‘detachment’ (Stubbs 1986) vis-à-vis the expressed propositions. Quite perceptively, Caffi also notes that “the advantage of deresponsibilization is

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counterbalanced by the possibility that the mitigated message can have contrasting interpretations and hence be ambiguous”. These are of course conventional indirect routines frequently used in Japanese, but they nevertheless are symptomatic of Ken’s relinquishing authority over his interpretations, and avoidance of categorical statements.

As for the forms that we could call ‘straightforward statements’ (lines 10 and 33), they are both mitigated by the verb ‘to think’, which “softens the force of the assertion”, and projects the impression that “[…] the speaker is not too brash, tactless, or domineering” (Maynard 1996: 220). Moreover, in responding to my interjection in line 41, while effectively rejecting my interpretation, he avoids any explicit signal of disagreement, questions my statement, and simply mentions an interpretation that is alternative to mine (while possibly leaving the matrix predicate, e.g. ‘I don’t know/ I wonder’, or other verb to this effect, unexpressed10).

Besides these relatively ostensible strategies, we could consider topical organizational features of the text expressed by Ken, using Bavelas et al. (1990)’s discussion of the broad category of ‘equivocal’ messages. As a notional category, ‘equivocation’ is defined as “[…] non-straightforward communication, including messages that are ambiguous, indirect, contradictory or evasive” (1990: 60)11. A message can be equivocal based on the extent to which it ‘blurs’ its relation to any of the situational coordinates of Sender (who expresses a viewpoint), Receiver (who is the target), Content (what is being expressed) and Context (co-textual relationships). We have seen above that Ken uses several devices that make viewpoint attribution slightly less distinct or certain (the use of distancing evidentials); he also generalizes his statements to refer to generic “people” (line 33) rather than the specific case I submitted. In terms of content, Ken’s lines 5-10 are the only instance in which I obtained a comment on the specific case I am referring to (“[the nurse] is not used to foreigners”) but it is noteworthy that even this is not an evaluative comment (or minimally so), and the numerous hesitations (pauses of one or two seconds) reveal its dispreferred status anyway; moreover, the comment is offered only at the end of a ‘double’ account (see below on this), which has the effect of delaying and ‘relativizing’ the final statement. The two explicit evaluations produced by Ken (lines 32-33: “it would be rude to speak directly”, and 35-37: “addressing someone 10 Ken’s last remark in line 42 could be judged as indirect if understood to be incomplete (i.e. lacking a matrix predicate as the one hypothesized above), but its form is formally undistinguished from a genuine question, so its ‘incompleteness’ could only be confirmed by Ken. 11 Hence all equivocal messages are indirect but not viceversa.


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directly may sound too casual”) refer to generic ‘people’ rather than a specific case, so while enunciating a social norm, Ken does not position himself either in line with or against it12. Finally, in terms of co-textual relations, we could note that other comments too are formulated as ‘double accounts’ (cf Watanabe 1993’s “multiple accounts”) that provide counterpoints to the statements he is about to make: in the first excerpt, Ken’s lines 5-10 juxtapose the scenario in which language is a problem—in which case the nurse could be justified for not talking directly to me—and the scenario in which language is not a problem—in which case the reason is the nurse’s lack of familiarity with foreigners, which could potentially cast her as blameworthy. The slow tempo and many pauses indeed suggest some hesitation, although Ken tactfully does not commit himself to an explicit negative judgment. In lines 35-37 again he first provides a justification for the instance of deflected communication that I put to him (by saying that some people may avoid speaking directly to me for fear of sounding too ‘casual’, which is a potentially misaligning move given my obvious disapproval of that behaviour) only to add a statement (lines 39-40) that acknowledges the legitimacy of my irritation (a move which arguably realigns our perspectives). These counterpoints provide an enlarged, inclusive perspective and effectively reduce his need to take a more definite personal stance.

But perceptions of cautiousness or elusiveness, long-windedness, or indeed general indirectness, cannot be fully justified by recourse to a cumulative analysis of a number of (indirect) individual linguistic devices, or by a one-sided analysis of Ken’s orientation to the topic. Meanings cannot be identified independently from the interactional circumstances in which they are uttered; they are initiated, developed, and ‘synchronized’ between, in relation to, or in response to, the participants themselves and their dynamically changing, discursive positions. They are therefore co-constituted, ‘interactionally achieved’ (Arundale 1999), and interpreted through a great deal of circumstantial filtering. The impression of indirectness derives rather from the relation13 of the actual message with

12 The way he identifies the receiver could also be construed as being mitigated: “if they speak directly” in line 32, instead of a more specific “if they speak directly to you”. Like in note 10, this is not an intrinsic property of this utterance and something that could be only be confirmed by Ken. There is a less generic verb in line 36 “to address (you) directly” but again the referent can only be recovered pragmatically. 13 Agha (2007); this is closer to Ervin-Tripp’s (1972: 235) definition of style as something defined by co-occurrence rules (syntagmatic relations) and alternation rules (or paradigmatic relations). The first define a ‘register’, the latter provide a

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different kinds of expectations, either pre-existing a conversation (e.g. the discursive roles that I expected Ken, Aya and myself to hold during the interview: they the experts, me the novice), or being generated through it (e.g. the second part of a question/answer pair, certain amounts and types of information, etc), which are of course subject to variable conventions regarding discourse patterns, as well as acceptable social stances.

I expected to obtain a discernable positioning (in line with the declared purpose of the interview) and I struggled to elicit any. I expected interpretations of specific cases, and received (until I forced my interviewees to be more precise) interpretations of generalized cases. I expected some authoritative statement, and at best I received suggestions as to possible interpretations. Although I had hoped that my explicit affective evaluation (“I was a bit annoyed”) would cue some sort of explicit positioning on Ken’s part, Ken’s response only revealed an attempt to remain as neutral as possible. While I was eager to obtain some overt indication of Ken’s stances with respect to the specific episodes I recounted, this seemed to be a type of information that he was unwilling to volunteer. It is clear therefore that my perception was shaped not by an unprejudiced, ‘clean-slate’ reading of Ken’s behaviour, but the mismatch between my—rather arbitrary and unilateral—expectations, and the type of contribution that he was intent in constructing.

There seemed to be, in other words, a mismatch between their and my understanding of the very nature of the situation (the purpose of the interview, our roles in it, the amount and type of information that could be considered adequate, etc.), i.e. the different “structures of expectations” at play, which I will refer to here as different frames.

The term frame is used in different senses in various disciplinary traditions. Tannen distinguishes an interactive notion of frame “[…] in Bateson’s and Goffman’s sense, that is, what people think they are doing when they talk to each other (i.e. are they joking, lecturing or arguing?)” (1993: 6), from ‘knowledge schemas’, which refer to “participant’s expectations about people, objects, events and settings in the world” (in Shank and Abelson’s or Fillmore’s sense, 1993: 60 ff.)14. While schematic knowledge of actional wholes typified by specific lexical items (e.g. buy

contrast with what that style is not; see also Tannen [1984] 2005 ‘conversational style’; Hymes 1974: ‘a way or mode of doing something’. 14 While some find the two concepts distinguishable in principle (e.g. Hanks 1993:128), Tannen notes that to consider the former ‘dynamic’ (because constructed and derived in interaction) and the latter ‘static’ (because they reside in speakers’ minds prior to interaction) is unjustified, as even pre-existing expectations are continually tested and modified against experience.


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and sell in Fillmore’s discussion) is of course part of speaker’s metalinguistic competence activated in any linguistic interaction, the type of knowledge discussed in cognitive semantics is not of immediate relevance to the discussion in this paper. So I will use the term frames in the Levinsonian sense of an ‘activity type’: “[…] a fuzzy category, whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded, events with constraints on participants, settings, and so on, but above all on the kinds of allowable contributions” (from Clark 1996: 30, my italics). I understand knowledge of these frames to constitute part of speakers’ metalinguistic and metapragmatic competence (it is linked to speakers’ knowledge of the typical linguistic signs associated with certain activities, and to knowledge of normalized modes of behaviour) and therefore act as a set of expectations regarding typical courses of action. This knowledge is constructed through processes of socialization, and it is therefore constantly updated in light of new experience. Additionally, as a product of socialization practices, frames can evoke cultural dimensions.

In this paper, as I will explain below, I discuss abstract, generic types of frames that are likely to underlie a range of interactional scenarios.

5. From linguistic signs to interpretive frames and values

One may well assume the social setting of “ethnographic interview” to have universally understood features: “a researcher interviewing an informant, who is taken to be an authoritative source, within an established domain for the conversation, etc…”, but the possibly heterogeneous conceptualizations of discursive roles and practices that participants bring to it mean that it is by no means a ‘universal frame’.

One’s course of action in a specific situation is determined by one’s assessment not only of hierarchical relationships or group membership (factors that are routinely mentioned in explaining interactional behaviour) but also in terms of what actors know about conventionalized ‘modes of participation’, or frames, such as ‘cooperation’ and ‘competition’ (Jackendoff 2007: 176)15. My expectations, conduct, and response to Ken’s conduct in the interview suggest the possibility that two different models for ethnographic interviews were at play: a competitive one in which the participants are able to contribute with different individual 15 The poles of cooperativeness and competition can be seen as one of the variable dimensions that can characterize joint activities (see Clark 1996: 31). The others, which I do not discuss explicitly here, are: scriptedness (vs. unscriptedness), formality (vs. informality), verbality (vs non-verbality) and governance (egalitarian vs. autocratic).

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stances, envisage the task as a game of minds in which a ‘winning’ argument leads to a specific outcome which eliminates other possible outcomes, and feel bound only by the task at hand, and a collaborative one, in which the participants feel bound to maintain interactional alignment, envisage the task’s outcome as the result of mutual agreement, and feel bound to each other in some (social, affective) capacity, beyond the task at hand.

So while my questioning attempted to prompt an explicit marking of my interviewees’ stance vis-à-vis the episodes I recounted, aimed at obtaining a definitive conclusion, and proposed interpretations that I wanted to be explicitly accepted or challenged (in line with my competitive frame), my interviewees’ contribution seemed to aim at maintaining some kind of overarching alignment and achieve a non-exclusive conclusion that reflected multiple positions (in line with a collaborative frame).

It is at this level of conceptualization, that of frame, that the constellation of linguistic signals makes sense: “[…] global predictions or expectations provide the ground against which possible ambiguities at the perceptual, or sequential levels can be resolved” (Gumperz 1992: 233). So understanding a frame provides us with an enriched interpretation of the utterances, and the various mitigators and instances of ‘equivocal’ messages I described above are less ‘equivocal’ in light of the aims of a participant working in a collaborative frame. If giving opinions positions people and has the potential to reveal their misalignment, a way to maintain alignment is by blurring the edges of a stance.

It should not be thought that Ken is just ‘hiding’ an explicit stance, that should theoretically be invariably expressed in any interview—by the mechanisms I described above he is intent in constructing his ‘scene’, a rather rich scene, in which some meanings are being highlighted and others shaded. The totality of his (verbal) behaviour makes this scene public and available to interpretation (although my interpretation may or may not coincide with the meanings or stances Ken had meant to project: Arundale 1999: 131); his stance is woven in relation to my own stance and interpretable against it. Once I made my stance explicit by casting these episodes as ‘problematic’, or by stating that “I was a bit annoyed” by them, I produced an alignment vis-à-vis the events that constrained Ken’s subsequent positioning16. In the context of our relationship (as newly 16 DuBois maintains that taking a stance means performing three acts: by evaluating something we (causally and inferentially) position ourselves with respect to others, and by positioning ourselves we align ourselves with others (2007: 163).


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acquainted parties, bearers of different positions in the academic hierarchy, age, gender and cultural background) Ken’s stancetaking was indeed a delicate matter. Ken used an indirect style to resolve a potential interactional tension. At the same time however, his stance was an expression of his social morality, and was indexical of a broader sociocultural framework (Englebretson 2007: 3).

While claiming that his stance evokes presupposed systems of sociocultural values (see DuBois 2007: 139) I by no means intend to claim that the same sociocultural values apply to the whole of Japanese society, or even that this is a constant character of Ken’s behaviour across any type of situation, setting, or participant frameworks—on the contrary, it is very much symbiotic to my own behaviour. But to the extent that his behaviour in this situation can be said to display a perceivably coherent character, other participants would ascribe their interpretations to him and hold him accountable for a specific social and moral ideology.

The discussion that follows is schematized in figures 11-1 and 11-2. The signs that Ken has provided me with (linguistic signs) are, to me,

indices of a coherent style (an indirect style); but while indirectness is an emergent property of conversation (a metasemiotic result of the relation of linguistic signs with specific co-textual and contextual conditions17), it is also the input for further metasemiotic generalizations (these facts are indicated by the upward arrows; inverse processes relating to how one’s value system affects one’s verbal behaviour are represented by the downward arrows). I noted earlier that an indirect style can be evaluated in different ways: positive (creating rapport) or negative (being evasive). At the time of the interview, I perceived it negatively—Ken’s style frustrated my expectations in many ways, including my (interested) research agenda. With the revised analytic agenda that I have for the purpose of this paper, and under the different conditions in which I can now approach the text (a detached post-facto analysis, free of the constraints of real-time face-to-face interaction), I will try instead to describe the mechanisms that subtend generalizations from linguistic signs to value attribution and how these can lead to (negative) evaluations.

Before I do that, I need to clarify the terminology I will use, in particular in relation to values, which is inspired by Jackendoff (2007). A value is, for Jackendoff, a conceptualized abstract property (hence not something existing in the “real” world), associated with (conceptualized) objects, persons, and actions, and that serves as an intermediary in a system of “folk logic”. Crucially, value is not a unitary notion, but can be

17 As opposed to an ‘anticipated’ product of the conversation (see Clark 1996: 22).

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broken down in various sub-values (e.g. affective-, utility-, normative-, quality-, esteem-value etc.). Variability in what (sub-)values are associated with what entities is what engenders cross-and intra-cultural variation (2007: 277 ff.). For instance, in some Japanese circles, going out for a drink with colleagues at the end of the day is de rigueur (the activity therefore is associated with a high normative-value), and the social payoff (i.e. the strengthening of group membership) may also be high (a high utility-value) but some people may feel a strong dislike for the inebriated crowds of the late train they have to catch after the drinking session (i.e. assign the activity a low affective-value): this may alter—devalue or undermine—their overall evaluation of the event, even though one recognizes the high normative- and utility-value of going out for a drink.

Here, I will comment only on a few types of value that are relevant to my discussion. Lastly, let us note that each value is explicated (see the top part of the figures) in terms of ‘principles’ (or ‘input rules’), that give grounds for assigning values to objects, people and actions, and ‘guidelines’ (or ‘output rules’) that spell out how the principles affect behaviour. Each principle specifies what gives the value a high and a low valence: for example, for the affective-value, the high valence reads: “harmonious discussion feels good”, and conversely the low valence reads: e.g. “disharmonious discussion feels bad” (the negative values are omitted, for the sake of simplicity, from the tables). The examples of principles and procedures that I use for each value are just indicative—many others could be assumed. VALUE TYPE PRINCIPLES > PROCEDURES

(settings of values) (guidelines for action) affective value a harmonious discussion > do what promotes feels good harmony utility value smooth conversation > avoid open

is beneficial disagreement, misalignment normative value respecting other people’s > minimize viewpoints is good egocentric statements … … …

ACTIVITY FRAME: COOPERATION !"

METASIGN: indirect style


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!" LINGUISTIC SIGNS epistemic distancing (lines 32-33, 36-37, 40) generalizing referents (line 33) inclusion of multiple viewpoints in accounts (lines 5-10, 35-40) signalling of disagreement through interrogative recast (line 42) etc…

Figure 11-1: From linguistic signs to values – cooperative frame and concomitant values VALUE TYPE PRINCIPLES > PROCEDURES

(settings of values) (guidelines for action) affective value a competitive discussion > solicit clear-cut feels good arguments and stances utility value argumentative conversation > open disagreement is beneficial is acceptable normative value challenging other people’s > egocentric viewpoints is good statements are ok … … … ACTIVITY FRAME: COMPETITION !"

METASIGN: direct style !" LINGUISTIC SIGNS (epistemic commitment) (single viewpoint)

etc.… Figure 11-2: From linguistic signs to values – competitive frame and concomitant values

From Ken’s verbal behaviour I could assume his preference for non-

categorical statements about a specific individual’s behaviour, his inclination to express his stance inferentially rather than explicitly, his

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unwillingness to engage in direct argumentation with another participant, his preference for inclusive accounts. At this level18, my interpretation and my attribution of an ‘indirect style’ to Ken’s performance is textual and based on systemic properties.

A descriptive linguist may stop just there; but as members of different social groups and bearers of different cultural values, our interpretation normally goes further: we judge people based on the way they talk and against our parameters of ’normality’, i.e. the normalized behaviours that we are familiar with (though we may not actively behave so ourselves). This requires a reflexive model of behaviour that tells us how people are supposed to act in that specific interactional context. This model includes acquired scripts for specific situations, and corresponds to what I here call ‘frame’ (see 4.3).

Any individual who, like Ken, has been socialized to a notion that stating opinions to near strangers in a public, semi-formal context must be done as collaboratively as possible, will find Ken’s verbal behaviour and stance perfectly natural—possibly unremarkable. An individual may hold, or be familiar with, a set of values consistent with that behaviour and stance: s/he will assume that Ken assigns a high affective-value (specifying what feels good or bad) and a high utility-value (specifying costs and benefits) to diplomatic, harmonious conversation; that he is conforming to a normative value (a moral code of conduct) that dictates inclusiveness and stigmatizes egocentrism (figure 11-1).

But as individuals accustomed to a competitive frame (figure 11-2), in which it is an argumentative, animated discussion that is associated with a sense of satisfaction (high affective-value) and beneficial effects (high utility-value), and in which personal, self-asserting statements are perfectly compatible with norms of acceptable behaviour (normative-value), the verbal signs provided in Ken’s performance generate some kind of discomfort and dissonance. Those signs are indeed likely to be evaluated negatively (i.e. to hold low affective-, utility-, normative-values), as we have seen with the charges of ambiguity, evasiveness, vagueness, or lack of logic. The extent to which we can make sense of Ken’s behaviour depends uniquely on our familiarity with his value system (and the corresponding frame). As bearers of different value systems (or as uninformed novices in intercultural encounters, the prototypical case of the language and culture learner), our responses to Ken’s behaviour can range from complete bewilderment to mild 18 Please note that I am not suggesting any temporal sequencing in the interpretive processes, and reference to different levels of, or different points in participants interpretation depends on the sequence of my analysis.


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frustration, because we fail to find coherence between the values we entertain (and that affect our judgement) and the verbal signals that Ken displays; we lack knowledge or understanding of the interpretive frame.

The case of the language learner exemplifies the extreme case where values are not shared, and possibly also not known—in fact, often a crucial discovery in language and culture learning is that different values exist even for what we may consider ‘universal truths’. But the community of users of Japanese language of course also includes individuals who do not actively share Ken’s values (for example, those who assign a higher utility-value to challenging and being challenged in one’s views; those who attach a higher affective-value to direct challenges, etc.), but are familiar with them. Such individuals are unlikely to be entirely puzzled by Ken’s indirectness: they would be able to recognize his behaviour as one of many models of behaviour. They may still evaluate it negatively, but this will be an informed evaluation of Ken’s values, not the result of one’s unilateral and absolutist reading of the ‘rules of the game’.

The point is that frames and values have to be learned. We cannot experience values directly (although we may infer them from metapragmatic comments) and we do so through experience of frames, or the scripts that (we have learned to assume) regulate behaviour. Repeated exposure to such frames allows us to find coherence19 in behavioural models, and make sense of them; lack of experience can give rise to negative judgements.

The values underlying a frame are evinced from the use of specific linguistic signs, but of course need to receive validation in some sort of folk reasoning. Many ethnographic commentaries on Japan have indeed highlighted the types of values I mentioned above (see e.g. Lebra 1976), such as preference for non-conflictual argumentation or inclusiveness; in particular, the dislike for egocentric stances has been noted in a recent study on apologetic metapragmatic comments (Pizziconi 2007). In the excerpt presented here, Ken produced two explicit enunciations of normative behaviour (though these are phrased as norms he knows of and not necessarily as norms he personally subscribes to): “speaking directly

19 Of course, lack of (apparent) coherence is often picked up on in daily conversations (e.g. contradictions between one’s stated morality and one’s actions), but here I refer to a requirement for mutual coordination, that makes us attribute value in consistent ways; coherence is a function of the subjective degree of match between our notion of which values go with which signs, and mismatches are possible since a value is actually a composite result of many sub-values which may have mismatches.

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may be rude” (lines 32-33) and “addressing someone directly may sound too casual” (lines 35-37).

However, even when we recognize ‘normalized models of behaviours’ or enunciable social norms, we need to consider that they are not necessarily universally subscribed to by the whole of the Japanese people, and they are not the same as ‘normative models’, i.e. models unquestioningly accepted as standards. Sociolinguistic competence requires an appreciation of finer distinctions with regards to the kind of people that those models are subscribed by, the social purposes that such models serve, and how broadly they are adopted in society. Failure to make these distinctions results in stereotyping overgeneralizations. There are several discussions of this issue from a social, or social-psychological point of view (see e.g. Eelen 2001 and Agha 2007), but here I would like to note the very simple psychological process that inhibits such distinctions. As we move from the recognition of linguistic signs (i.e. as signs belonging to the Japanese language, with specific referential meanings, indexing specific illocutionary stances, etc.) to attributions of values (something that happens early on in language learning), we move onto the much fuzzier area of social cognition. It is here that a seamless but crucial leap can be made between the evidence available to me (Ken’s value preferences as an individual), which has a ‘subjective’ character, and a generalization to other people ‘like’ Ken, or possibly the whole of the Japanese country, which has an ‘objective’ character, and for which I may not have much evidence. In other words, although all we could legitimately conclude is that “non-competitive discussion feels good to Ken” (a ‘subjective’ formulation) what we often conclude is that “non-competitive discussion feels good” (an ‘objective’ formulation; see Jackendoff 2007: 239)20. As a matter of fact, unjustified and unsupported by any evidence as it is, this kind of reasoning is fairly common, and indeed very human. Stereotyping is a way to simplify complexities, and

20 In Jackendoff’s discussion this is seen as a process whereby we arbitrarily attribute our own subjective take to others; here, I note the similar effects of attributing somebody else’s subjective take to others. Another interesting implication of the distinction between subjective and objective conceptualizations of values pointed out by Jackendoff (2007: 241) is that when someone’s subjective judgement is consistent with objective judgements this accrues another type of value (esteem-value, both self-esteem or the esteem of those who share the same value). However, when someone’s subjective judgement conflicts with the ‘objective’ judgement this generates loss of (self- or other’s) esteem. If I am wrong my self-esteem goes down, if you are wrong, you are “uncultured, savage, lacking in values”. In our case, ‘vague, inscrutable, illogic’.


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recognizing differences inevitably increases complexity. But the extra effort (cognitive and material) needed to account for variability also clashes with the need for simplification and economy that governs language classrooms.

6. Summary

The discussion above illustrated the mechanisms involved in the perception and evaluation of a speaker’s conversational style. Linguistic forms are of course the means by which speakers signal their orientation to values, but since the same linguistic signs (including the metasign of ‘indirect style’) may, and often do, have different interactional valences in different value systems21, a rigid interpretation of their meanings based on one’s own system of values carries the risk of misattribution.

I have tried to show the mechanisms that link the reading of an individual’s verbal behaviour to judgements of personhood. Crucial to an understanding of the significance of an indirect style are the participant assumptions regarding the type of activity one is taking part in, its purposes, the participating roles it prescribes, and how it relates to long-term goals beyond the immediate activity undertaken, i.e. their respective frames. The frames assumed in this study are generic relational frames that describe types of “joint actions”: cooperative or competitive. Frames shape the linguistic contributions from their inception, and are not just a ‘last resort’ bit of context, which can be invoked for interpretation to ‘fill in’ the gaps in semantic or syntactic meaning (Clark 1996: 58). The lack of a common ground in this mediating plane is responsible for mismatches in one’s expectations, and potential miscommunication, even when communication seems to proceed with no major hiccups at a lower, denotational level, at a local pragmatic level, etc.

It is well known that inaccurate form-function mappings are responsible for a great deal of language learners’ pragmatic failure. As ‘capsules’ of human knowledge and understanding about types of interactional patterns that are normally below one’s awareness (Hanks 1993: 129), frames are even more sensitive components of interactions. Participants in speech events hold others accountable for their communicative actions but are likely to invoke linguistic signs, rather than frames, in interpretive or argumentative reasoning about what is going on. We have seen this in many commentaries on the Japanese style, including

21 Tannen [1984] 2005 talks of ‘pragmatic homonimy’, i.e. the different interpretation of the same devices.

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the quotation from Clancy at the beginning of this paper, that deterministically explain perceptions of evasiveness on the basis of linguistic features of the Japanese language, leaving the ‘evaluator’s’ assumptions regarding the expected goals and features of the exchange unquestioned. Yet, we have seen how our expectations about the relevant ‘scripts’ for joint activities crucially affects our cognitive as well as affective evaluation of the effectiveness (or even comprehensibility) of a communicative exchange. In pedagogical contexts, it is important to highlight how frames condition verbal behaviour, and how they reflect and affect speaker’s stances towards the task at hand and the relationship with other participants. This is not the same as teaching language with a situational syllabus: scripts for post-office or restaurant encounters are more institutionalized and conventionalized than those for stating opinions (during ethnographic interviews, in a university seminar, or at a dinner party). Learners can benefit from guidance (and awareness raising) on how one’s assumptions about goals and participant roles affect communication.

Values are complex concepts, and can be described in terms of clusters of more specific sub-values that may have different valences for different individuals. This conceptualization of values allows us to account for culture-internal variation and reduce the drawbacks of necessary pedagogical simplifications. The implication for teaching is that no single account of ‘cultural values’ is likely to offer an exhaustive and non-stereotypical account of the social meaning of linguistic forms. When offering explanations of this or that form, conventional expression, lexeme, etc. a teacher/textbook may variably resort to a type of morality (“when complimented it is good to deny the compliment and show modesty”), a particular feeling (“it is considered clumsy to say no directly”), or a social norm (“even when you disagree, it is tatemae [=the socially accepted thing to do, see Doi 1986] not to do so directly”). None of these explanations is ‘more’ true than the others, nor are they necessarily all true at the same time either. They can only be true for someone, and the argumentative positioning—the ideology—that they presuppose needs to be addressed directly.

7. Conclusion

I have assumed that the abundance of claims about Japanese indirectness must be taken as genuine perceptions on the part of users, and although distinctions need to be made about what indirectness ‘means’, how socially widespread it is, in what situations it is deployed, and what argumentative positions it sustains (which needs extensive empirical


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testing), we need to acknowledge the existence of such perceptions, and account for it in pedagogical contexts. Japanese language no doubt makes extensive use of an indirect style—a style conveyed through the use of several grammaticalized and discourse-based devices—but evidence is available that suggests that this style is subject to a great deal of personal and situational variation, a fact that Japanese language instruction needs to proclaim more audibly (Matsumoto and Okamoto 2003: 34). When an indirect style is selected, this conveys information on the speaker’s orientation in relation to other participants. In this study we have seen that this may conflict with the goals of the task (as understood by one participant), but also that it indexes the speaker’s priorities: interactional, rather than transactional concerns. Indirect styles can be used to index speakers’ affective and social values, which assign importance to harmonious, non-conflictual stances, and condition the nature of the interactional frame.

Language forms can be indirect, but indirectness is not a fixed property of the Japanese language. The structure of the language cannot “foster ambiguity” but it can be exploited to convey ambiguity when this is the very meaning that speakers wish to express. Speakers can be indirect, vague, and ambiguous, but indirectness is also not an intrinsic property of speakers either; it is the result of a semiotic process in which several signs are perceived to converge to convey a consistent register of linguistic use, functional to the expression of alignment. The degree of indirectness we perceive is also a function of participants’ goals and expectations (our frames), and therefore it is an emergent property of specific interactions. Language teaching must avoid deterministic statements about the ‘spirit’ of the Japanese language, or essentializing statements about the preferences of a generic Japanese speaker, and focus on the goals of participants in situated activities, which are subject to variations in the stances, identities, and morality displayed.

Previous contrastive analyses of Japanese argumentation strategies (Watanabe 1993 contrasts them with American strategies) have argued that there are systematic cross-cultural differences at the framing level. In this study, I did not confirm nor disprove that this may be the case, but I argued that different settings in the clusters of sub-values in an individual value system allow for variation within a broadly shared cultural orientation. Each interaction provides evidence of an individual’s belief system, his/her orientation towards norms of behaviour and affective preferences towards patterns of interaction. Whether the collaborative frame and the underlying values I have described can be generalized to other groups in Japanese society is an empirical matter that depends on the

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frequency of occurrence of such behaviour. A truly pluralistic education requires that teachers contextualize their own interpretations and evaluations, and accompany such interpretations with reference to other value systems, for other ‘types’ of people (e.g. different generations, genders, different political or sexual orientations, etc.)22. As a kind of ‘gate keeper’, a teacher carries great responsibility in the creation and sustenance of normative models, and the potential perpetuation of stereotypes and prejudice.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to Ken and Aya (you know who you are) for their interest in my work and for putting up with several hours of relentless interviewing. A generous Japan Foundation grant made this project possible. This study would never have got off the ground without the EPICS III symposium, so a big thank you is also due to its ever amiable and hospitable organizers.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

ON INTERCULTURAL DISAGREEMENT: INTERACTION AND INERTIA

ALBIN WAGENER

1. Introduction

The risk of conflict can be found in any possible interaction. Intercultural interactions may trigger disagreement, mainly based on misunderstandings regarding the interactants’ cultural, social and individual schemata. Various speech acts, eye movements, gestures or facial expressions may be interpreted as polite or impolite, depending on our multiple origins. In a casual conversation for instance, a simple change of volume in the speaker’s voice might be considered as an agression by the listener. Every communicable sign contains a potential for interactive disagreement. In intercultural cases, this potential is even more increased by the differences existing between codes applied by the interactants. In fact, every conversational speaker thinks that his/her behaviours matches the ongoing communication process. When a conversational partner speaks (and therefore acts), s/he may believe that s/he is using the “right words” and acting the “right way”. Even if these acts are culturally marked, interactants cannot help but hanging on to them when it comes to communication. Speakers act as if their productions were instantly relevant. As Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1995: 270) state, “[…] of all the stimuli that are available to [him/]her and acceptable as a means of achieving [him/]her particular communicative goal, the communicator will choose one that is as relevant as possible to the addressee”.

This statement about relevance theory leads to another question: what is happening when both speakers produce acts that happen to be relevant in various contexts, but do not match the current communicational context? In other words, what is happening when an intercultural conversation blurs the lines between what is relevant and what is not? In

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cases of disagreement, Miriam Locher (2004: 83) admits that “[…] an interpretation which can be classified as a misundertsanding in retrospect will, nevertheless, have been processed according to the principles of relevance ”. This may be the key problem of intercultural interactions: everybody believes that everything he did or said was definitely relevant, precisely because he/she is used to see it as relevant in his/her own cultural context. The actual point is that an intercultural conversation may probably be the most “irrelevant” possibility of conversation, not because it may prevent the communication from being maintained, but because it leads this communication to grounds that the speakers may hardly know. It may be like experiencing a new colour or a new communicational dress: speakers are used to expect their interactional partner to have a behaviour that would reflect their own culture, but if s/he does not, then the reign of confusion may begin. In other words, speakers are caught in the golden cage of their own sociocultural vision of communication and social interaction.

We believe that it may help to look at intercultural communication processes through a systemic lens: we will therefore speak of conversational systems, as we believe that every conversation holds the attributes of a system, defined by Jean-Pierre Meunier (2003: 29): “[…] le concept de système […] implique les idées d’interrelation entre éléments, d’unité globale constituée par ces éléments en interrelation, et d’organisation qui lie l’idée de totalité à celle d’interrelation”1. Our definition of a conversational system implies the fact that speakers may be considered as systemic elements themselves, as well as time and space, the interactional context, the relation linking these speakers, etc.; the speakers may also be seen as open sub-systems, evolving in an actual interaction, trying “their best” to support this interaction and achieve their communicational goals: these goals may be conscious or not and might only represent a need to maintain a precise relationship or a social environment, according to various systemic principles (Atlan 1972; Von Bertalanffy 1973; Morin 1977) which will be described in this paper, although our main topic is only to present a brief overview of this complex and interesting research. Throughout this effort, we will use and explain a systemic model and understand how this model may help us to understand the fact that, when an interaction becomes an open conflict, it is not just an accidental stroke of fate, but that disagreement or conflict themselves obey pragmatic concepts. Therefore, when we tend to analyze the utterance of 1 “The concept of system […] implies the following ideas: an interrelation between elements, a global unity composed by these interrelated elements, and a structure that links the ideas of globality and interrelation”, our translation.

On Intercultural Disagreement: Interaction and Inertia 257

an intercultural disagreement, we will be able to focus on the dynamic character of interaction itself, as well as its sociocultural and emotional conditioning.

2. Disagreement as Confrontation between Social and Cultural Schemata

What happens when disagreement occurs in a conversational system, whose participants may have different cultural influences? First of all, we would like to define the concept of disagreement as seen by Christina Kakavá (1993: 36). We will use this definition throughout our proposal:

Since disagreement can lead to a form of confrontation that may develop into an argument or dispute, disagreement can be seen as a potential generator of conflict. Not only can disagreement create conflict, but it can also constitute conflict, since an argument is composed of a series of disputable opinions or disagreements.

Thus, Kakavá presents a different approach of disagreement from that

of Vincent R. Waldron and James L. Applegate (1994: 4), who see disagreement as “[…] a form of conflict, because verbal disagreements are taxing communication events, characterized by incompatible goals, negotiation, and the need to coordinate self and other actions”. Like Kakavá, we do believe that disagreement is not a simple form a conflict, but a step between conversational harmony and serious conflicts. Disagreement not necessarily triggers violent confrontations and its subsequent problems may be solved by using certain forms of politeness or argumentative rhetorics. However, whenever a disagreement emerges, it is in fact sowing the first seeds of potential conflicts. Intercultural interactions offer a large scale of possible disagreements: first of all, we need to assert that to us, disagreement already is a form of confrontation, which is not necessarily violent or submitted to severe tension, yet already allows the speakers’ schemata to emerge and to officially yet not necessarily consciously differ from each other. As we will notice, this disagreement may concern fragments of our behaviour that we might consider as harmless or of little importance. We may disagree and confront ourselves through the following topics:

- eye movements, glances; - management of interpersonal space; - management of time; - gestures, physical contact; - paraverbal indicators (voice volume, rhythm, intonation, accent);

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- physical attitude, posture; - language (especially if one or more of the interactants are non

native speakers). When we speak and act, we do not pay attention to these parameters.

We are reproducing them as if they were simply natural, yet they are not: they are only reflects and incarnations of our own culture, of our own social inheritance. We do not own them and we do not choose to produce them or not: we are really living through them as they remain parts of our identity. For Martine Abdallah-Pretceille (2006 : 43), identity is “mouvante, fuyante, tigrée, alvéolaire, elle n’est pas le reflet d’une réalité sui generis mais le résultat d’une activité de communication et donc marquée par son contexte d’émergence, contexte nécessairement pluridimensionnel”2. This complex process that we call identity is already an emerging and ongoing process, always conditioned by a particular context. When two different identities gather and confront their processes of being, it is easy to imagine that disagreement as confrontation might become a likely option.

We now wish to put an example forward, originally taken from Emmanuelle de Pembroke et Montgomery’s (1996) work on intercultural differences. To gather her main data, she focused on two groups of immigrant population living in Paris, France. The first group was formed of American immigrants and the second one was formed of Japanese immigrants. The reported example we will use involves a Japanese man, describing his feelings towards his French co-workers. This man is working in an international company and is trying hard to integrate well into the French society. However, he quickly becomes confused: the values of hierarchy, respect and efficiency he was hanging on to in Japan have a slightly different connotation in France. De Pembroke et Montgomery (1996: 283) offers us his own words:

Il est extrêmement intimidant pour [les Japonais expatriés] de prendre la parole. Ils ont peur d’être arrêtés dans leur discours, interrompus dans leurs idées. D’ailleurs, tous, hommes et femmes se qualifient de timides et posent ce qualificatif comme leur principal handicap. C’est pourquoi la peur d’être coupés est associée à la peur d’être regardés. Tous les yeux posés sur eux peut être une épreuve difficile à surmonter. ‘Tout le monde regarde la personne qui parle ! Mon Dieu ! Au Japon, on peut regarder mais la personne sait qu’elle ne sera pas interrompue ! C’est terrible ici !’

2 “Moving, elusive, spotted, alveolar, it is not the reflection of a reality sui generis but the result of an activity of communication and therefore marked by its context of emergence, a context that is necessarily pluridimensional”, our translation.


[…] En effet, le souci d’harmonie entre les individus est si fort qu’aucune opposition ne doit s’afficher clairement dans une conversation. En fait, le souci de l’autre, le respect de sa pensée sont tels que le locuteur doit faire abstraction de sa propre opinion. […] Chaque sujet est donc pesé avant d’être abordé. Les personnes interrogées disent toujours réfléchir avant d’entamer un nouveau thème3.

In this intercultural case, we may specify two main cultural postures.

However, we wish to emphasize the fact that it is not our purpose to create a glossary of stereotypes about Japanese and French behaviours, but to describe the possible cultural outings that Japanese and French might go through in particular contexts: every individual is different and does not carry all the behavioural attributes of his cultural inheritance. These Japanese bheviours, described by the Japanese and underlined by De Pembroke et Montgomery’s explanations (1996: 285), may be defined by the following preferences:

- avoiding interruptions during conversations; - avoiding or minimizing eye contact; - avoiding spoken disagreements or clear oppositions; - increasing the standing of mutual respect by carefully selecting

specific topics, etc.; The main value of these possible preferences is social harmony. Thus,

Japanese use certain forms of politeness and conversational rules in order to enable this harmony to get maintained. The social relationships are directly linked to this main value and are also related to a certain spiritual, historical and philosophical ethos. These behaviours, preferences and references are all attributes of a possible Japanese culture. In this case, the nebula of what we may call a possible Japanese culture is confronted with

3 “Expatriate Japanese find it extremely intimidating to speak. They are afraid of getting interrupted while speaking and thinking. In fact, men and women all describe themselves as shy and label this quality as their main handicap. This is why the fear of getting interrupted is linked with the fear of being watched. It may be very difficult for them to put up with all these eyes looking at them. ‘Everyone watches the speaker! My God! In Japan, you can watch this person, but he/she knows that she will not be interrupted! It’s terrible here!’ [...] In fact, the concern for harmony between individuals is so strong that no opposition shall be clearly expressed during the conversation. The care for others and the respect of their opinion are actually so important that the speaker must leave aside his/her own opinion. [...] Every topic is weighted up before being taken up. The people we interviewed always claim to think before submitting a new subject for conversation”, our translation.

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the nebula of a possible French culture, whose preferences may be as follows:

- tolerating interruptions during conversations; - increasing the standing of eye contact; - tolerating spoken disagreements or clear oppositions; - increasing the standing of mutual respect by asking certain

questions in order to show sincere interest, etc. Of course, it would be a mistake to argue that French do not wish to

maintain social harmony. In fact, they do, but in their own cultural way. The main value of these possible preferences also may be described as social harmony. French also use certain forms of politeness and conversational rules, and these forms are also directly linked to a historical and philosophical inheritance. In fact, the French cultural nebula and the Japanese cultural nebula both wish to maintain their own social organization, which is a quality of every system. If conversations can be described as systems, we may also assert that cultures are even greater ones, which are getting expressed through social and individual behaviours. Systems obey to a few basic rules and principles which maintain their own homeostasy (De Rosnay 1975):

- the circulation of information, which has to occur between elements of the system (in the case of conversations, these elements are played by speakers);

- a dyad of noise (all the possible disturbances which may alter the circulation of information) and redundancy (a principle based on the repetition and predictability of information, Bateson 1972);

- negentropy, which is a principle based on energy savings, allowing the system to maintain its harmony at the lowest possible cost;

- a principle of mimesis, based on a dyad of inclusion and exclusion: in order to communicate, elements of a system must share a certain amount of communicational values and rules of exchange (inclusion of language and culture for instance) yet still have to remain dinstinct from each other in order to bring something new to the system in its entirety (in the case of conversations, the mere physical differences and whole bodies are symptoms of systemic exclusion).

These rules and principles may be applied to a systemic model of human interactions, as they are allowing an observation which bundles the complexity and the variety of communication as well as the evolution it may undergo through time and the development of relationships. A


diagram of systemic conversations (Fig. 15-1) may help understanding the implications of this model by defining the following items:

- the position of speakers within the system (e.g. S1, S2 and S3); - interactions between internal and external contexts (iC and eC); - interactions between speakers and the internal context of the

system (relationship linking speakers, personal background, physical location, etc.)

- interactions between speakers and the external context of the system (time of day or night, country or region in which the interaction takes place, etc.)

- the system itself, delimiting a thin border which remains pervious to any external or internal influence.

Figure 12-1: Diagram of systemic conversations

In the case of De Pembroke et Montgomery’s example, a systemic model of humain interaction, associated with perspectivism (Putnam 1981) gives relevant information about the forces which led speakers to act the way they did. The Japanese and his French co-workers are in fact trying to paint the same painting, but with different colours and a completely different approach. In Japanese culture, mutual respect and harmony are guaranteed by a specifi behaviour: speakers do not interrupt their interactional partners, in order to let them feel that they are listening to them. Speakers try not to bother their partners with inappropriate and disrespectful glances. In other words: speakers try to give their partners the time and space they are needing for his/her words, and if they disagree, they are more likely to show him/her respect by staying silent than by showing him/her that their point of view is different. In French culture

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though, mutual respect and harmony are guaranteed by a completely different behaviour: speakers may interrupt conversational partners to finish their sentences or complete their ideas, thus showing that they are listening to what s/he is saying and that they are interested in it. Looking at their partners also shows them that speakers respect them and their points of view. If speakers do not agree, they are able to say it in their own words, in order to initiate a fruitful dialogue. In other words: speakers try to stay close to their conversational partner, and this verbal (interrupting sentences) and non verbal (looking at the speaker) contact is maintaining social harmony. Of course, these behaviours are only tendencies, but they already show us some cultural directions. Everybody is trying to paint the same painting (social harmony, for instance), yet the colours are cultural and the approach may be individual. The problem is that in such intercultural cases, confrontation is almost unavoidable. Every speaker will claim to have painted the right painting, because in their own culture, everybody would have painted it this way. Thus, the other way of painting may be considered as wrong or irrelevant. Stereotypes of the others’ cultures help to make such statements, but speakers have to keep in mind that no culture is “better” or “superior”4. According to Hilary Putnam (1981: 49), “[…] there is no God’s Eye point of view that we can usefully imagine: there are only various points of view of actual persons reflecting various interests and purposes that their descriptions and theories subserve”. However, when disagreements occur, two or more cultural perspectives of social harmony are confronted. The schemata depicted are possible interpretations of cultural systems. In the case of Japanese and French co-workers, the conversational system in fact represents an encounter between two cultures and two ideas of social organization. Samples of behaviours gathered in De Pembroke et Montgomery’s example are summed up in the following table (Table 12-1): both speakers are trying to reach the same goal by using utterances or behaviours which are interpreted in very different ways. Again, in order to clarify any form of suspicion, we have to underline the fact that these utterances and

4 From past tragedies to present stakes, the use of sterotypes has played and still does play a major part in human tragedies, from wars to genocides, from terrorist attacks to social stigmatization. The study of stereotypes therefore remains a major research field which should be explored and analyzed, in order to understand their cognitive, emotional, psychological, sociocultural and political effects on individuals, groups and -sometimes-whole nations. The use of stereotypes in daily press and media would form a useful subject and could help understand how opinions speakers call their own are actual fruits of complex and insidious processes.


interpretations are only possibilities and that they do not wish to reinforce stereotypes or imprison culturally marked behaviours into tiny boxes.

Utterances

/

Behaviours

Interruptions

during

conversations

Eye

contact5

Spoken

disagreements

or oppositions

Conversational

topics

Interpreted

by

Japanese

culture

Avoided. Avoided /

Minimized.Avoided.

Carefully

selected in

order to avoid

disagreement.

Interpreted

by

French

culture

Tolerated Tolerated /

Increased. Tolerated.

Selected in

order to

maintain social

linking.

Table 12-1:Summary of samples gathered by De Pembroke and Montgomery

Our purpose is not to condemn any form of confrontation. When two

cultures gather in a conversational system, disagreement may occur. We might even argue that disagreement already represents a form of recognition: when speakers take part in the emergence of a disagreement, they acknowledge the fact that they have perceived something different, something that does not fit into their social or cultural schemata. Thus, the emotional reaction we may go through is a positive reaction to a cognitive mismatch. Our purpose is not to avoid disagreement, because every living system needs differentiation processes in order to keep its dynamic evolution, or in other words, according to Frédérique Lerbet-Séréni (1994:

5 Another example should add another perspective to this tentative table: if a French speaker meets a German speaker, there is a cultural possibility that the German speaker will have the impression that his French partner is trying to avoid eye contact. Again, every cultural utterance has to be compared to a different one in order to prevent from drawing steady conclusions whereas we are not trying to justify any form of stereotype or social truth.

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18) “[…] par la relation entre deux sujets s’effectue la différenciation qui rend possible la construction d’une personne dans son originalité”6. We need to be realistic and explore the complexity of emerging disagreements, in order to be able to prevent them from becoming open conflicts. When two or more speakers tend to confront their social and cultural schemata, they instantly perceive that something differs from what they expected in the ongoing interaction. Their interpretations may vary, but the disagreement is likely to emerge and gain in weight and importance: it is the second phase of confrontation, when every speaker tries to restabilize an interaction that he/she perceives as damaged or feels as being incomfortable.

3. Interactive inertia: towards a reproduction of schemata

As seen in De Pembroke et Montgomery’s intercultural example, speakers tend to use their own social and cultural schemata in order to maintain the conversational system. Thus, every speaker uses his knowledge (which may be conscious or not) of certain codes in order to communicate. These schemata allow them to organize interaction and to use cognitive markers. Usually, they do not necessarily think about these cognitive markers, as they may automatically detect them and interpret the conversational context through the lenses proposed by these markers. Schemata use specific markers and give them a structured and senseful vision of their world, their society and of the relationships they tend to develop. According to Paul Watzlawick, Janet Helmick Beavin and Don D. Jackson (1967: 32), speakers are constantly stroke by any behaviour which would not fit into any known context. While syntactic or semantic modifications may in fact be of concern to speakers, behaviours which mark changing contexts are linked to more emotional reactions: in this field, knowledge of contextual or interactional rules is not as explicit as in semantics or syntactic structures, and speakers therefore may feel more sensitive to them. What cannot be put in words still holds a part of mystery and interactional partners cannot help but try to interpret it.

However, this continuous interpretational process seems to alter its efficiency when it comes to an encounter of different cultural schemata. While interpreting the behaviours of their conversational partners and the apparent consistency they believe the context is building, speakers are

6 “[…] the relation between two subjects creates a differentiation which allows the construction of an individual in its own originality”, our translation.


making assumptions about what seems to be happening. For Richard W. Janney and Horst Arndt (1992: 31), “[…] once such assumptions are formed, they remain relatively stable and their influence on social interaction becomes almost automatic […]. Events that contradict them do not change them, but tend rather to be interpreted as incorrect, ununderstandable, or abnormal”. According to our systemic model, these assumptions are subject to the negentropy principle which allows a better redundancy and predictability of information and therefore of human interaction. Speakers might choose the possible options listed below:

1. ignoring these utterances (verbal or not); 2. insisting on their own scheme in order to modify the interactional

context, assuming that their conversational partner may adopt their behaviour;

3. correcting their partner’s behaviour; 4. using clear contradiction or opposition in order to show their

partner that s/he is wrong, which may lead to an open conflict; 5. asking questions or producing reformulations of their partner’s

behaviour; 6. trying to figure out what may be “wrong” within the current

conversational system, etc7. As previously reported (Wagener 2007), we have figured out that the

reproduction of our main schemata is due to a need to create sense, coherence and a social and cultural structure in order to help us maintain a vision and organization of the world. Thus, in the case of De Pembroke et Montgomery’s example, the Japanese man and his French co-workers would probably insist on reproducing their own cultural schemata. In this case though, some important imbalance is influencing the relationship: while his French co-workers remain in their own cultural field, which does not require any important cognitive effort, the Japanese executive is acting and communicating in a cultural environment he does not know and posess, which leads him to a situation of utter discomfort and cognitive investment. While Japanese living in Paris may define themselves as “shy”, they still do not try to change their own behaviour by stating this. In fact, they are involved into a cognitive process leading to an interactive tensing:

(1) Japanese do not know when or how to speak in conversations with French;

7 We wish to emphasize the fact that this list of possible reactions is everything but exhaustive and that every speaker owns a singular approach to the problem of interactional disagreement.

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(2) Japanese refer to their own culture, longing for a situation of comfort;

(3) Japanese label themselves as “shy” in order to explain their attitude towards French, which may in fact think that Japanese are shy, precisely because they do not speak much;

(4) They label the situation in France as “terrible” because they are constantly “interrupted” while speaking;

(5) By stating this, they will freeze this intercultural interaction; (6) Japanese are not trying to develop an intercultural context.

In this case, we are still in a culture to culture-approach, and not in an intercultural approach of interaction and conversation. French might proceed the same way:

(1) French do not know why Japanese hardly speak with them; (2) French refer to their own culture, longing for a situation of

comfort; (3) French label themselves as having “normal” communications8

and may assume that Japanese have “communicational issues”; (4) They may label the behaviour of this Japanese man as shy,

impolite and even contemptuous or hypocritical; (5) By stating this, they will also freeze this intercultural interaction; (6) French are not trying to develop an intercultural context.

However, in this example, Japanese are living in Paris and are therefore trying to live inside a very different culture. This assumption may explain why Japanese already label themselves as shy, thus bearing out the attitude of French co-workers. This situation is complex, but no speaker has the keys that would allow him to understand what is really happening: while French hope that Japanese will speak and behave like them, Japanese hope that French will speak and behave like them. As long as speakers are staying in such situations, the conversational system is stuck in a process of inertia (Espinoza 2005). During this process, speakers are still working with their cultural habits, yet will not be able to create bridges between them. They will maybe see that “something” is not working in the conversational system, leading to a communicational handicap, but the pressure of their conditionments will not allow them to develop different strategies. This pressure is actually feeding the inertia process according to the rule of negentropy: speakers are cognitively looking for redundancy-though without being necessarily aware of it-in order to maintain their own communicational and sociocultural system. Thus, they are constantly involved in a circular process, circulating

8 We know that these communications are only cultural.


between their own cognitive and sociocultural stochastic reservoir and the ongoing interaction. This redundancy model (Fig. 15-2) allows speakers to verify that the interaction they are currently experiencing is obeying to the communicational and sociocultural codes they are used to observe and reproduce.

Figure 12-2: Redundancy model

Therefore, switching perspectives would demand too much energy and,

as any system is ontologically built on energy savings, it remains highly likely that interactional partners will feed their own redundancy loop. In this case, two sociocultural loops are constantly driving the speakers’ behaviours and, if no-one inside or outside the conversational system wishes to make the cognitive effort to pull themselves out of these loops, the confrontational inertia will remain the only option. We may sum up this inertia process and these loops (Table 15-2) in this particular intercultural case.

Cultural, social and linguistic references are the tools which allow individuals to adapt to different communicational contexts. When these contexts are too different from the ones they are using/used to, speakers might tend to notice that these cognitive tools are not used by their conversational partners. However, this step often leads to redundancy: speakers continue using their tools, “hoping” that the situation will change if they still use these tools again and again. When the context changes, we do not try to change our vision of the context: we are trying to change the context in itself. Having studied oriental philosophy and communication theories in order to help workers in difficult communicational contexts, Christophe Guérin (2003: 14) assumes that we are trying to save energy when such disagreements occur:

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Interactive Steps Japanese man French co-workers

(1) Initial statement

Conversational problem:

coordination with

speakers

Conversational

problem: silence of

a speaker

(2) Verification

process

Stochastic reservoir filled

with Japanese

sociocultural codes and

behaviours

Stochastic reservoir

filled with French

sociocultural codes

and behaviours

(3) Feedback to the

ongoing interaction

Shyness may explain

own behaviour

Own behaviour

labelled as

“normal”

(4) Assumed

explanation of the

current issue

Interactional situation

labelled as “terrible” in

French context

If own behaviour is

“normal”, then the

partner’s behaviour

is labelled as

“abnormal”

(5) Interactional

result

Issue solved:

responsibility comes

from the partners,

interaction is frozen

Issue solved:

responsibility

comes from the

partner, interaction

is frozen

(6) Pragmatical

impact

Non-development of any

interactional and

intercultural ground

Non-development

of any interactional

and intercultural

ground

Table 12-2: Summary of inertia process


[Notre] pensée […] est conditionnée par tout notre vécu, toutes nos constructions mentales précédentes qui auront été mémorisées. Dès qu’une quantité d’information fournie au cerveau se rapproche d’une construction déjà faite et mémorisée, il est plus simple et moins coûteux en énergie de la reprendre plutôt que de chercher à en reconstruire une nouvelle.9

Although it seems clear that this low cost in energy may be relevant in the first moments of such intercultural disagreements, we are quickly able to see that if every speaker uses this process, the cost in time and energy would be more important than expected. Speakers are used to reproduce schemata they already know: it is their everyday functioning. Since they are young, they memorize and reproduce educational, social and cultural schemata: they learn to know people that may inspire them and still allow them this same way of functioning. When intercultural disagreements occur, speakers still use redundancy in order to save time and energy, yet they use it while seeing the world through different lenses. Although they could try to share these lenses, the pressure of redundancy is so strong that it may appear easier for every speaker to keep his/her own lenses on and to keep looking through them, hoping that the disturbing elements might disappear or get reduced by any other process. This cognitive comfort is not saving time and energy at all when it comes to intercultural conversations, because every speaker might hang on to his/her own vision of the world and repeat its schemata over and over again, making inferences about the incapability of their conversational partner to fit his/her own cultural context. This is what happens in De Pembroke et Montgomery’s reported case: French co-workers do not abandon their cognitive schemata and reproduce the same comfortable context over and over again. According to them, if a problem occurs in the current conversation, then their Japanese co-worker must be responsible for it. On the other hand, the Japanese man is caught in the same process, although he may first admit that his shyness might be the origin of the communicational problem; in fact, he quickly goes back to the “terrible” conversational environment he has to adapt to in France, because this environment does not fit into the cultural schemata he was used to in Japan. In this example, both co-workers are producing and expressing inferences about themselves and their interactional partner, in order to find

9 “[Our] way of thinking [...] is conditioned by our experience and all the previous mental constructions we have memorized. As soon as certain quantity of information provided to the brain looks close to a construction we have already created and memorized, it is simpler and less costly in energy to reuse it than to build a new one”, our translation.

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an explanation for the ongoing disagreement. Throughout their studies of intercultural communication, Ron Scollon and Suzanne Wong Scollon (2001: 11) have noticed the importance of inferences:

When someone says something, we must jump to some conclusion about what he or she means. We draw inferences based on two main sources: (1) the language they have used, and (2) our knowledge about the world. That knowledge includes expectations about what people would normally say in such circumstances.

Like Scollon and Scollon, we believe that what we may call knowledge

is in fact a habit of interpretation of the world. Knowledge in itself is not a universal vision of reality or a unique truth explaining the ways of the world, but some assumptions shared by individuals, united in a social and cultural group. The problem is that speakers believe this knowledge to be “right”, which may explain the maintaining of cognitive habits, although they are able to see that the ongoing conversation is creating interactional problems and is subject to possible failure or even conflict. Interactive inertia is a process which does not instantly threaten the maintaining of communication: speakers are still communicating with each other, but not through the same channel. Every speaker assumes that his/her partners will in the end adopt his/her own context and therefore invites him/her to do so by reproducing his/her own cultural schemata over and over again. Two or more opposite cultural schemata are repeating the same codes, leading the conversational system to develop a sort of “communicational tumor” that may lead to conflict. We might also assume that this tumor is slowly storing the energy spent by speakers in order to save energy: during the process of interactive inertia, speakers spend more energy trying to save their actual energy and comfort than really making significant energy savings by investing in new communicational solutions. In this Franco-Japanese case, this “communicational tumor” is also emerging because no-one is able to explain what is currently happening. French co-workers and their Japanese colleague both manage to see that there is a gap between their own behaviour and the codes applied by their interactional partner-which explains their outings about getting annoyed of the attitude of their interlocutors-yet they all remain strictly unable to have some hindsight about the whole communication and the current processes involved in it. In other words, every speaker is analyzing the problematic interaction through the lens of his/her own recursive loop, withouth adopting a systemic perspective which gives an overview of the whole conversational situation and of its very sociocultural conditionments.


4. Being interaction: the difficulty of hindsight

The emergence of interactive inertia creates a seemingly paradoxical situation: while speakers try to resolve this situation of discomfort by maintaing their own cultural codes, the possibility of a pragmatic hindsight may seem to appear as an unlikely option for disagreement resolution. In fact, the conversational system is actually moving towards a state of instability. This instability is due to what Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers (1979: 177) are calling an episode of systemic fluctuation:

La fluctuation ne peut envahir d’un seul coup le système tout entier. Elle doit d’abord s’établir dans une région. Selon que cette région initiale est ou non plus petite qu’une dimension critique […] la fluctuation régresse ou peut, au contraire, envahir tout le système. Il s’agit d’un phénomène de nucléation.10

The work of Prigogine and Stengers focuses on the evolution of these

systems. The fragile systemic balance of a conversation is also subject to possible fluctuations, possibly leading to nucleation phenomenons. In De Pembroke et Montgomery’s example, this fluctuation, as it becomes influenced by cultural, cognitive and communicational disagreements, might lead to an open conversational conflict, based on sociocultural differences. Fluctuations may also call other fluctuations, leading to the emergence of a systemic destabilization. Japanese interviewed by De Pembroke et Montgomery (1996: 281) thus add other grievances in order to explain their feeling of discomfort:

Les cadres japonais sont particulièrement sensibles alors au ton de la voix. ‘Au début, j’avais l’impression d’être agressé. Crier est très mal considéré au Japon, c’est le contraire du leadership posé et fort.’ Au Japon, il est beaucoup plus positif d’écouter que de parler et celui qui a le plus de poids est souvent silencieux ou bref. […] ‘Au Japon, on ne parle pas dans le travail : le plus important est l’écoute, la concentration, l’efficacité et la rentabilité’.11

10 “Fluctuation cannot take over the whole system at once. It first has to establish itself in a certain area. This fluctuation might decrease or take over the whole system, [...] depending on the ability of this area to be more or less important than a critical dimension. This phenomenon is called nucleation”, our translation. 11 “Japanese executives are especially sensitive to the tone of voice.’First, I had the feeling that they were agressive towards me. In Japan, it is very bad form to shout, it is seen as the contrary of a strong and steady leadership’. In Japan, it is much more positive to listen than to speak: people who carry weight are often silent or

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If De Pembroke et Montgomery had asked further questions to these French co-workers, they would possibly have added other arguments that would have given us an even more complex picture of this intercultural interaction. We would like to underline the fact that, when intercultural disagreements occur, speakers are able to speak of their own culture, like this Japanese man does. In fact, it is the first sign produced by the speaker about the perception of a real difference between him/her and his/her conversational partner. In this example, the speaker refers to his culture in order to explain his perception of the interaction. Thus, he/she compares his/her cultural politeness principle (here, Japanese executives at work) to the ones of his/her conversational partner. However, though he may recognize difference between these two cultures, the Japanese speaker will remain unable to have hindsight about the current process of inertia which is amplyfing the ongoing fluctuations. Speakers may be aware of the fact that there are cultural differences between themselves, they will not necessarily express further explanations about the communicational situation; in fact, their level of analysis remains close to their own cultural codes, habits and behaviours, as they stay focused on the fact that the interlocutor’s utterances do not match with their own vision of social interaction.

The perception of differences is often based on the behaviours we believe may be polite or not, depending on our social or cultural schemata. The perception of differences in politeness organizations helps us to delimit the possible area of fluctuation or nucleation. According to Sara Mills (2003), Kate Beeching (2002), or even Ardith J. Meier (1995: 352), politeness may be considered as the most important guarantee of social harmony:

[Politeness is] a set of norms and dependable adherence to these norms within a group engenders a structure and predictability which results in a considerable saving of energy in everyday life and can be viewed as serving the goal of something akin to social harmony and perhaps even survival. Individuals are thus motivated to adhere to these norms (thereby maintaining a desired image) because of the subsequent social value and consequent ‘power’ they are accorded in relation to a group.

Again, the systemic principle of negentropy plays a distinct part in

Meier’s definition of politeness. In order to enable the process of hindsight, one must be able to know what is appropriate or not in his/her

brief [...].’In Japan, we do not speak at work: listening, concentration, efficiency and profitability are the most important skills’”, our translation.


own politeness system: the first important move is to have hindsight regarding to one’s own sociocultural codes and influences. In order to stand back from the ongoing disagreement, the speaker must be aware of the properties of politeness, as mentioned by Meier. The problem is that any speaker is far too busy being involved in the interactional process in itself to discover the “bigger picture” which any systemic model may provide. As expressed before, some of our simplest behaviours are almost “set on automatic” when we interact. Cognitive comfort, predictability, a coherent and constant vision of the world, energy saving and social harmony are the real purposes of a possible lack of hindsight. It is in fact relevant when we base our study on the individual, as far as s/he is concerned; the problem is that individuals themselves do not always measure the high impact of interaction on their everyday life and social and cultural principles-they simply may not be aware of it, mainly because it may seem so essential and “natural” that it may remain a highly non-conscious process. In fact, cognitive comfort and social harmony are reliant on interaction. Predictability and energy savings are based on schemata which speakers are integrating throughout their life. Like sponges mopping up water, individuals are highly sensitive to these social and cultural schemata, absorbing and reproducing them according to their basic social needs. In De Pembroke et Montgomery’s example, both Japanese and French co-workers reproduce the codes and behaviours they have absorbed in order to maintain a particular context of work: in this case, these codes are actual answers to their basic social needs in a working environment. For instance, having a particular way of managing turn taking in conversations constitutes a precise answer to a singular contextual and social need.

Speakers are therefore continually submitted to change and evolution as long as they are living in a particular culture. In fact, speakers are neither interacting with, nor are they in interaction: they are interaction. An individual could be defined as a common ground where many influences and conditionments meet and converse or even an ever evolving beam made of various parameters: education, professional background, sociocultural history, psychology, even moods or biology define people as individuals. They lead them to want what they want, need what they need, desire what they desire. Being interaction themselves, speakers keep moving in an ever changing universe they keep building with the numerous tools they forge from their conditionments and that their conditionments are forging from them. However, if hindsight may be a difficult process, it is not impossible. Individuals may change their vision of the conversational context in order to keep the conversational system

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from breaking its own homeostasy. In fact, according to Miriam Locher (2004: 49), “[…] context is not a stable construct. Interactants interpret what they see and hear and continunally use this flood of incoming information to make sense of the focal event”. Thus, the instability of context allows speakers to use it as support for a possible process of hindsight. Despite of this instability, speakers have to create a senseful universe around them and they may use complex yet stable cognitive codes in order to build a protection against the fragility of context: this opposition between stable codes and a versatile context help us to understand the core of the interactional paradox. Moreover, this situation explains the temporary inability of hindsight which we also encounter in the Franco-Japanese case. In this example, we may even notice that in spite of the mutual context, co-workers still use different codes and elaborate different answers. They are experiencing the same objective context yet they are different interactional habits and behaviours.

Francisco Varela (1999) argues that the difficulty in facing problems like intercultural disagreement is caused by the speakers’ vision of the self. According to his work, individuals are, like social, cultural or conversational contexts, ever changing processes. This definition of the self may shake our vision of identity, precisely because we experience our self as a clear and delimited entity; however, research in biology and cognitive sciences clearly shows that this self could be nothing but an ongoing emergent constructed beam made by our neurobiological system in order to assure us some cognitive comfort. For Varela (1999: 17), “[…] the world we know is not pre-given; it is, rather, enacted through our history of structural coupling, and the temporal hinges that articulate enaction are rooted in the number of alternative microworlds that are activated in each situation”. We are processes and ongoing productions of the interactions we are forming. There should not be any issue about the causes of our acts and behaviours: from a systemic point of view, all of these concepts are linked and connected. Our conditionments may trigger our behaviours, but these behaviours may as well be the origin of our sensitivity to certain conditionments; we do not have to choose one of these explanations, because both of them are actually explaining the definition of a self as an ongoing and ever changing process. If we look at the Nippo-French intercultural situation, we might watch it through a different lense: being interaction, Japanese and French co-workers would have to make a considerable effort if they wanted to stop the conversation and prevent the disagreements from happening again.


5. Conclusion

Disagreements help to see the differences in action and to study them afterwards, when hindsight becomes possible. Defined as processes with different visions of their own conditionments, speakers could thus be able to build a real intercultural ground, common to every individual involved in the conversational system. This intercultural ground could not erase the cultural particularities, but enable speakers to share knowledge, experiences and involvement about their cultures. Speakers could build a real intercultural conversation filled with comprehensive exchanges. The remaining difficulty is to elaborate strategies in order to pull speakers out of the process of interactive inertia. In order to design such strategies, studies in pragmatics and cognitive sciences need to analyze precise cases in order to isolate the core of human behaviour in case of intercultural disagreements; in fact, according to D. Rumelhart et al. (1986: 20) research needs to focus on cognitive and cultural schemata, insofar as they remain a driving force within the speakers’ behaviours.

Schemata are not things. There is no representational object which is a schema. Rather, schemata emerge at the moment they are needed from the interaction of large numbers of much simpler elements all working in concert with one another. Schemata are not explicit entities, but rather are implicit in our knowledge and are created by the very environment that they are trying to interpret – as it is intrepreting them.

Rumelhart et. al. assert that schemata are the emerging results of

particular contexts. Thus, if we change our vision of the context, we may also change parts of this context and let our schemata emerge in a different way. If we really want to solve the problems caused by complex intercultural disagreements, Guérin (2003: 59) assesses that we must start by changing our own perception of the world, because “[…] le changement ne sera possible que s’il y a remise en cause de la conception de la réalité qui, comme toute construction mentale, n’est qu’une image, un point de vue forcément incomplet”12.

The study of intercultural disagreements has various implications in everyday life: at school, children should receive a pragmatical education to differences and intercultural communication in order to learn how to understand, tolerate and respect different ways of being socially and

12 “Change will only be possible if there is a calling into question about the conception of reality, which is only an image, a point of view which inevitably remains incomplete, like any mental construction”, our translation.

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culturally. However, individuals should be provided with a deeper analysis of their own ways of interacting and of living: coupled with ethnology and cognitive psychology, pragmatics and linguistics could offer a large scale of behaviours, codes and emotional reactions in order to prepare individuals to a different society, where inter-individual and inter-groupal relations build the core of understanding and respect. It is important to assess that education has to play the biggest part in this matter. On the other hand, improvisation theatre or forum theatre in particular-could be used as an experimental and playful ground in order to make speakers aware of these differences and of the way of coping with disagreement or intercultural conflict. A research group made of linguists, actors and teachers is already working on it in order to build bridges between practice and science. In a world like ours, the management of intercultural disagreement needs further investigation and a very serious methodology in order to comprehend the complexity and versatility of human interactions.

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Beeching, K. Gender, Politeness and Pragmatic Particles in French. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002.

Bousfield, D. and M. Locher (ed.). Impoliteness in Language. London: Walter de Gruyter, 2008.

De Pembroke et Montgomery, E. Vers une pédagogie de la communication interculturelle. Paris: ANRT, 1996.

De Rosnay, J. Le macroscope. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Espinoza, F. “An analysis of the historical development of ideas about

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Guérin, C. “Du positionnement à la posture: l’émergence”. Diploma diss., Ecole Française de Yoga de l’Ouest, 2003.

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Lerbert-Séréni, F. La relation duale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1994. Locher, M. Power and Politeness in Action. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter,

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PART IV:

TEACHING LANGUAGES FOR ACADEMIC AND SPECIFIC PURPOSES

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

PRAGMATIC MARKERS IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE:

THE CASES OF WELL AND THE SPANISH COUNTERPARTS BIEN AND BUENO

BEGOÑA BELLÉS-FORTUÑO AND INMACULADA FORTANET-GÓMEZ

1. Introduction

The globalisation of English is a fait accompli in the current century. Crucial for the survival of any language is the power of its scientific production and its use in academic institutions. Scientific discovering and technology can largely be spread thanks to a single global language for communication, English. This reason has led many scientists and professionals from non English speaking communities to choose English as the unique scientific language.

A large number of university students have an ‘international’ background (Benson 1994: 182); these students are exposed to lectures which play an important role for the students’ learning process. Although most of the teaching in English has been done in English speaking countries, such as Britain and the United States and it is also in these countries where academic discourse started to be analysed (Mauranen 2001; Swales and Malczewski 2001; among others), we cannot deny that English has expanded to other countries as the result of internationalisation.

Due to this internationalisation of university lecturing mainly in Europe (e.g. Erasmus-Socrates programmes, Leonardo da Vinci projects) and also in the United States (e.g. postgraduate education), academic discourse in English has become a main concern in higher education institutions, focusing especially on spoken academic discourse, which should be looked at as paramount for both students and faculty. Students

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281

attending a lecture need to listen to and understand, to later be able to take notes. On the other hand, faculty’s academic life involves not only reading English publications, but attending as well as presenting papers at conferences, or researching and lecturing in other universities where English is used as the primary language. All these are instances of oral academic genres which have recently been studied (Räisänen 1999; Giménez 2000; Crawford 2004; Bellés-Fortuño and Fortanet 2005; Fortanet and Bellés-Fortuño 2005).

A small-scale but generalised work is the one by Mauranen (1998, 2001), where English academic discourse among international academic institutions is considered to be essential. When referring to academic genres, Mauranen says:

Academic speech events are commonly organised in chainlike formations either within one genre (e.g. a lecture course or a linked series of seminars) or across different genres (e.g. lectures, followed by examinations; supervision and consultations, followed by a thesis defense and its important prior text, the thesis itself). (2001: 166)

In general, classroom genres have aroused the interests of researchers, specifically the genre of lecture, being one of the most important genres within spoken academic discourse. As Flowerdew points out, lecture research

[…] can indicate to teachers and course designers what linguistic and discoursal features learners need to be familiar with in order to understand a lecture and what, therefore, should be incorporated into ESL courses. In addition a knowledge of the linguistic/ discoursal structure of lectures will be of value to content lecturers in potentially enabling them to structure their own lectures in an optimally effective way. (1994: 14)

As opposed to what seems the unstoppable hegemony of English in the scientific and academic fields, Spanish is the second international language and has all the conditions needed in order to be present in strategic international contexts such as international relations, business, commerce and the scientific world. Regarding Spanish in the global world, the number of students is also growing. Spanish is being offered as a second language in most European countries as well as in the United States where the nation’s Hispanic population is expanding dramatically to such an extent that legislators and civic leaders are confronting new questions about how, or whether, to regulate the emergence of Spanish as a lingua franca in American life (Branigin 1999).

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At a tertiary educational level Spanish as an international academic language gains importance with the great amount of Latin-American students who come to Europe to take master or doctorate courses. Up to now, most European universities have opted for offering courses in English for international students, but English is not exclusive, we can also encounter this type of courses in Spanish opening and facilitating enrolments in this competitive academic environment. Some of the earliest analyses of academic discourse date back to the 1960s and focus on the quantitative study of the formal feature of language varieties, or registers (Barber 1962; Halliday, Strevens and McIntosh 1964). After these first studies, the work done in academic discourse has become “narrower and deeper” (Swales 1990: 3). According to Flowerdew, “[…] narrower in the sense that it has focused on specific genres and deeper in so far as it has sought to investigate communicative purposes, not just formal features” (2002: 2). This work tries to fit into this description and it categorised as ‘narrow’, since we centre our attention on the lecture genre, and ‘deeper’ because it tries to analyse the communicative purpose of discourse markers and more concretely, pragmatic markers, within spoken academic discourse. The research tradition of genre analysis has been framed within English for Specific Purposes (Hyon 1996; Yunick 1997) drawing special attention to Hallidayan ideas about the relationship between language and its social function. Seminal in this approach are the studies carried out by Swales (1981, 1990); Dudley-Evans and Henderson (1990a, 1990b); Henderson and Hewings (1990); Bathia (1993) and Skulstad (1996, 2002), among others. Swales’ work, although focused on EAP, provides a definition of genre mainly based on the relationship between text and discourse community:

A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognized by the expert member of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre. This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and styles. (Swales 1990: 58)

We can also find in the field of EAP Tarone et al.’s early study (1981), “On the use of passive in the astrophysics journal papers”, which is significant as both a ‘deeper’ and a ‘narrower’ approach; deeper because it focused on the communicative value of a syntactic feature, the passive, and narrower because it analysed this feature as it was contextualised within one particular genre. This earlier approach to genre analysis


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culminated years later with the studies of Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993). Swales and Bhatia worked on genre analysis, the former in the field of academic discourse, the latter in business, academic and legal genres always with pedagogical purposes. The result has been the genre analysis approach and the very much cited Swalesian Move-Step analysis. In the present study some Spanish and English language features are observed and analysed at a tertiary level education, in this way we will be able to work upon some academic language generalisations on how English and Spanish discourses, as two of the main and most important world global languages, are used and structured. The focus of the study in the present work is academic discourse and what we broadly understand here as Language for Academic Purposes (LAP). As has been argued above, English is now the lingua franca of a global world, and as such it is more and more often used as the language of instruction in educational institutions as a result of the globalisation of education. However, Spanish is also considered the second international language in the world. The teaching of English is mainly addressed to the preparation of non-native speakers (NNSs). The analysis of native English academic discourse allows researchers to use it with pedagogical purposes. When comparing and contrasting two languages such as English and Spanish, the results obtained can be of great help for both speaking communities and especially in the teaching and learning of English and Spanish.

2. Aim and scope

2.1. Contrastive Linguistics

The purpose of this study is to analyse the genre of lecture as it is presented to university students of two different speaking communities. A contrastive analysis between Spanish and North-American lectures is carried out by highlighting the use of some specific linguistic features such as pragmatic markers. To carry out the analysis, a contrastive linguistics approach has been taken into account. A contrastive approach brings out features of a language A or a language B that would not have come to light in a monolingual analysis (Salkie 1997). In this paper we revise concepts such as similarity (Chesterman 1998: 6), the study of bilingual or multilingual parallel corpora (Altenberg 1999: 249; Salkie 1997: 297), correspondence in translation (Salkie 1997: 299), specifiable meaning depending on context (Kryk 1992: 205) or potential translation equivalents (Ramón García 2007: 493).

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If similarity is a relation between two entities, it ought to have some regular logical properties; but this seems not to be the case. “Similarity is not necessarily symmetrical” (Altenberg 1999: 6); cognitive psychology has made a distinction between two main models of similarity (Cacciari (ed.) 1995). On the one hand, the mental distance model where entities perceived as similar are located closer to each other in the mind (Chesterman 1998: 7). On the other hand, the contrast model where similarity is understood as the degree of feature overlap. This concept of similarity taken by the cognitive psychology was based on the traditional approach by Tversky (1977). Tversky mentioned the degree of similarity between two objects can be measured in terms of the number of shared and distinctive features that characterize them, for example, in terms of feature matching. Whereas the Translation Theory has traditionally focused on individual written text analysis and how to establish principles or rules for translation, contrastive analysis and therefore, contrastive linguistics has been interested in the area of parole, that is, spoken language, and especially with the technological advances in corpus linguistics. Computer processing allows now operations of quantifying (counting the number of given words or sentences), concordancing (producing lists of linguistic items and their immediate linguistic context in order to determine syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties), parsing (separating sentences into grammatical parts) and labelling (syntactic analysis) or tagging parts of speech. Studies based on this approach, although not focused specifically on academic discourse, are the work of Sinclair and Collins Cobuild project (Sinclair 1987) and the one of Biber (1988) in register analysis.

Several book collections on Corpus Linguistics have been published both by European and North-American linguists with a wide impact (Aijmer and Altenberg 1991, Simpson and Swales 2001, Leistyna and Meyer 2003, among others). Aijmer and Altenberg have defined corpus linguistics as “[…] the study of language on the basis of text corpora” (1991: 1). They established the beginnings of corpus linguistics with the development of two events that occurred around 1960s. One was Randolph Quirk’s (1960) launching of the Survey of English Usage (SEU) with the aim of collecting a large varied corpus of spoken and written English. The other was the advent of computers which made it possible to store, scan and classify large bodies of data. The analysis of natural language from parallel corpora, as it is the case in this study, can give interesting methodological problems since more than one language system and language use are compared. The results


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obtained from a contrastive linguistics analysis such as the one carried out here can have important applications in the fields of linguistics and more concretely in language teaching and cross-cultural studies.

2.2. Pragmatic markers

Many researchers have suggested that an understanding of the role of discourse markers and the relationships between different parts of the text is fundamental for the comprehension of lectures (Morrison 1974; Coulthard and Montgomery 1981; Chaudron and Richards 1986). In his work, Cook (1975) examines the functions of connectives, which serve as indicators of topic continuation. Other authors identify a number of markers of the rhetorical organization of lecture discourse (Murphy and Candlin 1979).

Several studies have examined features of discourse organization. Chaudron (1983) in an early study analysed the effects of topic signalling in experimental lectures on ESL learners’ immediate recall of the topic information. Sawa (1985) studied two factors in recorded lectures: repetition and paraphrasing of information, and signalling of major segments and emphasis. In a later study, Chaudron and Richards (1986) investigated the effect of pragmatic signalling devices on lecture comprehension. Previous text studies (Kintsch and Yarbrough 1982) had also pointed out that subjects are better able to answer gist and main-idea questions for texts that contain evident rhetorical cues (discourse markers) than for texts that, although having the same content, do not include evident rhetorical cues.

Spanish DMs have also aroused the interest of researchers especially during the last 20 years (Fuentes 1987, Casado 1991, Portolés 1998, Martin and Portolés 1999, to name a few). Most of their studies have been focused on the use of some specific and more concrete types of DMs and how they functioned in written texts rather than spoken language. In contrast, a contrastive study carried out by González (2004, 2005) between Catalan and English is based on an oral corpus. She analyses 40 oral narratives, 20 in English and 20 in Catalan. The informants from whom the oral narratives were elicited were all native speakers of Catalan and English. González claims the different nature of DMs. She distinguishes those DMs that set up logico-semantic argumentative relations (of cause, result, reason, concession, contrast, time, etc.) from pragmatic markers. She states these DMs have “[…] descriptive or lexical meaning and have been traditionally called in the literature ‘argumentative connectors’ (González 2005). DMs that are included in this category are for instance,

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‘therefore’ (‘por lo tanto’), ‘in contrast’ (‘en contraste con’), ‘on the other hand’ (‘por otra parte’), ‘nevertheless’ (‘sin embargo’), ‘because’ (‘porque’). Additionally, she adds that pragmatic markers are those:

[…] whose main functions are rhetorical signal the speaker’s intentions and goals and basically help convey the illocutionary force of the story. Markers found in the sequential structure delimit segments boundaries and sustain the discourse network; they highly facilitate the in-and-out shift of the narrative segments. In the case of markers that have a dominant inferential role, the link that is set up between the cognitive domain of the speaker and hearer is fundamental to understand and grasp the point of the story. (González 2005: 54)

She disregards semantic markers for her study paying attention only

to the so called pragmatic markers, in particular she takes for her study markers such as ‘well’, ‘so’, ‘then’, ‘I mean’, ‘you know’ and ‘anyway’, together with their Catalan counterparts ‘bé’, ‘bueno’, ‘clar’, ‘doncs’, ‘pues’, ‘llavors’, ‘aleshores’, ‘no’ and ‘eh’. She displays a proposal for a discourse coherence model based upon Schiffrin (1987) and Redeker’s (1990) discourse coherence models and on the semantic versus pragmatic source of coherence (González 2005: 57). Figure 13-1 below shows González’s discourse coherence relations model.


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DISCOURSE COHERENCE RELATIONS

(source of coherence)

SEMANTIC PRAGMATIC

IDEATIONAL PRAGMATIC STRUCTURE STRUCTURE

CONNECTORS PRAGMATIC

MARKERS ! indicate logico-semantic

argumentative relations ! have referential meaning

RHETORICAL SEQUENTIAL INFERENTIAL STRUCTURE STRUCTURE COMPONENT

Figure 13-1: González’s (2005) proposal of the distribution of markers in the discourse structure components From her study on pragmatic markers on oral narratives in Catalan and English, González (2005) concluded that both English and Catalan pragmatic markers have a predominant role in the rhetorical and sequential

Illocutionary intentions and force indicators

Discourse structural role

Inference facilitators and restrictors

-guide speaker’s intentions

-delimit discourse segment boundaries

-link text to cognitive context

-convey illocutionary force

-sustain discourse network

-have procedural meaning

-show relationship with text genre

-constrain possible inferences and presuppositions

-facilitate contextual shifting onto new segment

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narrative structures and that English markers are more attached to the ideational structure than Catalan markers. She also observed that the appearance of some markers is not arbitrary in the narrative since certain markers recurrently appear in certain discourse segments. González’ study of pragmatic markers is important for our own research, not only because it shares common traits with our study (contrastive analysis, use of a corpus, analysis of pragmatic markers use in oral discourse, etc.) but because of her proposal of the distribution of DMs, which in fact is an attempt for a DM categorization according to pragmatic and semantic discourse relations. It can also be observed from González’s study that when contrasting two languages DMs counterparts are not always possible or do not express the same discourse relation. We aim at exploring the correspondence between English and Spanish pragmatic markers, and concretely ‘well’ and its Spanish translation equivalents (‘bueno’ and ‘bien’) as used in lectures between the two languages. In a previous contrastive study on English and Spanish DMs (Bellés-Fortuño 2007), it was proven that well was one of the most recurrent markers in the English corpus. Therefore, Spanish translation equivalents were observed in the Spanish corpus; there seemed that ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ were the matching translation equivalents; these markers were also present in a quite high frequency when used as pause-fillers in the Spanish corpus. It became evident that further analysis regarding ‘well’ and the possible Spanish counterparts was needed. After observing the functions of ‘well’ and the contexts in which it appeared we headed towards a classification. Pragmatic markers have been traditionally defined as being predominantly a feature of oral rather than of written discourse (Östman 1982), as being short items (Östman 1982:149) often phonologically reduced (Schiffrin 1987: 328) or unstressed that form a separate tone group (Quirk et al. 1985:1112) with falling-rising or rising intonation (Schiffrin 1987: 328).

Taking these definitions and other literature review on DMs into consideration and in an attempt to create a DMs classification model valid not only for English but also for Spanish and other languages, Bellés-Fortuño (2007) presented a DMs classification proposal distinguishing three levels or categories: Micro-markers, macro-markers and operators (see Figure 13-2).


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Micro-markers

Internal (ideational) relations

Additional Temporal Causal Contrastive Consecutive

Macro-markers

Overall discourse structural relations

Starter Rephraser Organizer Topic-shifter Conclusion

Operators

Relation speaker-speech Relation speaker-hearer

Attitudinal Pause filler Elicitation Acceptance Confirmation

check

Figure 13-2: DM classification model (Bellés-Fortuño 2007) According to Bellés-Fortuño’s classification of DMs and bearing in mind the literature review on pragmatic markers, well and its Spanish counterparts would fall under the category of operators. Bellés-Fortuño defines operators as those markers which convey relations between ‘speaker-speech’ and ‘speaker-hearer’ (or vice versa). These markers are more specifically related to conversational, spoken discourse rather than written discourse (Llorente 1996) and have been traditionally called in the literature ‘pragmatic markers’. These DMs are those which rhetorically signal the speaker’s intentions and goal (the illocutionary force) as long as

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they play a dominant inferential role in the discourse, frequently monitoring proximity between speaker-hearer and speaker-speech. The categories included in Figure 13-2 are ‘attitudinal’, ‘pause filler’, ‘elicitation’, ‘acceptance’ and ‘confirmation-check’. The instances of ‘well’ analysed in the current study (and its Spanish counterparts) are those in which ‘well’ functions as a pragmatic marker of the inferential component used as a facilitator or pause-filler within the framing relational function of speaker-speech as shown in Figure 13-3.

OPERATORS Attitudinal (interpersonal meaning)

Relation speaker-speech Relation speaker-hearer *Pause-filler Figure 13-3: Pause-filler classification under the operator category (Bellés-Fortuño 2007)

3. Method

The corpus under study is made of 24 spoken-lecture transcripts from the field of Social Sciences and Humanities. Half of the corpus consists of 12 North-American English lectures, the other half consists of 12 Spanish lectures. The North-American English lecture transcripts, also called North-American corpus (NAC), have been taken from MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English) (R.C. Simpson, S.L. Briggs, J. Ovens and J.M. Swales 2002) available on the Internet thanks to the English Language Institute at the University of Michigan (US). MICASE is available through an on-line search engine containing a collection of transcripts of academic speech events recorded at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (MI). The corpus consists of approximately 1.8 million words transcribed from a variety of speech events that goes from February 1998 up to 2003. The Spanish part of the corpus (SC) consists of twelve lectures recorded at Universitat Jaume I, Castelló (Spain) as part of the MASC (Multimodal Academic and Spoken


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Corpus) by the Group for Research on Academic and Professional English (GRAPE). Taking into account lecture corpus features such as number of words and recording duration, the lectures (LEs) taken from the MICASE were longer than the Spanish LEs (see Tables 13-1 and 13-2). This might be due to the different lecturing styles in both universities. However, this aspect does not seem to be significant for the aim of this study. As to participants, the students and teachers involved in the North-American English lectures are mostly native speakers of the language (NS). In the SC, participants are NSs of Spanish but in a language context where Spanish and Catalan are both official languages and where most students and teachers are mother-tongue bilingual in these two languages, as some examples of code-switching have shown in the SC transcripts.

3.1. Procedure and variables

The procedure followed was a search in the Wordsmith Tools 4.0 software with the concordancer option. The goal was to find those instances of well as a pause-filler pragmatic marker in the NAC, to later look for instances of the Spanish ‘bien’, ‘bueno’ counterparts in the SC and observe their functions and contexts in which they appeared. The variables analysed have been the number of pragmatic makers, that is, the recurrence of the markers ‘well’, ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’, and their frequency rate calculated every a 1,000 words.

4. Results

Results for ‘well’ have shown a total of 121 instances of ‘well’ as a pause-filler operator with a 1.0 frequency rate (see Table 3). Instances of ‘well’ were proof-read and examined to fit the pause-filler category. Its

Total 125,42 864mAverage words & time x

10,452w 72m

Total SC 79,811 644mAverage words & time x LE

6,650w 53.6m

Table 13-1: Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes)

Table 13-2: Total and average number of words (w) and time (in minutes) per LE in the SC

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nature as a pause-filler depends on the context/co-text where it appears. We took away expressions such as ‘as well’, ‘very well’, ‘well done’, ‘well-known’, ‘quite well’ and indirect speech segments such as ‘say well’ or ‘said well’. Instances of ‘well’ as a pause-filler usually came after pauses or what we call here hesitators ‘um’, ‘uh’. (See examples 1, 2, 3 for operator ‘well’).

Pause-filler # DMs ‰

well 121 1.0

well (1) S3: because i the trouble is i ca- i can't, now (xx) come to the point uh be on uh me to the point uh be on uh s- be stuck with the empirical question. S1: okay well uh, let's see what would would work Monday (LE7/NAC) (2) somebody gets steamed up about it. alright. i hope this has convinced you, well... i don't know whether convinced is the word uh it slightly, has has has… (LE10/NAC) (3) connection themselves and, inevitably it seems like you hear something like, oh well actually yes um, uh the woman i had been dating uh dumped me, very precipit (LE11/NAC) (4) you're saying that F is changing into... (xx) S1: yeah well what i'm trying well yeah (xx) th- what happened is that in Castilian and only in Castilian, what was the /f/ in Latin, or what is believed to have been a /f/ in Latin, cuz i'm gonna have to sort of uh… (LE12/NAC) Moving to the analysis of the SC, we found that ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’

seemed to be equivalent to the English pragmatic marker ‘well’. It is worth pointing out that we did not expect to find an exclusive counterpart for well in the SC. However, and relying on our native Spanish speaker condition we expected ‘bien’ to be one of the best matching translation equivalents as literature has reflected on the Translation Theory. Nevertheless, the results have shown that ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ as pause-filler operators are equally used as the result numbers and the frequency rates show in Table 13-4 below. Both, ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ can be used

Table 13-3: ‘well’ pause-filler operator results in the NAC


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indistinctly as pause-fillers; the similar results show no preferences (see examples from 5 to 11 for ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’). Instances of ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’ as adjectives, adverbs or functioning as correlative conjunctions were disregarded. The number of ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ occurrences and rate (1.6‰) are slightly higher than in the case of ‘well’ (1.0‰) (see Tables 13-3 and 13-4).

bueno (5) una pregunta de examen. De momento llevamos tres ¿no? Vale, nada, [falling intonation] bueno experiencias de enseñanza del lenguaje verbal a primates, (LE10/SC) (6) otra que siempre me hagáis referencia a alguna característica de Hockett, me... bueno eso quiere decir que cumple esta característica de Hockett que es lo que… (LE10/SC) (7) Escorza y escribe un manuscrito que eh... lo que hace es eh... [pause] bueno eh... imaginar, inventar, soñar y describir una ciudad ideal. Con la ciuda Renacimiento pasa lo siguiente veréis…(LE2/SC) (8) con respecto a los planes de marketing. Ayer por la tarde a última hora eh... bueno pues me llegó que se habían concedido unas prorrogas a determinados grupos (LE7/SC) bien (9) puntuaciones diferenciales es igual a la varianza de las ys en puntuaciones directas, bien ¿a dónde voy a parar? [falling intonation] si nosotros en lugar de trabajar (LE3/SC) (10) el hospital de la ciudad, en fin que es de un detallismo asombroso, eh... pues bien a parte este libro también eh fue ilustrado con dibujos con

Pause Filler # DMs ‰

bueno 125 1.6

bien 125 1.6

Table 13-4: ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ pause-filler operators results in the SC

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más de un centenar de dibujos [pause] preciosos [raising intonation] que muestran imágenes de esa ciudad soñada [pause] (LE2/SC) (11) dos cantidades son positivas siempre es positivo, el signos lo ponemos... eh... bien. Entonces, entonces, eh... ¿cómo será b? [pause, waiting for an answer] en es en este caso, el término relativo es grande (LE4/SC) (12) fundamentación y luego en las en los objetivos y en las actividades. Bien, eh... sobre ¿dónde vamos a saber si existen o no asociaciones? [falling intonation] en primer lugar ver si hay un registro municipal [slows down the discourse] Thanks to the transcription norms (see Appendix 11) used for the SC, we can observe that in most cases the uses of

‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ implied preceding or following rising/ falling intonations as it is the case of the example 5 for ‘bueno’ and the examples 10 and 12 for ‘bien’. An observation drawn from the corpus analysis revealed that in some cases ‘well’, ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ were not used in isolation but co-occurring with other pragmatic markers. In the case of ‘well’ it usually collocated with ‘okay’, also a pragmatic marker functioning as a pause-filler affecting relations speaker-speech (read example 1). The same happened with ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’ which in many cases co-occurred with ‘pues’, another Spanish filler. More concretely the collocates observed were ‘bueno pues’ and ‘pues bien’ in this order. ‘Okay well’ normally co-occurs at the beginning of a speaker’s speech section and therefore, functions as a pause-filler, giving the speaker time to start or re-start his/her speech. The cluster of the Spanish collocates ‘bueno pues ‘ and ‘pues bien’ as pause-fillers also makes the pause to lengthen, giving the speaker more time to think what he/she is going to say next, as examples (8) and (11) illustrate; the pause is even emphasised with the hesitator eh.

5. Conclusion

The aim of this study was to look at the semantic and pragmatic correspondences, similarities and divergences of the pragmatic marker ‘well’ and its Spanish translation equivalents in lecture discourse, ‘bien’ and ‘bueno’. 1 The transcription norms used for the NAC and the SC have been included in Appendix 1 (a,b).


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We can conclude that especial uses occur when trying to find counterparts or translation equivalents with some particular operators (‘well’) and that relying on one’s intuition as a native speaker can be misleading. In this study we have shown that ‘well’ has at least two translation equivalents in Spanish lectures when used as a pause-filler pragmatic marker. As a result we can say that translation equivalents may have the same semantic and pragmatic equivalents in the study of parallel corpora as here North-American and Spanish lectures. Therefore, there is a high degree of similarity or feature overlap between ‘well’ and its Spanish translation equivalents ‘bueno’ and ‘bien’ as pause-filler pragmatic markers. This is an example of the difficulties we may sometimes encounter when carrying out a comparative bilingual corpus analysis. The number of pause-fillers in both sub-corpora (the NAC and the SC) is quite relevant. Both Spanish and North-American lecturers need time to think and pause, even to breathe for a while and go ahead with the lecture delivery; pause-fillers are in these cases used as lecturers’ resources and strategies. This might be linked to the idea that the Spanish lecture discourse is changing towards a more “open” type of lecture (Swales 2002) along with the North-American lecturing style (Waggoner 1984; Benson 1994; Mason 1994) in the fields of Humanities and Social Sciences. The idea of DMs collocations has already been introduced by authors such as Fraser (1990, 1999, 2004), Fraser and Malamud-Makowski (1996) and Swales and Malczewski (2001) who pointed out the idea of looking at DMs as units that can co-occur together. One of the arising questions after detecting the collocates in the NAC and the SC was whether the pragmatic marker conveyed a different meaning when it appeared in isolation from when accompanied by other markers forming a collocate. In the case of the collocates mentioned in this study (‘okay well’, ‘bueno pues’, ‘pues bien’) what we found is two markers of the same category (pause-fillers) co-occurring. This fact, far form bringing in new meanings and functions, emphasizes the pragmatic marker’s function and meaning remaining a pause-filler. Due to the importance of the lecture genre among higher education institutions we believe that this study on lecture discourse can be beneficial both for university students and lecturers. Lecturers could definitely benefit from the findings of this study. Take for instance both L2 English and/or Spanish lecturers whose English or Spanish language level of proficiency is of different nature and background. Teacher training courses either addressed to L1 or L2 future teachers focus on two main

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concepts: teaching and research; however, they are basically concerned on the learning of pedagogical tools and teaching methodologies rather than on the improvement of the language level proficiency. Sometimes linguistic and grammatical aspects are taken into consideration and included as part of the syllabi; however, the main concern is that of the teaching and learning of linguistic features from written texts, meanwhile spoken discourse features are disregarded and neglected, not being taught in the classroom. The findings presented here could be included as part of the group of learning strategies and cross-cultural differences that should be taught or autonomously learned by tertiary education lecturers and students within the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. Moreover, the results obtained in this study could also be taken into consideration and applied in the postgraduate courses offered by universities throughout the world.

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Appendix 1

a) SC Transcription norms2.

...: short pause, stammering [down tone] [up tone] [falling intonation]: after a rhetorical question, lecturer is not seeking for response but gives it him/herself [irony] [LECTURER] [LECTURER DOES NOT TAKE INTO ACCOUNT STUDENTS INTERVENTION.] [LECTURE WRITES ON THE BOARD] [LECTURER REFERS TO OHT/PPT] [INTERRUPTION, STUDENT COMES INTO THE CLASSROOM] [STUDENT INTERVENTION](male student/female student answers, makes a comment) [INTERRUPTION FOR LECTURERS’ EVALUATION] [pause expecting an question or confirmation check] [pause, waiting for an answer] [pause]: when is long [QUESTION ADDRESSED TO OBSERVER] [slows down the discourse] [partial repetition] [repetition, adding info. [repetition, paraphrasing] [repetition] [murmur] [laugh] underline (shows code-switching) italics for anglicisms <unclear>

2 These norms were originally used in Spanish and have been translated for a better understanding.

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b) MICASE transcription and Mark-up norms in the NAC

SGML TAG or SYMBOL MEANING/DESCRIPTION APPEARANCE IN ON-LINE

TRANSCRIPTS (HTML VERSION)

SPEAKER ID , , etc.

Speaker IDs, assigned in the order they first speak.

S1: at the beginning of each turn or interruption/backchannel.

, , 

Unknown speaker, without and with gender identified

SU: SU-f, SU-m

 Probable but not definite identity of speaker

SU-1:

<SS> Two or more speakers, in unison (used mostly for laughter)

SS:

PAUSES <PAUSE DUR=:05> Pauses of 4 seconds or longer

are timed to the nearest second.

<P: 05>

, Comma indicates a brief (1-2 second) mid-utterance pause with non-phrase-final intonation contour.

,

. Period indicates a brief pause accompanied by an utterance final (falling) intonation contour; not used in a syntactic sense to indicate complete sentences.

.

... Ellipses indicate a pause of 2-3 seconds

...

OVERLAPS <OVERLAP>...</OVERLAP> This tag encloses speech that

is spoken simultaneously, either at the ends and beginnings of turns, or as interruptions or backchannel cues in the middle of one speaker's turn. All overlaps are approximate and shown to the nearest word; a word is generally not split by an overlap tag.

Text of overlapping speech is in blue.


303

BACKCHANNEL CUES and FAILED INTERRUPTIONS Embedded utterance ( tag within a tag)

Backchannel cues from a speaker who doesn't hold the floor and unsuccessful attempts to take the floor are embedded within the current speaker's turn, and not shown as a separate line/paragraph.

[S3: Text of embedded speech is in orange and surrounded by orange square brackets.]

Embedded and overlapped utterance (<OVERLAP> tag within an embedded utterance)

Backchannel cues or unsuccessful interruptions that overlap with the main speaker's speech.

[S3: Text of embedded speech that is overlapped is in blue and surrounded by orange speaker ID and square brackets.]

LAUGHTER <EVENT DESC=LAUGH> or <EVENT DESC=LAUGH WHO=S2>

All laughter is marked. Speaker ID not marked if current speaker laughs.

<LAUGH>, <S8 LAUGH> <SS LAUGH>, etc.

CONTEXTUAL EVENTS <EVENT DESC="WRITING ON BOARD">

Various contextual (non-speech) events are noted, usually only when they affect comprehension of the surrounding discourse.

<WRITING ON BOARD>

<EVENT DESC="APPLAUSE"> <APPLAUSE> <EVENT DESC="AUDIO DISTURBANCE">, <EVENT DESC="BACKGROUND NOISE">

<AUDIO DISTURBANCE>, <BACKGROUND NOISE>

<EVENT DESC="SOUND EFFECT">, <EVENT DESC="GASP">

<SOUND EFFECT>, <GASP>

READING PASSAGES <SEG TYPE="READING">.....</SEG>

Used when part of an utterance is read verbatim.

<READING>.....</READING>

FOREIGN WORDS <FOREIGN>.....</FOREIGN> Used for non-English words

or phrases. Italics e.g.: the mother says c'est quoi? and Annika says to parce que eh and then,...

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PRONUNCIATION VARIATIONS <SEG TYPE="PRON" SUBTYPE="/seltik/">Celtic</SEG>

Used when an unexpected pronunciation is used that would affect comprehension of the surrounding discourse.Dialect or other phonological variations are generally not represented.

Pronunciation guide follows the word e.g.: ...they asked the librarian for pictures of old Celtic <PRON: /seltik/> uniforms the basketball team, and it turns out that the project was he was supposed to find Celtic <PRON: /keltik/> costumes.

<SIC>...</SIC> Used when a speaker makes a mistake without self-correcting, and the error might otherwise appear to be a transcribing error.

(sic) follows the word. e.g.: despite the fact that that was the era of Women's Liberation like i say on the cover of Newsweek, and Gloria Steinman (sic) and uh Betty Friedan...

UNCERTAIN or UNINTELLIGIBLE SPEECH (xx)

(words)

Two x's in parentheses indicate one or more words that are completely unintelligible. Words surrounded by parentheses indicate the transcription is uncertain.

i don't (xx) whole (xx) analysis it just struck me...

lemme not write it that way (lest it be confused) with C syntax...

NAMES When participants' names occur in a recording, they are changed to pseudonyms in the transcript, except in the case of most public colloquia (i.e. COL-prefixed files). In some cases, names of non-present people referred to in the recording are also changed. There is no SGML marking for names.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BETWEEN THE ACADEMY AND THE FRONT PAGE:

THE DOUBLE DISCOURSES OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH

RUTH BREEZE

1. Introduction Political communications research spans a vast territory that disregards

the classically defined borders of history, politics, current affairs and media studies. Researchers in this area occupy a vantage point between the academic world and real political action, and their findings are of interest to both theorists and practitioners. It might thus be expected that the discourses of political communications experts could reflect the dual nature of their interests, staking claims to relevance within both the specialized academic culture of the university and the wider culture of politics and social communication. This paper explores the discourses of this hybrid discipline through analysis of research paper introductions in three journals which focus heavily on politics and communication, focusing on the different rhetorical moves used, and the ways in which the writer orchestrates these in order to stake a claim to importance in one or both of the two possible target cultures. The means by which some writers strive to bring together their claims to relevance on both levels are also explored. The findings are then analyzed in terms of their implications for teaching academic writing to non-native students who aspire to becoming culturally literate in their chosen discipline.

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2. Background

Pragmatic approaches to academic writing have focused on the way writers achieve their goals, working with the tools conventional within their particular discourse community and the constraints it imposes. A large number of studies have centered on the research article and its structure (Stanley 1984; Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993; Nwogu 1997; Posteguillo 1999; Hyland 2000; Piqué, Posteguillo and Andreu-Besó 2001; Sancho 2003), revealing much common ground across disciplines, as well as various areas of divergence.

Within this area, research article introductions have proved fertile ground for researchers. The function of the introduction is chiefly rhetorical, since initial information about the study at hand is generally provided by the abstract. In some sense, the introduction is the medium through which writers position themselves within the academic landscape, justifying their own work as a contribution to ongoing debates. It could be said that the interest of the introduction lies in the way that it encapsulates the writer’s self-construction, and in the carefully modulated claims that it makes to significance in one sense or another.

Building on Swales’s (1981) ground-breaking work on the CARS (create a research space) move structure of introductions in empirical disciplines, specialists have identified various differences attributable to cultural factors (Taylor and Chen 1991; Fredrickson and Swales 1994; Fakhri 2004) and disciplinary approaches (Anthony 1987; Swales and Najjar 1987; Samraj 2001). Such research points to a much higher degree of variation between academic fields than was originally supposed, resulting from the way the disciplinary culture in question sees itself and its function.

Against this background, it is surprising that little research attention has focused on research paper introductions in the social sciences. Positioned strategically on the border between practical relevance and theoretical interest, the area of politics and communication provides a particularly rich field for the study of rhetoric and pragmatics. Arguably, writers in this area have to negotiate two very different cultures, that of academia and that of media and politics, and the discourses they choose to adopt reflect their understanding of their role as observers and their perception of their own position as observers and interpreters of cultural phenomena.

In the present study, I analyze the introductions to 50 research articles from the area of political communication. My analysis builds on Swales’s (1981, 1990) three moves (establishing a territory by claiming centrality or

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making topic generalizations, establishing a niche by identifying a research gap or raising a question, and occupying the gap or promising to answer the question that has been identified), but develops a deeper understanding of moves 1 and 2 which reveals the existence of rhetorical patterns in which the writer may look inward, to the culture of the academic discourse community, or outward, to the real-world issues at stake, or endeavor to keep both within the field of vision.

3. Method and results

The introductions to 50 research articles on political communication (averaging around 600 words in length), from issues of the Journal of Communication (28), Political Communication (16) and European Journal of Communication (6) published between 2004 and 2007, were analysed in terms of the CARS model (Swales 1981). Since this model accounted for only some of the moves observed, further criteria were developed in order to classify the data.

3.1. Move structure

With regard to Swales’s (1981, 1990) three moves, 33 of the introductions exhibited features of all three moves in the CARS model, though not necessarily in clear sequence; 37 included move 1 (establishing a territory by claiming centrality or making topic generalizations), 47 move 2 (identifying a research gap or question) and 47 move 3 (occupying the gap or promising to answer the question). The patterns of use are shown in Table 14-1.

However, it was noted that although the vast majority of the introductions included at least two of the moves, these moves were not always accomplished in the same way. Some writers laid special emphasis on the academic credentials of their work, making a strong case for its contribution to scholarship, while others emphasized the real-world relevance of the issue at hand and stressed the practical consequences of the topic they had researched. Yet others sought to combine these two approaches, arguing that their (academic) research would provide knowledge that would be important in the public arena, or that the importance of an issue in the socio-political sphere justified research being carried out in the academy. We thus attempted to refine our model of the move structure in order to take account of these different strategies.

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Table 14-1: Moves used in introductions

3.2. Refinement of move structure

According to Swales (1990, 144), centrality claims are “[...] appeals to the discourse community whereby members are asked to accept that the research about to be reported is part of a lively, significant or well-established research area”. However, subsequent researchers have noted that this definition does not cover all the possible variations that may arise in different discourse communities. Samraj (2002) has noted that in some disciplines, centrality claims seem to be made in two ways: either by assertions about the real-world importance of the issue under discussion or by assertions concerning active research activity in the area concerned. In the course of the present analysis, it became evident that political communications experts are torn between two ambitions: to contribute to scholarship, or to make a statement about the social relevance of their research. We therefore developed subdivisions within moves 1 and 2, which we labeled 1(a) and 1(b), 2(a) and 2(b):

1(a) Real-world importance 1(b) Academic importance 2(a) Real-world question or dilemma 2(b) Academic question or dilemma In general, the simplest patterns emerging in the introductions studied

concentrated on claiming academic importance alone. The following

0

5 10 15 20 25 30 35

allthree

two,three

one,three

one two one,two


309

example illustrates how moves 1(b), 2(b) and 3 are used to construct an introduction which stakes a claim to academic relevance:

For nearly 30 years, the transfer of issue salience has been the core concept in agenda-setting theory that scholars have sought to gauge. In most instances, researchers have examined how [...]. However, the scope of research has been expanded to investigate [...]. Although the concentration on salience resonates throughout the literature, few inquiries have formally explicated the concept. [...] Few studies have exclusively converged on agenda setting’s key independent variable: media salience. Thus, the chief purpose of this article is to fill this void in research by engendering a conceptual model of media salience (Kiousis 2004: 71). This pattern is familiar from the general bibliography on academic

writing (Swales and Feak 2004), reflecting the writer’s primordial concern with the academic discourse community itself. In this classic model, the writer maps his/her own research onto the panorama of previous work in the subject, by creating and occupying a position in the discourse of the subject. In this sample, move 1(b) is accomplished by use of phrases such as “The effects of X have been of interest to scholars for some time”, “A growing corpus of literature has documented”, or “For three decades, X has provided one of the most influential and fertile paradigms in communications research”, in which the writer’s position as a scholar or researcher is explicitly asserted. Move 2(b) is achieved by a wide variety of stratagems, including neutral observations as to the existence of a research gap, as in “Virtually no studies have examined”, more loaded versions of the same gambit, such as “No real cumulative effort has been overtaken so far” or “To address this limitation in research”, and strong claims regarding the nature of the knowledge gap, as in “We still cannot answer the basic question”.

However, only 14 out of the 50 introductions surveyed in the present study consisted of these moves alone, either in the standard linear sequence (1(b), 2(b), 3) or in some recursive (e.g. 1(b), 2(b), 3, 2(b), 3) or truncated (e.g. 2(b), 3) variation. In other words, three quarters of the writers preferred to include some move of type a (real-world importance). This seems to indicate that most of the writers in this particular discipline feel a need to justify their work in terms of relevance or applications in the world of politics and communications, in addition to the academic world. Along these lines, writers included instances of move 1(a) such as “Few topics are as important, or as fascinating, as the question of how voters come to choose one candidate over another”, “The mass media are a major source of information for citizens trying to make sense of the world”, or

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“Latino voters received unprecedented media attention in the 2000 presidential campaign”.

Move 2(a) was also fairly frequent, including rhetorical questions such as “Is all this political advertising a problem for our democracy?”, “Do newspapers matter when it comes to politics?” and indications of gaps in our general, rather than academic, knowledge of the issues at stake, as in “Although we know that people dislike campaigns, we know comparatively little about what citizens actually want from them”. Sometimes these real-world knowledge gaps are elaborated with promises of supposed real-world benefits to come, as in the latter case, where the following is added: “Answers to these questions will speak to the potential benefits and popularity of proposals to reform campaigns, and will also help illuminate what citizens want from the governmental process more generally”.

On the other hand, only two of the introductions contained moves of type (a) alone, which appears to suggest that real-world importance, though highly valued, is generally not deemed to constitute sufficient rhetorical justification for a paper within this disciplinary culture. These writers, though conscious of their close proximity to the world of politics and the media, tend to construct their identity primarily as academics rather than directly as commentators on social affairs, at least for the purposes of the papers published here. In total, across all 50 introductions examined, 36 texts included at least one move of type a (real-world importance), while 48 included at least one move of type (b) (academic importance), and 34 included moves of both types (a) and (b). Interestingly, use of both (a) and (b) types was distributed fairly evenly across moves: 18 introductions incorporated both 1(a) and 1(b), while 22 introductions included both 2(a) and 2(b); 6 introductions included 1(a), 1(b), 2(a) and 2(b), though not necessarily in that order.

To summarize, the most notable pattern emerging from this part of the study was the marked tendency to include moves of both kinds. However, while academic moves could be said to be obligatory, being present in all but two cases, moves referring to real-world issues occurred in three quarters of the introductions, and might therefore be thought to be “useful” or “recommended” rather than absolutely necessary.

3.3. Order of moves

One further point about the moves identified in the current corpus is their order. It was noted above that relatively few of the introductions used the simple structure recommended by Swales and Feak (2004), namely


311

1(b), 2(b), 3. Many of the samples were cyclical or recursive, moving from the background to the knowledge gap, and then back to the background (1(b), 2(b), 1(b), 3), or indicating how the research undertaken to fill the gap is likely to have important consequences outside the academy (1(b), 2(b), 3, 2(a)). Although these more complex introductions varied greatly, the most coherent pattern to emerge indicated a certain circularity linking moves 2 and 3 (the gap/question and the promise to respond). Thus 10 of the introductions studied included a recursive 2, 3, 2 or 2, 3, 2, 3 pattern, with or without move 1.

This finding concurs with earlier studies on research article introductions, such as Crookes (1986) and Hopkins and Dudley-Evans (1988), which also pointed to the frequency of cyclical patterns in introductions. In this context, it can be seen that defining the gap (move 2) and filling the gap (move 3) are a task that is not straightforward, since it involves a need to refer back to other writers in order to substantiate the types of claims that are being made, and this process of self-justification may be quite intricate. As Samraj (2002) has noted, reference to other writers, which may sometimes be isolated as a “literature review” in move 1, is quite often integrated into all three steps as part of the ongoing discursive process of the introduction. This convention actually tends to complicate the move structure, since the definition of present purpose in move 3 may well prompt a comparison with a previous study, leading back into move 2 before concluding with a refined or modified statement of purpose.

As Hyland (2000: 31) has noted, the epistemological framework underpinning research in the humanities and social sciences permits writers to refer to multiple levels of previous research and thinking, and issues may be diverse, detached from the immediate past of a particular subject area. Unlike the situation in the “hard” sciences, where knowledge is commonly seen to develop in a process of cumulative growth, in the social sciences, new knowledge “follows more reiterative and recursive routes as writers retrace others’ steps and revisit previously explored features of a broad landscape”. The bibliography to which social scientists refer may be widely dispersed in historical terms, and the field of focus has to be defined carefully by the creation of a special discursive framework that provides a plausible structure to contain the findings and arguments that the writer wishes to put forward.

In the present paper, it can be seen that the tendency noted by Hyland (2000) in the social sciences is particularly important for the area of political communications, since the discursive framework constructed in the introduction often has to take in both the previous literature on the

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subject, which may include any author from Plato to the present day, and the socio-political phenomena that the writer wishes to include in the field of vision. The creation of this framework thus requires a more complex move structure than the linear one observed in the “hard” sciences which forms the basis of the CARS model.

3.4. Bridging strategies

As we have seen, the blending of academic and real-world claims was frequent in these introductions, with 34 out of 50 papers including moves of both types. From the discursive point of view, it is interesting to explore the way in which these two approaches are interwoven. Close examination of the examples revealed a variety of strategies for bridging the gap between the two “worlds”:

1. Using a real-world centrality claim or question to justify present research, or the discipline as a whole.

2. Identifying a lack of research before moving into deeper analysis of a real-world issue.

3. Stressing the real-world importance of issue in order to complain about the lack of research in the area in question.

The most frequently used of these is the first, namely, using a real-

world centrality claim or question to justify the research at hand. Examples of this type of bridging strategy abound, such as:

Latino voters received unprecedented media attention in the 2000 presidential campaign. […] Central to their (newspapers’) coverage was a sense that Latinos were empowered, and that they should be addressed and not eschewed in campaign strategies. In the year 2000, however, this was no easy task. As scholars have revealed, Latinos constitute a complex voting population [...] (Connaughton and Jarvis 2004: 38). Televised debates have become an important part of election campaigns in many countries around the world [...] Despite numerous empirical studies, some fundamental questions about the effects of televised debates have remained unanswered (Reinemann and Maurer 2005: 775). As use of the web by candidates increases, so too does the significance of scholarly debates over whether it is having a discernable impact on the political behaviors of office seekers and voters, and by extension, on the public sphere (Xenos and Foot 2005: 169).


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This first form of bridging strategy may also function by justifying the discipline as a whole through the importance of its object of study in real contexts. An example of such a general justification from this corpus is “Now that public journalism has had a decade to develop, it also is time to take the scholarship to another level […]”. In this case, the link between the real issue and the academic one seems to be founded on a general assumption that scholarship has to keep pace with developments in the media, rather than the more urgent and compelling transition from events to research suggested by most of the examples set out above.

In all the above cases, the importance of the issue is used as a hook in order to draw the reader into the need for or justification of research, then often leading directly into allusions to the writer’s own research. The second option, indicating a lack of previous research in order to move deeper into the analysis of real-world issues, implies a reversal of this order. In such cases, the writer usually provides a review of relevant bibliography in a general area, then defines an aspect which has not been researched, and justifies this choice by reference to its real-world significance:

In addition, political strategists often employ ads as a framing device to define or highlight the issue positions and the characters of the candidates and their political opponents [refs]. [...] Yet, how message frames within political ads might affect audience cognitive responses remains relatively unexplored. This study extends the research of news framing to the arena of political advertising and explores whether political ads, by focusing on issues or candidate characters, will have an effect on audience message interpretations and political evaluations. Political ads represent a direct attempt by politicians and their supporters to present their campaign platforms and package candidates to voters. Attempts to frame messages in political ads can have the potential of activating particular cognitions and affecting subsequent interpretations (Shen 2004: 124). This approach can also be seen to have a strong rationale, since

assertion of a lack of research on a particular phenomenon provides an opening for discussion of that phenomenon itself and its importance. The writer is positioned as a trail blazer, opening up new pathways through territory that other scholars have left unexplored.

Finally, the third bridging strategy, stressing the real-world importance of issue in order to lament the lack of research in the area in question, is used to strengthen the argument in favor of the writer’s own project. In the examples given below, the writer refers to real-world issues to emphasize the importance of the knowledge gap, reinforcing this with rhetorically loaded lexis such as “surprising” and “complaint”.

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This lack [of research] is particularly surprising given the enormous numbers of people viewing such dramas and the fact that controversial issues are sometimes woven into the plots (Slater, Rouner and Long 2006: 235) Despite frequent complaints about gender bias […] surprisingly little research has systematically analyzed press coverage of women candidates in the USA (Heldman, Carroll and Olson 2005: 316). This type of strategy is particularly appropriate to strengthen move 2,

which establishes a knowledge gap. It should be noted that instances of this bridging strategy combine real-world and academic issues within one sentence, which functions as a link from one area of referencing or reporting to another.

All of these bridging strategies are part of the way in which political communications researchers negotiate their territory between the academic world and real political action. Their discourse is thus a double-edged sword, cutting both ways according to the strategy that is required. However, this dual function complicates the move structure, so that a writer goes from a real-world issue (gender bias, say, in move 1(a)) to a real-world knowledge gap (move 2(a)), and then takes a step back to discuss what the academic literature on the issue has covered (move 1(b)) before delineating what has not been covered (move 2(b)). All of this is in some sense necessary within the disciplinary self-understanding, before a strong move 3 can be brought in to close the sale.

It can thus be seen that the need to argue for two kinds of importance in two different orders of relevance probably explains the more convoluted and recursive structure of these introductions, and their departure from the straightforward sequence that has been encountered elsewhere.

4. Discussion

In pragmatic terms, academic writing can be seen to entail an implicit contract between writers and readers, which underpins the credibility of what is written and establishes the writer’s status as an expert member of a discourse community, on the one hand, and involves the decoder in the arguments, on the other (Givón 1982). This agreement between writer and reader is tacitly assumed to be cooperative, shaped by the assumptions that both share the same underlying disciplinary beliefs or values, seek compatible goals (to cast light on an issue deemed to be significant), and accept the possibility of consensus (Sancho 2003). This contract is evidenced nowhere as clearly as in the three-move structure common in


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research article introductions, which leads from shared, valued knowledge (move 1) to an area consensually identified as unexplored and important (move 2) and then, more delicately, into the writer’s fresh contribution, offered as meeting the shared objectives of the discipline (move 3). All three of these moves may contain explicit references or allusions to other members of the discourse community, thus anchoring the writer’s work in previous research and current understanding of the issue. It is arguable that even if explicit reference is not made to other community members, for the introduction to be successful, the moves used must reflect an understanding of the current situation in that disciplinary culture which is acceptable to its members. Thus, move 1 must paint a picture of research that the discipline would accept, move two must indicate a gap that community members can acknowledge, and move three must seem sufficiently convincing.

In the case of the discipline we have examined, the picture is more complex, not because of any divergence from the underlying model of the contribution to knowledge valued by a particular discourse community, but because of the nature of political communication as a pure-and-applied discipline which looks inward, to academia, and outward, to real politics, at the same time. It thus poses a particular challenge to writers, who seek to assert their academic credentials at the same time as they claim relevance to an understanding of current affairs. In this chapter we have seen how this tends to produce a more complex move structure, involving recursive maneuvers which enable the writer to draw on arguments of two essentially different types. Since political communications researchers need to highlight the relevance of their work to real-world issues as well as stake a place in the academic discourse community, their introductions tend to be more complex, and rarely follow the straightforward sequence identified by Swales (1981) and observed in many disciplines across the academic landscape.

In this divergence from the general norm, we can observe some parallels with the findings of Samraj (2002), who compared introductions in the apparently related areas of conservation biology and wildlife behavior, concluding that there were major differences in the way their centrality claims (move 1) and gap specifications (move 2) were constructed. While wildlife behavior tended to follow the standard three-move academic model, framing its purpose as a contribution to theoretical knowledge, conservation biology tended to apply a greater rhetoric of persuasion and relevance, woven around well-developed centrality claims concerning real-world ecological issues. Samraj (2002) attributes this to the differences in the way these disciplinary communities understand their

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purpose: the former is academic in a traditional sense, while the latter is a younger, interdisciplinary area with a strong level of commitment. We can imagine that this phenomenon may also exist in other disciplines, particularly those that have emerged more recently or those that have more immediate applications, where the immediate need to negotiate a space within the academic community is juggled with a desire to prove the external or extrinsic relevance of the research to the community in general.

In the present study, political communications research has been seen to have common ground with both of the fields analyzed by Samraj (2002), incorporating centrality claims of both kinds. We can surmise that the cultural status of political communications research, as a relatively new academic discipline, and one that people come to from a wide range of academic backgrounds (politics, communication and media studies, sociology, history, economics) as well as from professional practice (journalism, public relations, politics), means that it is less academic and more directly concerned with current world issues than, say, history or philosophy.

At the same time, the discipline is far from understanding its function as being purely to comment on current affairs. It has also to assert its status as an academic field, with its own bibliography, criteria and norms. It could be suggested that this point is particularly important, given the relative youth of this disciplinary community in academic circles, and the need of its members to assert their academic credentials as well as their claims as commentators on current affairs: this is necessary in order to reinforce the writers’ own position within academia on a personal level, for the purposes of research audits and promotion within the university system. Moreover, it is also important on a departmental level, to obtain research funding, and to reaffirm the academic status of a discipline that might be relegated to a secondary rank.

In this study, we have seen how writers adapt their discourse to the parameters of one disciplinary culture. Rhetorical structures and generic conventions that may be current in one academic area cannot necessarily be transposed into another field without modification, since the self-concept and epistemological presuppositions of different disciplines may vary considerably. Further research is needed to draw firm conclusions as to whether the variations noted here, involving claims to real-world centrality alongside claims to academic importance, are typical of younger, less well-established discourse communities or academic cultures that are more immediately concerned with the immediate social applications of their work.


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5. Conclusion

As far as the teaching of academic writing is concerned, the present study must conclude with a general warning, as well as with positive indications for practicing teachers and pointers for future research. To begin with the caveat, Crookes (1986) in a much earlier study warned about the dangers of teaching non-native students rhetorical organizations of genres that may not be accurate for the disciplinary communities they are entering. The results of this comparative study further underscore this danger and provide support for the view that instructors need to point to possible variations in text structure across disciplinary boundaries.

Bearing this in mind, we can safely suggest that Swales’s (1981, 1990) three-move model should be accorded the status of a useful heuristic, but that teachers must temper this with field-specific genre analysis designed to bring out the special features of writing for a particular discipline. Our growing understanding of the values and self-images of different discourse communities is unveiling a greater degree of complexity in the interactions between writer, reader and object of study than might originally have been supposed (Anthony 1999). In the case of political communication, the implicit contract could be said to contain space for two types of centrality claim—real-world relevance and academic significance—which require careful rhetorical balancing.

Writing teachers must therefore keep an open mind regarding the rhetorical possibilities in disciplines with which they are not thoroughly familiar, and conduct genre and discourse analyses before endeavoring to teach students how to write for these communities. In the case of disciplines such as political communication or conservation, where researchers make claims to relevance both within the academic community and beyond, teachers should take this need seriously and help students to blend centrality claims of both kinds, which may mean elaborating the three-move structure to incorporate moves one and two of both kinds, or developing a more complex, even recursive, move structure. It should be noted that bibliographical references and elements that could be classified as belonging to “literature review” can be incorporated into all three of the moves, even though they are particularly salient in moves one and two of the “academic” type.

It is useful to end by remembering that both our graduate students and L2 writing instructors need to develop sensitive and flexible genre awareness (Ramanathan and Kaplan 2000). Novice writers whose first language is English have to undergo a process of enculturation into the disciplinary discourses, genres and value system, that is, into the

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disciplinary culture. Non-native writers may come to this problem with the additional difficulties of lower language proficiency and different underlying cultural schemata. We must underscore the need for apprentice writers (and writing teachers) to bear in mind not only the degree of difficulty, but also the need for a precise diagnosis as to where those difficulties may lie in each case. It is essential that writing teachers should try to connect the trees with the forest: in this case, not just the micro-activities of the classroom with the macro-level of disciplinary discourse, but also the text-level observations of person, mood, tense and lexical choice with the discourse-level negotiation of position within a disciplinary culture. The academic writing teacher will thus provide essential tools and guidance to help in the cultural socialization process that the novice non-native writer must undergo.

References

Anthony, L. “Writing research article introductions in software engineering: How accurate is a standard model?”. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 42 (1999): 38–46.

Bhatia, V. K. Analysing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London: Longman, 1993.

Crookes, G. “Towards a validated analysis of scientific text structure”. Applied Linguistics 7 (1986): 57–70.

Fakhri, A. “Rhetorical properties of Arabic research article introductions”. Journal of Pragmatics 36 (2004): 1119-1138.

Fredrickson, K. M. and J. M. Swales. “Competition and discourse community: introductions from Nysvenska Studier”. In Text and Talk in Professional Contexts, edited by B. L. Gunnarsson, P. Linell and B. Nordberg, 9-22. ASLA: Sweden, 1994.

Givón, T. “Evidentiality and epistemic space”. Studies in Language 6 (1982): 23-49.

Heldman, C., S. J. Carroll and S. Olson. “‘She brought only a skirt’: print media coverage of Elizabeth Dole’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination”. Political Communication 22 (2005): 315-335.

Hopkins, A. and A. Dudley-Evans. “A genre-based investigation of the discussion sections in articles and dissertations”. English for Specific Purposes 7 (1988): 113–122.

Hyland, K. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. London: Longman/Pearson, 2000.

Nwogu, K. N. “The medical research papers: structure and functions”. English for Specific Purposes 16 (1997): 119–138.


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Posteguillo, S. “The schematic structure of computer science research articles”. English for Specific Purposes 18 (1999): 139–160.

Ramanathan, V. and R. B. Kaplan. “Genres, authors, discourse communities: Implications for L2 writing instructors”. Journal of Second Language Writing, 9 (2000): 171–191.

Samraj, B. “Introductions in research articles: variations across disciplines”. English for Specific Purposes 21 (2002): 1-17.

Sancho Guinda, C. “Contractual role of modality as convergence strategy in technical research articles”. Revista Electrónica de Lingüística Aplicada 16 (2003): 219-233.

Stanley, R. M. “The recognition of macrostructure a pilot study”. Reading in a Foreign Language 2 (1984): 156–168.

Swales, J. M. Aspects of Article Introductions. The University of Aston: Aston ESP Reports 1, 1981.

—. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Swales, J. M. and C. Feak. Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.

Swales, J. M. and H. Najjar. “The writing of research article introductions”. Written Communication 4 (1987): 175–191.

Taylor, G. and T. Chen. “Linguistic, cultural and subcultural issues in contrastive discourse analysis: Anglo-American and Chinese scientific texts”. Applied Linguistics 12 (1991): 106-128.

Texts cited

Connaughton, S. L. and S. E. Jarvis. “Invitations for partisan identification: attempts to court Latino voters through televised Latino-oriented political advertisements 1984-2000”. Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 38-54.

Kiousis, S. “Explicating media salience: a factor analysis of New York Times issue coverage during the 2000 US presidential election”. Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 71-87.

Reinemann, C. and M. Maurer. “Unifying or polarizing? Short-term effects and postdebate consequences of different rhetorical strategies in televised debates”. Journal of Communication 55 (2005): 775-794.

Shen, F. “Chronic accessibility and individual cognitions: examining the effects of message frames in political advertisements”. Journal of Communication 54 (2004): 123-137.

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Slater, M. D., D. Rouner and M. Long. “Television dramas and support for controversial public policies: effects and mechanisms”. Journal of Communication 56 (2006): 235-252.

Xenos, M. A., and K. A. Foot. “Politics as usual or politics unusual? Campaign web sites in the 2002 U.S. elections”. Journal of Communication, 55 (2005): 169-185.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

PRAGMATICS AND ESP TEACHING: POLITENESS IN ENGLISH-SPANISH

BUSINESS CORRESPONDENCE

MARISOL VELASCO SACRISTÁN

1. Introduction

In pragmatics language is analysed as discourse in context. Emphasis is placed on language usage, communication strategies and language functions. It is indeed within the pragmatic paradigm and within the communicative teaching approach that a branch of EFL/ESL develops in the 60s: English for Specific Purposes. ESP implies the description and teaching of English in specific academic or professional settings (Fortanet Gómez, Posteguillo Gómez and Palmer Silveira 2001: 15).

Pragmatics is inherently constitutive of English for Specific Purposes in different respects (Triki 2002: 2-3):

(i) ESP is a goal-oriented type of English specially designed to meet the customer specifications;

(ii) The fundamental pragmatic concepts of context-sensitivity and intentionality are constitutive of the very term ESP;

(iii) In ESP, perhaps more so than other pedagogical areas, there is a need to develop communicative competence.

(iv) ESP requires access to authentic materials which in turn calls for a reliance on corpus-based evidence.

Hence ESP is deeply rooted in pragmatics. Yet ESP development shows a greater emphasis on linguistic description over communication which has remained from the 60s to the 90s when a new trend in ESP research appeared, genre analysis, where the influence of pragmatics with its concern on communication can be traced (Fortanet Gómez, Posteguillo Gómez and Palmer Silveira 2001: 15). Indeed, research on ESP has adopted various approaches to text analysis, from the early register

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analysis associated with the identification of key grammatical elements of scientific communication to rhetorical analysis through to the current dominant approach, genre analysis (cf. Dudley-Evans 2000: 4).

Considering then genre analysis as a pedagogical effective and convenient tool for ESP teaching and learning (Bhatia 2002, 2004, 2008) the present work will investigate the genre of business letters and more specifically its pragmatic dimension with regard to the notion of linguistic politeness. Politeness is among the central concerns of Pragmatics and, not unnaturally, it is also among the top priorities of ESP teaching.

2. Approaches to politeness

Politeness has been one of the most important and productive areas of research in the last three decades. It is Goffman’s (1967), Lakoff’s (1973), Grice’s (1975), Leech’s (1983) and Brown and Levinson’s (1978, 1987) now seminal work that has all made significant contributions to helping this very subject grow into a major topic of concern not only in the domains of pragmatics but also in anthropology, sociolinguistics, culture, communication, discourse analysis and even cognition (Escandell-Vidal 1996, 1998; Foley 1997, Wardhough 1998; Grundy 2000; Xie 2000; Zhuang 2001; Watts 2003; Bargiela-Chiappini 2006; Holmes 2006; Pizziconi 2006; Spencer-Oatey 2007; Spencer-Oatey and Ruhi 2007) (cf. Xie 2002). Yet despite so many studies on politeness there has not been consensus on its definition. Nonetheless, there are two stances running through most discussions: “politeness as conversational strategy” and “politeness as social indexing” (Escandell-Vidal 1998: 49).

In line with these two conceptions of politeness, there are two main approaches to politeness: the early ‘Gricean-norm based approach’ and the ‘social indexing approach’ that has derived to the current alternative Relevance-theoretic approach. The early Gricean-norm based approach sought to explain politeness in terms of the Gricean maxims and Speech Act Theory (cf. Escandell-Vidal 1996). In this approach (Lakoff 1973; Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987; Leech 1983) politeness was seen as a set of conversational strategies (i.e., different linguistic ways of conveying a certain speech act, e.g., using an imperative, etc.). This view is also known as the strategic approach and includes the so-called “conversational-maxim view” (Lakoff 1973; Leech 1983; Kasher 1986), the “face-saving view” (Brown and Levinson 1978, 1987) and the “conversational-contract view” (Fraser 1975; Fraser and Nolen 1981). The basic assumptions in this approach can be summarised as follows: (1) polite is indirect; and (2) indirect is implicit (Escandell-Vidal 1996: 630).

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These views of politeness as strategic politeness have to be distinguished from politeness as social indexing (Erving Trip, Guo and Lampert 1990; Held 1992; Watts, Ide and Ehlich 1992; Werkhofer 1992; Eelen 2001; Watts 2003). This approach considers the fact that whenever social indexes are used, they have to conform to socioculturally prescribed or permitted choices. It takes full account of the hearer’s position and the evaluative moment, deals with both politeness and impoliteness and provides a more dynamic, bi-directional view of the social-individual relationship (cf. Terkourafi 2006).

Another functional approach based on the social aspects of politeness is the “Relevance-theoretic approach” (Jucker 1988; Clark 1994; Groefsema 1995; Escandell-Vidal 1996, 1998; Jary 1998; Žegarac 1998; Ruhi and Dogan 2001). It explained politeness from the perspective of cognitive theories arguing that politeness is a matter of knowledge that we acquire as part of the socialisation process. In this approach the emphasis is put especially on context, and not on inferential devices, in other words, politeness is conceived basically as a matter of social adequacy and crucially depends on expectations (i.e., on knowledge) (cf. Escandell-Vidal 1998: 491).

In sum, there is little agreement among researchers in the field about what, exactly, constitutes politeness (Fraser 1990: 234), but it seems clear that the framework of Brown and Levinson’s politeness model has been proved to be “the most influential and comprehensive so far” (Bayraktarouglu and Sifianou 2001: 7). Certainly the best known of the Gricean-norm based approached to politeness is that in Brown and Levinson’s model (1978, 1987), also known as “the face-saving view” (Fraser 1990: 228-232). Brown and Levinson’s model is based on the notion of face, the individual’s self-esteem, one that they argue is universal (1987: 13, 61-62). They characterise two types of face. They call these ‘negative’ and ‘positive face’. Negative face refers to one’s want to be unimpeded by others and to one’s claim to freedom of action; positive face has to do with one’s want to be appreciated and approved of by others (1987: 61). Face is something vulnerable as many things that we do with words are potentially face-threatening, including ordering, advising, offering, promising, criticising, contradicting, etc. Brown and Levinson call these linguistic behaviours ‘face-threatening acts’ (FTA’s for short). They further suggest that we adopt various speech strategies to minimise or eliminate such threats. Politeness is seen as redressive action taken to counterbalance the disruptive effect of face-threatening acts (FTAs). Redressive action that is addressed to the hearer’s negative face is “negative politeness” and “[…] redressive action that is directed to the

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hearer’s positive face is “positive politeness” (1987: 70). Brown and Levinson also claim that a speaker must determine the seriousness of a face-threatening act in terms of three independent and culturally-sensitive variables (1987: 74): social distance between the speaker and the hearer, relative power of the speaker with respect to the hearer and absolute ranking of impositions in the culture.

Despite being so influential Brown and Levinson’s argument that face entails universal applicability has been largely contested by researching politeness in non-Western societies (Hill, Ide, Ikuta, Kawasaki and Ogino 1986; Matsumoto 1988, 1989; Ide 1989; Nwoye 1992; Mao 1994; Yeung 1997; Usami 2002; Fukada and Asato 2004; Haugh 2007; Wouk 2007; Ruhi and I!isk-Güler 2007; Abdurahman Nureddeen 2008; Ohashi in press). Though intended as universal, in their original formulation it covered basically Anglo-Saxon social behaviour, but it is inadequate to account even for other Western cultures, let alone Eastern or African (Escandell-Vidal 1998: 55). In short, politeness varies considerably between language communities, not least in their linguistic form. This lack of universality can be clearly appreciated in cross-cultural types of professional business communication such as business correspondence.

3. Politeness in English-Spanish business correspondence

While politeness has been the focus of several studies of the speech of non-native speakers of English, the area of politeness in studies of written language and language for specific purposes (LSP) has been scantily studied (cf. Pilegaard 1997: 224). The same happens with the business letter writing genre. There are yet surprisingly few studies which have applied politeness theory in the study of cross-cultural business correspondence. Exceptions in this sense, mostly using Brown and Levinson’s face-saving view of politeness, are the studies of Pilegaard (1989, 1990, 1997), Maier (1992), Bargiela-Chiappini (1996), Marcén Bosque (1997, 1999, 2001), Yeung (1997), Hong (1998), Valero Garcés (1999), Saorín Ibarra (2003), Fuertes-Olivera and Nielsen (2008) and Velasco Sacristán (2008). This is by no means a trivial question in terms of both theory and pedagogy.

Business letter writing is a genre used across several different cultures to interface with the cultural world. This means that in it more and more people are finding themselves compelled to take an interest in issues such as politeness in understanding and avoiding the problems caused by miscommunication. Business letter writing is therefore a genre that lends itself to an analysis in terms of politeness for either native or non-native


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speakers. This has clear implications for teaching business letter writing to non-native speakers. As argued by Maier (1992: 190) “[…] even with a flawless control of English grammar, a writer who does not have well-developed sociolinguistic competence runs the risk of offending the reader by violating unwritten rules of social interaction”. It is surprising, however, the degree to which many correspondence handbooks focus solely on issues of form, ignoring the crucial matter of politeness (Hagge and Kostelnick 1989; Maier 1992; Rodman 2001; Saorín Ibarra 2003, Ancarno 2005). Consequently, there is a need to develop pedagogical tasks and activities in order to help non-native learners of business correspondence acquire mastery over the use of polite strategies and expressions in their L2 business writing.

Here we will focus on “politeness in English-Spanish correspondence” using Marcén Bosque’s (1997) study of the conceptualisation and manifestation of politeness in English business letters to propose, in the following section, some tasks and activities to help Spanish learners of Business English acquire mastery over the use of polite expressions in business letters written in English.

According to Marcén Bosque (1997) there are certain politeness strategies that are often used in English business letters (model based on Brown and Levinson’s face-saving view). Generally speaking, negative politeness strategies dominate. They show a high degree of deference and social distance between the writer and the reader.

The main positive politeness strategies used in English business letters are (1997: 422):

(i) attending to the letter’s receiver’s interest; (ii) intensifying the interest; (iii) avoiding disagreement by seeking agreement; (iv) presupposing common ground; (v) offering benefits to the letter receiver; (vi) including both the letter writer and the letter receiver in

the activity; (vii) giving reasons; (viii) assuming reciprocity; (ix) being optimistic.

Along with these positive politeness strategies Marcén Bosque presents the following list of negative politeness strategies used in English commercial correspondence (1997: 423):

(i) apologising; (ii) being pessimistic; (iii) being conventionally indirect;

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(iv) giving deference; (v) impersonalising; (vi) minimising the imposition (thanking before asking for

something). Marcén Bosque’s analysis of the different politeness strategies used in

English business letters can be used as a starting point for the development of tasks and activities for teaching non-native speakers of English to recognise and incorporate politeness strategies into the genre of formal business writing. Some of these tasks and activities will be presented in the following section.

4. Tasks and activities to acquire mastery over the use of politeness in business letters written in English

by Spanish learners

In this section we will present a selection of tasks and activities that can help Spanish learners of business English acquire mastery over the use of politeness in business letter-writing in English. They are presented in two different parts: first, those tasks and activities that can be used to recognise politeness strategies and their linguistic carriers and, second, those tasks and activities that can be used to help the student to incorporate politeness strategies and their linguistic carriers when writing business letters in English. They are different tasks and activities that involve matching, classifying, scanning, translating and other teaching techniques.

(a) Tasks and activities for recognising politeness strategies and their linguistic carriers in English business letters.

1. [Source: Own elaboration with material from Rosset (1994) and Equipo de Expertos 2100 (1996)] Match the following expressions of linguistic politeness used in English letter-writing (Column A) with their corresponding expression in Spanish letter-writing (Column B).


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Column A Column B

1. We would be most grateful if you allowed us a further 30 days for the payment of your invoice.

a. Tendré mucho gusto en corresponderle cuando se presente la ocasión.

2. As you have probably noticed, the goods were packed with the usual care, but it seems the lorry carrying the crates was involved in a car accident.

b. Atentamente,

3. We are glad to inform you...

c. Como ustedes mismos habrán podido comprobar, las mercancías fueron embaladas con el cuidado habitual, pero al parecer, el camión de transporte sufrió un accidente de trabajo.

4. Dear Sirs, d. Nuestros amigos nos garantizaron personalmente que la calidad de sus productos es óptima.

5. I should like to apply for... e. Si ustedes decidieran darme una oportunidad en su compañía no escatimaría esfuerzos para justificar su confianza.

6. Our friends personally guaranteed that your products are of the best quality.

f. En caso de que el producto sustituido no fuera de su agrado, podrán devolvérnoslo sin gastos.

7. Thank you very much for... g. Deseo solicitar... 8. Yours sincerely, h. Le invitamos... 9. A 20% discount can be allowed for large orders.

i. Creemos, sin embargo, que nuestras prendas de lana se venderán muy bien en su tienda.

10. If you do not like the article replaced you can send it back without any extra charge.

j. Muy Sres Nuestros,

11. The forwarding charges will not be compensated.

k. A la espera de sus noticias.

12. Should you decide to give me a try out with your firm, I would do my utmost to justify your confidence.

l. Los gastos de expedición no quedarán compensados

13. We are sorry to inform you...

m. Nos complace informarles que...

14. Looking forward to hearing from you.

n. Puede concedérsele un 20% de descuento para pedidos grandes.

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15. We invite you... o. Agradecemos sinceramente... 16. We feel sure this will meet with your approval.

p. Nos sentiríamos muy agradecidos si nos concedieran otros 30 días más para el pago de su factura.

17. We do believe, however, that our wollen garments will sell quite readily in your shops.

q. Lamentamos tener que comunicarle...

18. I shall only be too pleased to reciprocate should the opportunity arise.

r. Con la certeza de su conformidad.

2. [Own elaboration] Classify the expressions from Column A

under the following strategies of positive and negative politeness in English: a. Giving reasons b. Giving deference c. Avoiding disagreement by seeking agreement d. Being optimistic e. Being pessimistic f. Attending to the letter receiver’s interests g. Minimising the imposition (Thanking before asking for

something) h. Presupposing common ground i. Impersonalising j. Apologising k. Offering benefits to the letter receiver l. Assuming reciprocity m. Being conventionally indirect n. Including both the letter writer and the letter receiver in the

activity. 3. [Own elaboration] Classify the different strategies of linguistic

politeness in 2 into strategies of positive or negative politeness in English.

4. [Own elaboration] Answer the following questions: a. When do we use strategies of positive politeness? b. When do we use strategies of negative politeness? 5. [Own elaboration with a letter from (Rosset 1994: 94)]

Underline examples of strategies of positive politeness and circle those of negative strategies in the following letter. What type of strategies are they?


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Hernu Person 15 Albion Road Leeds TH4 7TV Sheffield, 13th May 20__ Dear Sirs, I should like to apply for the post of secretary which you

advertise in this morning’s Daily Mail. I am 25 years of age and I have had two years’ business

experience with a publishing House in the West End. Previously I spent nine months at a Commercial School in the City, where I became proficient in shorthand and typing, as well as becoming familiar in with the Computer languages: Basic and Cobol; Data Processing; WordPerfect and WordStar; and Operative systems MSDOS and UNIX. At present we are using MSDOS and WordPerfect in my office where I am in charge of the invoicing and stock control.

The reason I wish to resign from my present position is that

owing to re-organization and changes of Directors, my work is not so congenial to me as it has been until now. I feel sure, however, that my employers would be pleased to answer any inquiries as to my capabilities, etc. I would be very happy to call on you for an interview, should you consider my application favourably, then you would have the opportunity to see for yourselves my level of knowledge, and I could give you any further details that you may require of myself.

Yours sincerely,

(b) Tasks and activities for incorporating politeness strategies and

their linguistic carriers in English business letters. 1. [Source: Adapted from Ashley 2003: 9] Sort out the jumbled

words below to make six sentences typical of business correspondence. Add capital letters and punctuation as

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necessary. Identify the type(s) of politeness strategy (positive or negative) in operation. 1. grateful/soon/a/as/we/for/would/possible/ reply/as/be 2. for/find/please/cheque/£49.50/a/enclosed 3. further/please/if/us/information/you/any/ contact/need 4. April/your/you/letter/thank/5/of/for 5. you/we/forward/to/from/look/hearing 6. pleasure/price-list/enclosing/have/a/catalogue/ our/I/Spring/and/in.

2. [Source; Adapted from Ashley 2003: 36] Rewrite the following sentences so that they are more suitable for business correspondence.

c. You should put it right d. We’re sorry about the muddle e. We’re planning to buy from someone else f. Your machine doesn’t work g. We want our money back h. We’re not giving you your money back 3. [Source: Own elaboration] Propose phrases or sentences of

your own for the following strategies: i. Attending to the letter receiver’s interests: j. Avoiding disagreement by showing agreement: k. Giving reasons: l. Apologising: m. Giving deference: n. Impersonalising: 4. [Source: Own elaboration with material from Rosset (1994) and

Equipo de Expertos 2100 (1996)] Translate the following sentences from Spanish letters into English:

o. Visitamos su stand en la Feria de la Electrónica y quedamos favorablemente impresionados.

p. Estamos seguros de que quedarán satisfechos de nuestro servicio y quedamos a la espera de recibir más pedidos suyos.

q. Lamentamos tener que informarles que la partida de vino solicitada por ustedes ha permanecido bloqueada por la aduana durante unos días; ello ha hecho que la mercancía no les haya llegado en la fecha prevista.


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r. Esperamos que el problema quedará así resuelto y nos comprometemos a hacer todo lo que esté en nuestra mano para compensar el retraso.

s. Le agradecemos su interés y sentimos no poder ayudarle. t. Esperamos recibir la factura correcta. u. Me gustaría conocerle personalmente en un futuro próximo. v. Cordialmente 5. [Source: Own elaboration]. Write a letter of complaint about a

late delivery to a manufacturer of bathroom fittings. Write out the letter correctly. Make it as polite as possible.

5. Conclusion

As we have shown in this paper, politeness is crucial in cross-cultural business correspondence. Yet it is surprising the degree to which business correspondence handbooks focus only on issues of form ignoring the crucial matter of politeness (Hagge and Kostelnick 1989; Maier 1992; Rodman 2001; Saorín Ibarra 2003; Ancarno 2005). As a result, business letters written by non-native speakers, even those which are grammatically flawless, may be perceived negatively by their readers because of the inappropriate use of politeness strategies.

In view of this situation and in order to remedy it, we argue for the idea that different pedagogical tasks and activities on the different conceptualisation and manifestations of politeness in letters from different cultures can be proposed to help non-native learners of business correspondence acquire mastery over the use of polite expressions in their L2 business writing.

In this paper, using Marcén Bosque’s (1997) study of the manifestation of politeness in English business letters, we have proposed some tasks and activities to help Spanish learners of Business English acquire mastery over the use of polite expressions in business letters written in English.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

ADVANCES IN INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND TRAINING

BASED ON COMPUTER SIMULATION OF REAL BUSINESS SETTINGS

VICTORIA GUILLÉN-NIETO, PEDRO PERNÍAS-PECO,

CHELO VARGAS-SIERRA AND JUDITH WILLIAMS-JELLYMAN

1. Introduction In the information society at the beginning of the 21st century, as

companies grow within the global market, business people are faced with the challenge of exchanging information and establishing international business relations with entrepreneurs who not only speak other languages but come from other cultures. In international business settings people in general communicate in English, which is considered to be today’s lingua franca of the academic, cultural and professional world, much as Latin was in the Middle Ages.

Intercultural communication, however, means more than simply making use of a lingua franca to communicate with other people. In a communicative process, a company’s export activities and business relations are quite likely to be put at risk by the most subtle aspects, which are sometimes invisible but deeply rooted in the human nature of the participants in discourse, such as their particular values, beliefs, and attitudes and, more significantly, the way in which these aspects are made visible at the pragmatic level of language use.

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Findings from the ELUCIDATE survey (Business Communication Across Borders: A Study of Language Use and Practice in European Companies, 1996-1997), and the ELISE survey (European Language and International Strategy Development in SMEs, 1999-2000) (Hagen 2001: 1-16), two major research projects supported by the EU Leonardo da Vinci Programme revealed that a high percentage of European small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) have met both language and cultural barriers leading to loss of business turnover in recent years. More specifically, the ELUCIDATE survey made public that the UK and Spain are the two countries in the EU that show the largest percentage of lost business—14% in the UK and 19% in Spain—because of the above mentioned communication barriers.

Therefore, cultural sensitization and communicative competence in English and/or Spanish in international business settings are two fundamental social needs that have attracted the interest of researchers in English and Spanish for Specific Purposes in the last few years.

Pedagogic innovation is needed in the teaching-learning methodology with which cultural awareness should be developed in our multilingual and multicultural Europe. Computer simulation of real business settings may be an effective learning tool for academic and professional people in general and business people in particular who need to use English and/or Spanish as the lingua franca in their daily activities. Computer simulation promotes the learner’s action, communication and negotiation of meaning in a fully contextualized way. It also offers students continuous intercultural communication training in a virtual setting, which is especially advantageous for business people who do not usually have the time to attend training courses due to their very busy agendas.

This discussion is part of a major project called COMINTER-SIMULNEG (I+D HUM2006-12989/FILO) conducted by one of the authors at the IULMA (the Inter-University Institute of Modern Applied Languages), at the University of Alicante in Spain, and funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education for the period 2006-2009. The project has a cross-disciplinary nature in which intercultural communication research, language for business, social anthropology, linguistic pragmatics, and new technologies applied to teaching, training and learning are intertwined.

The aim of this chapter is to give an overview of the two main areas of the research project COMINTER-SIMULNEG, namely designing a cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons, and developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. Finally, a concluding remarks section will bring together the most

Advances in Intercultural Communication Research 339

relevant conclusions, and some educational implications for the teaching and learning of intercultural communication will be brought to light.

2. Designing a cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication

2.1. Aim and approach

The aim of the cross-disciplinary model we would like to propose is to enable the language researcher to examine the rich and multifaceted nature of culture in international business settings, and ultimately explain how cultural value systems and orientations may influence discourse patterns and promote different communicative styles. In Culture’s Consequences, the renowned Dutch sociologist Hofstede draws on an Indian fable to illustrate the importance of crossing disciplines to gain a deeper insight into the nuances of culture:

Social scientists approach the social reality as the blind men from the Indian fable approached the elephant; the one who gets hold of a leg thinks it is a rope, but none of them understands what the whole animal is like. We will never be more than blind men in front of the social elephant, but with joining forces with other blind men and women and approaching the animal from as many different angles as possible, we may find out more about it than we could ever do alone (Hofstede 2001 [1980]: 2). As in the Indian fable just quoted, in the COMINTER-SIMULNEG

project, we may say that blind scholars from varied disciplines have put their heads together in an attempt to reach a deeper understanding of the mechanics of intercultural communication. Just as the blind men and women in the Indian fable tried to gain ‘intersubjectivity’ in their approach to the elephant, we will endeavour to do so by pooling and integrating conceptual dimensions from social anthropology and social psychology with interactional principles derived from linguistic pragmatics.

Traditionally, linguistic theory has been devoted to the study of purely linguistic structures and strategies. Similarly, social anthropology has been mainly concerned with non-verbal communication and intercultural communication at the macro level. All in all, little attention has been paid to the influence of cultural values on human interaction and communication, although since the 1990s there seems to be increasing academic interest in this research question (Clyne 1996 [1994]: 176-2001; Pan, Wong Scollon and Scollon 2002: 1-26; Harris Bond, Žegarac and

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Spencer-Oatey 2004 [2000]: 47-71; Gudykunst 2004 [2000]: 293-315; and House 2005: 13-28).

Of all the very many definitions scholars have used to explain the concept of ‘culture’, we find Hofstede’s definition most suitable to our research needs and purposes. According to this sociologist, culture is “[…] the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another” (2003 [1991]: 5). The concept of a “collective mental programming of the mind” evokes that of ‘habitus’ proposed by the French sociologist Bourdieu (1980: 88-89). They both refer to the fact that certain conditions of existence produce a ‘habitus’, namely a system of permanent and transferable tendencies.

According to social anthropological research, people carry cultural mental programmes that are developed in the family in early childhood by way of both formal and informal learning (Hall 1973 [1959]: 68-71). These are reinforced in schools and organizations through technical learning (Hall 1973 [1959]: 71-72). Therefore, culture is learnt and should be distinguished from other levels in human mental programming such as human nature, which is inherited with one’s genes and is common to the human race on the one hand, and an individual’s personality, which is both partly inherited and partly learnt on the other. As Hofstede argues, however, “[…] exactly where the borders lie between human nature and culture and between culture and personality is a matter of discussion among social scientists” (2003 [1991]: 5).

In sum, culture, as collective mental programming, refers to the particular ways in which universal basic bio-social problems affecting the whole of the human race have been negotiated and solved in each society. The collective level in human mental programming has been traditionally depicted as an onion made up of different layers. Whereas the inner, intangible layers represent core values and basic assumptions, beliefs and attitudes; the outer layers correspond to the rituals of interactive behaviour and discourse patterns that are specific to a community. These patterns are considered to be shared by its members, despite their different personalities, the individual values they may hold, and the idiosyncratic language styles they may exhibit in social interaction (Hofstede 2003 [1991]; Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 1997; Spencer-Oatey 2004 [2000]). The cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication we would like to propose in this chapter draws on Hofstede’s (2003 [1991]: 4-7) concept of culture as collective mental programming and is based on the following premises:

a) Culture is acquired: humans need a period of intensive programming by their social environment.


b) Culture is shared: mental programming is clearly expressed in the different values, beliefs, attitudes, and patterns of non-linguistic and linguistic behaviour that are specific to a particular group or category and shared with people who have gone through the same learning processes.

c) Cultural awareness involves recognizing ourselves as part of a community that has been mentally programmed in a specific way, regardless of the individual differences within the members of the same community.

d) Intercultural competence entails being aware of the dissimilar values, assumptions, rituals and behaviour shared by the members of a community other than our own.

As shown in Table 16-1, four levels of analysis may be distinguished in the proposed model:

A Cross-Disciplinary Model for the Analysis of Intercultural Communication between Spaniards and Britons Level 1 Selecting relevant value dimensions for the analysis of

intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons.

Level 2 Defining culture-specific value orientations in Spanish and British national cultures.

Level 3 Analysing how culture-specific value orientations have been negotiated into culture-specific ritualistic behaviour, namely protocol and social etiquette.

Level 4 Examining how culture-specific value orientations have been negotiated into culture-specific language use, namely rules of interaction, sociopragmatic conventions, and pragmalinguistic behaviour.

Table 16-1: Levels of analysis

In the next few sections we will look at each one of them in turn in

further detail. 2.1.1. Level 1. Selecting relevant value dimensions for the analysis of intercultural communication

All cultures meet the same basic problems of social life. The essential philosophical questions shared by most—if not all—civilizations may be summarised as follows: (a) how does the human race explain their origin and existence in the universe? (b) How does man relate to nature and respond to biological wants? And (c) how does man relate to other individuals of the same species and respond to societal wants? Although

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all cultures face the same basic social problems, “[…] to navigate through an unfamiliar culture”, explain Walker, Walker and Schmitz, “you need to be able to get your bearings by relating yourself to specific features in the environment the way a sailor uses the sun, the moon, the starts and the horizon” (2003: 55). Since the 1950s many scholars have put forward cultural models, the main purpose of which has been precisely to identify “[…] a limited number of common human problems for which all peoples at all times must find some solution” (Kluckhohn 1963: 221 quoted in Stewart et al. 1998: 159). The basic social problems that have been identified as affecting the patterns of behaviour of people from all over the world are known under the rubric of ‘value dimensions’. Like the cardinal points of a compass, a metaphor that was used by the renowned phonetician Daniel Jones (1962) to describe any vowel within the total range of vowel sounds in any language, the concept of value dimension is a social construct to enable the researcher in intercultural communication to identify a number of basic social questions affecting all cultural groups equally but for which there are different answers. We will now select a number of value dimensions having an effect on human communication and social interaction. Three of them, namely Time, Personal Space and Context are borrowed from Hall’s investigation in his wide-reaching trilogy, The Silent Language (1973 [1959]), The Hidden Dimension (1969

Value Dimensions Time It makes reference to people’s concept of time and the use

they make of it. Personal Space

It considers the way people delimit their physical and psychological space.

Context It examines how people express and convey meaning. Identity It concerns the relationship between the individual and the

group. Power distance

It is related to the different solutions to the basic problem of human inequality.

Gender It is related to the division of emotional roles between men and women.

Truth It is related to the level of stress in a society in the face of an unknown future. It looks at how people in culture cope with the unpredictable and the ambiguous.

Virtue It is related to the choice of focus for people’s efforts: the future or the present.

Table 16-2: Value dimensions having an effect on human communication and social interaction (Hall 1973 [1959], 1969 [1966], 1977 [1976]; Hofstede 2001 [1980], 2003 [1991])


[1966]), and Beyond Culture (1977 [1976]). We will also draw on five value dimensions identified by Hofstede (2001 [1980]; 2003 [1991]), namely Identity, Power Distance, Gender, Truth, and Virtue. 2.1.2. Level 2. Defining culture-specific value orientations in Spanish and British cultures

Each of the value dimensions proposed by Hall and Hofstede in their respective cultural models may be understood as a continuum between two opposite extremes along which cultural groups may show divergent or similar preferred strategic orientations regarding a basic social problem. Although the problem affects all societies equally, each national culture may offer a differing solution, giving as a result a culture-specific ‘value orientation’, that is, a value which is at the core of a culture and hence, more resistant to change than other more peripheral cultural issues such as beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts. In our view, value orientations may offer language researchers a set of cardinal points of reference by which to orientate themselves in the intercultural scenario, in our case intercultural Basic Problem of Social Life

Value Dimension One Extreme Value Orientation

Other Extreme Value Orientation

Time Time Polychronic Monochronic Personal Space Personal Space Non-contact Contact

Context Context High context Low context Identity Individualism

Index (IDV) Collectivism Individualism

Hierarchy Power Distance Index (PDI)

Large Power Distance

Small Power Distance

Gender Masculinity Index (MAS)

Care-oriented Achievement-oriented

Truth Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI)

Strong Uncertainty Avoidance

Weak Uncertainty Avoidance

Virtue Long-Term Orientation Index (LTO)

Long-Term Orientation

Short-Term Orientation

Table 16-3: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons (Hall 1973 [1959], 1969 [1966], 1977 [1976]; Hofstede 2001 [1980], 2003 [1991])

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communication between Spaniards and Britons. Table 16-3 summarizes the value dimensions and value orientations that have proved to be relevant to our research needs.

As far as Hall’s dimensions are concerned, we may say that Spain has been traditionally identified as a polychronic (multi-active, multi-focus, flexible), high context, contact culture. On the contrary, the UK has been recognized as a monochronic (linear-active, single-focus, rigid), low context, non-contact culture. Unlike Hall’s value dimensions, Hofstede’s are based on quantitative data. On visiting Hofstede’s (2003) webpage, the language researcher may consult the scores that have been calculated using sophisticated statistical methods for the five value dimensions in a wide range of countries since 1967. Figure 16-1 below compares the scores calculated for the UK and Spain as regards Power Distance Index (PDI), Individualism Index (IDV), Masculinity Index (MAS), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI), and Long-Term Orientation Index (LTO).

0

20

40

60

80

100

SpainUK

Spain 57 51 42 86

UK 35 89 66 35 25

PDI IDV MAS UAI LTO

Figure 16-1: Hofstede’s value dimension scores for Spain and UK

Two considerations need to be made as regards the study of value orientations, before continuing with the presentation of the other levels in the proposed model of analysis. Firstly, we should be aware of the fact that the value orientations making up our mental programmes cannot be directly observed, what we perceive instead is the outer visible layers of


culture, namely systems and institutions, artefacts and products, rituals, non-verbal behaviour, and language use. And secondly, value orientations like the ones referred to in Table 16-3, for example, do not apply to single individuals. Therefore, we cannot argue that the average Briton is higher in Individualism than the average Spaniard, because that would mean succumbing to the so-called ‘ecological fallacy’, that is, “[…] confusion between within-system and between-system (ecological) correlations […]” (Hofstede 2001 [1980]: 16). In other words, we cannot shift from the collective level of culture to the individual level of personality. What we can do instead is use the mean of the scores calculated for each value orientation in each culture to predict the degree of ‘social integration’ of an individual into a particular community as regards the expected norms of non-linguistic and linguistic behaviour.

Hofstede’s empirically verified scores confirm that there are strong cultural differences between the UK and Spain, as shown in Table 16-4 below. Therefore, we may assume that these two cultural groups have been mentally programmed at the collective level in different ways, that is, they have differing value orientations as regards a number of dimensions that have an effect on interpersonal communication. What is more, unawareness of the mental programme operating in the other cultural group may inexorably lead to communication barriers, namely stereotyping, miscommunication, and linguistic transferences at the pragmatic level of language use in intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons (Guillén-Nieto 2005: 107-126, 2006a: 101-119, 2006b: 117-131, 2007: 93-105).

As we can see from Table 16-4, the value orientations that are likely to cause more friction between Spaniards and Britons are: Time, Personal Space, Context, Individualism, and the Uncertainty Avoidance Index.

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One Extreme Value Orientation

Other Extreme Value Orientation

Spain UK Basic Problem of

Social Life Value Dimension

Time Time Polychronic Monochronic Personal Space Personal space Contact culture Non-contact culture

Context Context Fairly high context Low context

Identity Individualism Index (IDV)

Average (51) Very high (89)

Hierarchy Power Distance Index (PDI)

Average (57) Moderately small (35)

Gender Masculinity Index (MAS)

Average (42) Moderately high (66)

Truth Uncertainty Avoidance Index

(UAI)

Very strong (86) Moderately weak (35)

Virtue Long-Term Orientation Index

(LTO)

No data available Low (25)

Table 16-4: Value dimensions and orientations having an effect on intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons (Hall 1973 [1959], 1969 [1966], 1977 [1976]; Hofstede 2001 [1980], 2003 [1991]) 2.1.3. Level 3. Analysing how culture-specific value orientations have been negotiated into culture-specific ritualistic behaviour

Level 3 concerns the way universal bio-social problems have been negotiated into culture-specific practices. “Why people behave the way they do”, claims Leaptrott (1996: 2), “is a complex subject that can be simplified by the understanding that people behave in a manner consistent with their perception of reality”. Protocol is a set of rules for interaction that must be observed in order to accomplish any business objective. The rules of interaction—protocol—tell us what to do in order to achieve a certain result. Social etiquette, by contrast, tells us how to do it gracefully. As a result, the people of any nation may be thought of as a group of players bound by a unique culture. Their society’s protocol promotes the


perpetuation of the society, its beliefs, and its objectives. Protocol may entail wide-ranging visual cultural aspects such as conventional usage of formal and informal terms of address, honorifics and personal reference (Brown and Levinson 1978; Kramer 2005: 58-65; Ilie 2005: 174-188; Huszcza 2005: 218-233; Haumann, Koch and Sornig 2005: 82-99; Yli-Vakkuri 2005: 189-202), gestures, business cards, gifts, and dress and accessories (Morrison, Conaway and Borden 1994; Leaptrott 1996; Reynolds and Valentine 2004). Mastering the game of global business requires two skills: understanding the rules of interaction and using the rules strategically. Understanding means knowing where the rules come from and what purpose they serve, as well as knowledge of specific business customs. Both protocol and social etiquette are collective activities that are technically unnecessary to the achievement of desired ends, but within a culture are considered socially essential, keeping the individual bound within the norms of the community. Cultural awareness of how to behave and interact with other participants in conversation during a professional interview, telephone call, business negotiation, meeting, presentation, business lunch, etc requires knowing the rules of interaction and the social etiquette at work. Intercultural communication competence implies, in sum, recognising that business people from other cultural contexts may have different rituals of behaviour in business settings and at least, being familiar with them.

2.1.4. Level 4. Examining how culture-specific value orientations have been negotiated into culture-specific language use

Level 4 deals with the way culture-specific values have been negotiated into language-specific behaviour. The members of a community also share a collective communicative style. This, which has been defined elsewhere as “[…] the interface between language and anthropological culture […]” (Guillén Nieto 2006c: 912), may disclose the way in which culture-specific values, such as worldview, kinship system, social organisation, norms of politeness and behaviour, etc are embedded in the linguistic system. However, the still pending question in this discussion is: How are value systems made visible in intercultural communication between Spaniards and Britons? Among the numerous language researchers who have explored the impact of culture on language use are Blum-Kulka (1982: 29-59, 1983: 36-55, 1987: 131-146, 1996: 179-194), Wierzbicka (1985: 145-178, 1987, 1991), Scollon and Wong Scollon (1995: 40-41), Clyne (1996 [1994]), Ramsey (1998: 112-129), Baba (1999), Spencer-Oatey (2004 [2000]), Díaz Pérez (2003), De Mooij (2004, 2005), Li (2008: 11-24), Ädel (2008: 45-62), Feng (2008: 63-86),

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Loukianenko Wolfe (2008: 87-121), Pak and Acevedo (2008: 123-145), Suárez and Moreno (2008: 147-168); Wang (2008: 169-191), Bloch (2008: 257-274), and Connor (2008: 299-315). Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, especially the Uncertainty Avoidance and Power Distance Indexes have been used by Clyne (1996 [1994]: 176-201) to explain how cultural values may impact on professional and academic discourse patterns. For example, findings from his survey on academic discourse show that the high Uncertainty Avoidance Index among many European groups may lead to long speech turns with explanations, and apparent disclaimers in spoken discourse, as well as to longer, more exhaustive written texts.

We will now go on to put forward a hypothetical correlation between certain culture-specific orientations and language-specific behaviour, which is currently being tested in the COMINTER-SIMULNEG project. This is shown in Table 16-5 below.

Unawareness of the existence of such differing orientations in language use may inevitably lead to miscommunication and linguistic transferences between Spanish and British speakers at the pragmatic level when engaged in intercultural communication. To illustrate this, let us consider the following examples: spatial proximity may show friendliness in Spanish culture and thoughtless invasion of privacy in British culture. When Britons show preference for doing one thing at a time, they may give the wrong impression of themselves as rigid; by contrast, when Spaniards frequently engage in multiple activities they may be wrongly interpreted as ill-mannered and undisciplined (Guillén-Nieto 2005: 115). Whereas Spaniards, as fairly high context communicators, will rely on nonverbal, symbolic, and situational cues, Britons tend to believe that meaningful and significant information should be recorded meticulously, and ask for and provide explicit confirmation of their understanding of interactions and situations (Lewis, 1999 [1996]: 184). Britons, as individuals with an instrumental orientation, may interpret expressive communicators as difficult, embarrassing, or irrational. Spaniards, as individuals with an expressive orientation, may perceive those who hide their emotions as unapproachable, cold, or even deceitful. Whereas Spanish directness may sound aggressive and rude to British people, British indirectness, namely mitigation and hedging, may be wrongly interpreted as untrustworthy.


Value Dimension

National Culture

Culture-Specific Values

Language-Specific Behaviour

Spanish Polychronic

Multi-active Multifocus Fluid High tolerance for interruptions

Time

British Monochronic

Linear-active Single focus Rigid Highlights punctuality Low tolerance for interruptions

British Non-contact culture

Promotes spatial distance

Personal Space Spanish Contact culture

Promotes spatial proximity and eye contact

Spanish Fairly high context

Promotes implicitness Relies on contextual cues and non verbal codes Context

British Low context Promotes explicitness Relies on symbolic language and the verbal code

British Very high 89 Uses independence strategies (negative politeness) Individualism

Index Spanish Average 51 Uses involvement strategies (positive politeness)

Spanish Average 57 Honorifics, terms of address V/T forms Power Distance

Index British Moderately small

35 Honorifics, terms of address Ø V/T forms

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British Moderately high

66 Task-oriented Instrumental Masculinity Index

Spanish Average 42 People-oriented Expressive

Spanish Strong 86 Turn-taking system is asymmetrical Shows preference for digressiveness, circumlocutions, and long texts Uncertainty

Avoidance Index British Moderately weak

35 Turn-taking is symmetrical Shows preference for linearity and short texts

Table 16-5: Hypothetical correlation of culture-specific values with language-specific behaviour (Hall 1973 [1959], 1969 [1966], 1977 [1976]; Clyne (1996 [1994]: 176-201) Hofstede 2001 [1980], 2003 [1991])

At the current stage, we feel that analysing intercultural

communication poses many methodological problems for the language researcher, and more empirical evidence and measurable quantitative data are needed to account for the impact of cultural values on language-specific strategic behaviour at the micro-level. For example, we still have no definite answer to such questions as does the British high score on Individualism promote their preference for independence (negative politeness) strategies in their interactive style? Or does the British low Uncertainty Avoidance Index encourage their production of short, linear texts?

3. Designing a graphic adventure

The second main area in the COMINTER-SIMULNEG project consists of developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. This part of the project is indeed the didactic application of the theoretical model put forward in the preceding pages of this chapter to the teaching and learning of intercultural communication, especially between Spaniards and Britons, in business settings.

Founded on the experiment conducted in the VIRTUA laboratory at the University of Alicante, in which one of the authors of this chapter has been working since 2000 designing graphic adventures for the teaching of


Spanish in the Cervantes Institute, our methodological proposal for developing intercultural competence consists of designing a particular type of video game—a graphic adventure—called “It’s a Deal”. This technological tool uses a simulated experience to provide the targeted users (business people in international trade) with the opportunity to become aware that each culture has its own rules of the game, as well as to discover which rules apply in British culture and practice using these rules. Mr. Michael Babb and Mr. Guillermo Blanco, directors of Standards Group Ltd., a company dedicated to the promotion of Spanish products in the UK with offices in both countries, act as our advisors when creating the situations. Thanks to their practical experience and documentation we can reproduce in the video game authentic situations and communication problems experienced by business people in real life. The didactic methodology of a graphic adventure belongs to the constructivist learning theory, since the student, motivated by the plot of the video game explores the reality that surrounds him, discovers the right social interaction and communication strategies to be used in each situation, adds them to his bank of existing knowledge and assimilates them as the correct response that should be given to similar communication problems arising in real life. In our case, students will be able to learn and acquire intercultural competence through a three-stage process: (a) Sensitization, (b) Developing intercultural knowledge, (c) Acquiring intercultural communicative competence, to which we will now briefly refer:

Stage 1: Sensitization refers to the development of both cultural awareness, namely recognizing ourselves as part of a community that has been mentally programmed at the collective level and belongs to the same speech community, and intercultural awareness, which entails being aware of the existence of communities with different value orientations and linguistic behaviour to our own.

Stage 2: Developing intercultural knowledge refers to the knowledge of: (a) the value dimensions affecting human communication and social interaction, and (b) the culture-specific value orientations of the cultural groups involved in the intercultural scenario.

Stage 3: Acquiring intercultural communication competence refers to the acquisition of the rituals of behaviour, discourse patterns, and strategies of a specific lingua-culture. This involves a number of sub-competences, such as linguistic, socio-cultural, discursive, strategic, functional, and non-verbal competences.

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3.1. The structure of the “It’s a Deal” graphic adventure

The technique of ‘scene design’, which is educational, realistic and extremely immersive, is used to create the graphic adventure called “It’s a Deal”. A scene is a screen or set of screens where the user must solve a problem, in our case a communicative problem, using his cultural knowledge. The “It’s a Deal” graphic adventure consists of an introduction in which the context of the video game is explained to the user. Then a series of interrelated scenes appear in which the video game player has to interact with different characters using different means. Each scene is designed to meet a general teaching objective, which in our case is intercultural communication competence, that is, the Spanish user is made aware of the differing value orientations Britons may hold with reference to a limited number of basic problems of social life, namely Time, Personal Space, Context, Individualism Index (IDV), Power Distance Index (PDI), Uncertainty Avoidance Index (UAI), etc, together with their influence on other more external layers of culture, such as sociopragmatic rules of interaction and pragmalinguistic principles of communication.

The ‘screens’ in each scene take the user from one situation to the next in order to apply in each what he has learnt or discovered in the previous ones. A screen involves a situation in which the video game player will find some type of communication conflict or enigma that must be resolved before he can move on to the next screen. Identification of the problem together with the adequate strategy that should be used to work it out is essential to achieve a specific didactic objective, which in our case is awareness of the differing value orientations held by Spaniards and Britons and how these may affect the characters’ linguistic and non-linguistic behaviour.

We decided to use Hymes’s (1974) SPEAKING model to systematize each situation. We, thus, present a setting, participants, a purpose, key, channel, content and form in order to explore the way in which value dimensions and value orientations affect the rules of social interaction and communication strategies chosen by the protagonists in the video game.


Figure 16-2: Graphic Adventure Diagram

Figure 16-3: Scene Diagram

The narrative elements that give coherence to the plot are ranked according to the level of complexity of the conflicts the protagonist must resolve, which in turn correspond to the difficulty of the specific didactic objectives set. Conflicts due to visible cultural aspects (protocol and social etiquette) are presented before those arising due to invisible cultural elements (discursive patterns and communicative strategies).

At the end of the video game, the student will have overcome all the communicative conflicts encountered in the different speech situations and

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speech events that occur in business settings by applying the right communicative strategies. This is verified by means of a final evaluation in which the user is asked to reflect on his performance and the level of intercultural competence reached.

In order to create our graphic adventure, a general script is created for the main scenes. Based on this general script, a more detailed one is produced for each individual situation. The tasks are divided into two groups: (a) tasks of the didactic team, and (b) tasks of the technical team, which we will now discuss in more detail. The first task of the didactic team is to create a programme describing the main cultural and communicative competences to be developed in the graphic adventure. The second step is to develop a plot for the video game. The plot will connect the different scenes and should provide the motivation necessary for the learner to complete the game. The third step is to develop the specific competences that the user/learner must acquire in each situation. The fourth task is to create a script including the situation, characters, dialogues and possible alternative outcomes. This means designing what happens not only when the player chooses the correct actions or strategies, but also when he chooses the wrong ones. The completed script is then given to the technical team to convert it into a graphic adventure. While this script is being digitalized, work begins on the script for the next situation.

The tasks of the technical team are as follows. First, the digitalization team makes a detailed analysis of the narrative coherence of the plot. The artists are then given the task of creating the graphic elements, such as scenes, characters, etc. The drawing is first done on paper in pen or pencil and then the image and colouring or illumination of the illustrations is digitalized. Each figure is then drawn separately. Using FLASH® language to create the video game, it is possible to draw the various elements in layers, for example, background, furnishings, characters, etc. Next, the interaction is designed (programmed in FLASH® language) using the elements created in the previous step. The video game is then put together and finally tested.

4. Conclusions and some educational implications for the teaching and learning of intercultural communication

This chapter necessarily ends in an open-ended way, since our purpose was to provide an overview of the two main areas of the research project COMINTER-SIMULNEG, namely designing a cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication, especially between


Spaniards and Britons, and developing a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings.

In the first part of this chapter we presented our cross-disciplinary model for the analysis of intercultural communication, and the different levels involved in an attempt to synthesize linguistic insights with those of another discipline, namely social anthropology. How value orientations influence discourse patterns and strategies at the collective level was indeed a crucial issue in the whole approach. We feel, in sum, that the time has come to mark out independent measures for linguistic parameters. More empirical evidence and quantitative data are needed to support the correlation between value orientations and linguistic variables at the micro level, if we are to make real advances in intercultural communication research.

In the second part of this chapter we described the graphic adventure “It’s a Deal” we are developing as a teaching methodology for cultural awareness based on computer simulation of real business settings. The ultimate aim of the graphic adventure is to help people see exactly what can go wrong in intercultural encounters and what they can do to prevent mistakes; in other words, to improve people’s skills in intercultural communication. Through a series of scenes, screens, and situations the video game players will be given the chance to find out by themselves the rules of the game when doing business with the UK, as well as test their intercultural competence in business settings. However, a word of warning should be given as regards intercultural communication training. Although it is fairly easy to incorporate elementary culture clashes into a game or simulation, to go beyond that is more difficult, “(…) since national cultures are so rich and multifaceted and they interact with personalities and situational contexts in so many ways that one can hardly ever directly point a finger at culture’s consequences” (Hofstede, Pedersen and Hofstede 2002: 190).

Finally, we would not like to finish this chapter without mentioning three educational implications for the teaching and learning of intercultural communication:

a) Language teaching has traditionally been isolated and dissociated from culture. In the last few years, efforts have been made to integrate the visible aspects of a culture in the language curriculum, namely, the country’s history, customs and traditions, food, sports, music, art, etc into the language curriculum (Sercu et al. 2005). However, at the current stage, we feel that what needs to be done is to go a step further in order to try to integrate the invisible and hidden dimensions of a culture too. Intercultural communication competence

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can neither be learnt nor fully acquired unless we identify the connections between language use and the value orientations that are at the core of a culture. Language structures and functions can easily be learnt, but will not by any means be acquired by second language learners unless they understand the cultural motivation behind them. The linguistic expression “May I draw your attention in particular to pages 44-45 in the catalogue, (…)” can easily be learnt but will only be acquired when second language students understand how the British culture has negotiated the basic social problem of Identity into a culture-specific high score on Individualism and this has been made visible in a language-specific strategy that highlights respect for freedom of action (negative politeness strategies).

b) Pragmatic research into intercultural communication should provide an explanation of how cultural-specific value orientations are made visible in language use, namely the general preference shown by a speech community for certain ritualistic behaviour, discourse patterns, and linguistic strategies.

c) Linguistic transferences from one language to another should be explained in the light of the value orientations lying at the core of a culture.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE ANECDOTE AS HUMOROUS NARRATIVE: STRUCTURAL AND SOCIO-CULTURAL FEATURES OF ANECDOTES WRITTEN

BY NATIVE AND NON-NATIVE WRITERS OF ENGLISH1

LAURA HIDALGO DOWNING

1. Introduction

Humorous anecdotes form part of our everyday life much in the same way as many other story telling and story writing activities. However, little has been done to describe the characteristics of this genre, which shares features with prototypical narratives and, at the same time, presents idiosyncratic features which typically give prominence to the humorous effect or tone. Furthermore, humorous anecdotes can be used in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language as a way of developing the awareness of pragmatic and intercultural factors concerning both the conventions of the writing of short narrative texts and the underlying social and cultural assumptions which enable us to make sense of a humorous story. More specifically, humorous anecdotes, like

1 This publication is the result of the work carried out in two research projects financed by UAM-CAM, one granted for the year 2005 on “Interacciones entre lenguaje, cognición y cultura” directed by Dr. Manuela Romano, and another one granted for the year 2008 on “Intercultural Communication” (CCG07-UAM/HUM-1829), coordinated by myself. I wish to thank the students from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, the students from the University of Hawai’i and the students and lecturer from the University of New York, who so kindly wrote the anecdotes that have been analysed in this study. Without them, this study would not have been possible.

The Anecdote as Humorous Narrative 363

other humorous texts, can provide valuable information regarding the similarities and differences in preferred cultural values which are expressed discursively by native and non-native writers of English.

The main objectives of the present article are thus the following: (i) to identify and describe the main features of the humorous anecdote as a genre, (ii) to identify similarities and differences in a sample of written anecdotes of native and non-native writers of English, and (iii) to conclude by pointing out the implications for the teaching and learning of pragmatic and intercultural awareness.

2. The humorous anecdote as a genre

The anecdote is described by Bauman as “[…] a short, humorous narrative, purporting to recount a true incident involving real people” (2005: 22). It is worth pointing out that, according to this definition, the anecdote is understood as inherently humorous in nature. Bauman further makes reference to the importance of oral transmission in the concept of the anecdote, though, he argues, written anecdotes have also formed part of the Western literary tradition for centuries. The oral origins of the anecdote no doubt have influenced the fact that anecdotes “[…] tend to be heavily dialogic”, and also typically have a punchline rendered in direct speech (Bauman 2005: 22). With regard to the discourse structure of the anecdote, Bauman explains that its characteristic formal features “[…] include a focus on a single scene and a tendency to limit attention to two actors, generally a named principal and an interlocutor” (2005: 22).

In the present article, an adapted version of Labov’s model of narrative (1972) is used in order to analyse humorous anecdotes. For this purpose, I draw from the description of narrative as presented by Butt et al. (2000) in the Systemic Functional Linguistics tradition, from Toolan’s (1988, 2006) critical review of various approaches to narrative and from the description of humorous texts in Attardo (2001, 2005), Chiaro (1992), Norrick (2005) and Ross (1998).

The prototypical oral narrative as described by Labov (1972) consists of the following parts:

! An abstract which encapsulates the story. ! An orientation which introduces the relevant information

regarding the characters and the setting (when where, how). ! A complicating action, which describes a series of

chronologically ordered events. ! Evaluation: the means used by the narrator to indicate the point of

the narrative.

Chapter Seventeen 364

! A resolution, which describes what finally happened. ! A coda, which indicates the narrative has finished.

Although Labov’s model was developed for the analysis of oral narratives2, it has been used extensively to analyse also written forms of narrative. Interesting adaptations of this model have been developed in Systemic Functional Linguistics (see, for example, Butt et al. 2000, Toolan 1988, 2006) and in Humour theories (see, for example, Attardo 2001, 2005), among others.

In Butt et al. (2000) a chapter is devoted to the description of basic text types. According to these authors, telling stories is a text type which includes three main subtypes, recount, narrative and news story. Within these, narratives are described as follows:

A narrative is a special kind of story that is valued highly in English-speaking cultures. Narratives are structured to be entertaining and to teach cultural values. In Narratives, normal events are disrupted and language is used to build up suspense around the disruption so that it reaches a crisis point. The way that characters in the story confront and resolve the crisis teaches the audience about ways of behaving which are valued in the culture. (Butt et al 2000: 225) More specifically, what characterises narrative and distinguishes it

from other story telling text types is that it constructs “[…] a pattern of events with a problematic and/or unexpected outcome that entertains and instructs the reader or listener” (Butt et al. 2000: 217).

Two aspects of the descriptions of narrative presented above are particularly significant for the description of the humorous anecdote. In the first place, the idea that language - both at the level of lexicogrammatical choice and the discourse-textual level - is structured in a way to create suspense and to lead to a disruption of events which subsequently leads to a resolution. This description is useful in order to understand the way in which the humorous effect is progressively built up in an anecdote, how expectations are defeated and disrupted and how this conflict is finally resolved, usually by means of a punchline. Second, the idea that narrative is structured to be entertaining and that it reflects and also teaches cultural values. It can be argued that humorous texts undoubtedly have an entertaining purpose, among others, and that there is an instructive dimension which is reflected in the evaluative part of the

2 For a cross-cultural study of solidarity in Spanish and English oral radio narratives see Romano, Hidalgo and Molina (2006).


text (Also see Toolan 1988, 2006). This point is particularly interesting when the humorous anecdote is viewed from the perspective of the possible applications to the development of intercultural and pragmatic awareness of non-native speakers of a language. Thus, humorous anecdotes typically focus on events which form part of specific socio-cultural experiences which are evaluated by the writers/narrators according to already existing patterns of values and beliefs.

The fact that narratives reflect our cultural values and social identities is pointed out by Toolan, who explains that “[…] the kinds of stories (and story contents) we choose to tell each other, and in particular the things we seem to agree are the kinds of issues that make stories ‘non-pointless’ and tellable, reflect and disclose our cultural presuppositions and values.” (Toolan 1988: 164).

Continuing with the description of the narrative structure, Butt et al. argue that the main structural elements of a narrative are those shown in table 17-1 below (2000: 222-223).

Orientation (obligatory): ! to set up what is to follow by introducing who, where, when, ie.

the setting and the narrator.

Complication (obligatory): ! A sequence of events disrupted creating a problem or crisis for

the characters. ! The characters evaluate the problematic events to give them

significance.

Resolution (obligatory): ! The problem/crisis is resolved and normal events resume.

Coda (optional): ! Shows how characters have been changed by the events. ! Evaluates the whole incident.

Table 17-1: Structural elements of a narrative (adapted from Butt et al. 2000)

If we compare this model with Labov’s original model of narrative, the

main differences which can be observed have to do with the absence of the abstract, on the one hand, and the introduction of evaluation as a functional dimension of the categories complication and coda, on the


other. With regard to the category of evaluation, Butt et al. (2000: 222-223) further explain that evaluation in the complication is realised by means of appraisal indicators, such as repetition to build up suspense, and the expression of attitude and affect (positive and negative evaluation; evaluative adjectives and adverbs, words with specific connotations, etc.).

In the analysis carried out in the present article, I depart from these models in order to propose a prototypical structure of humorous anecdotes. For this purpose, an effort is made to explore whether the anecdotes contain an introductory section which serves a similar function to the abstract and to identify where the evaluation is situated.

Turning now to previous studies of humorous texts and, more specifically, to how other humorous texts may be relevant for the study of the anecdote, Attardo (2005: 225) points out the similarities between the structure of narratives and the structure of humorous texts. Indeed, it has often been argued that humorous texts are serious narratives with one or more punchlines.

Attardo explains that jokes, one of the humorous texts which has most frequently been analysed, typically have a three part structure, with a set up, a complication and a resolution, that is, the nuclear parts of a narrative. Norrick describes the joke as consisting of a build-up leading to a trigger and ending with a punchline (2005: 256-57). The relation between build-up and punchline is described as follows: “The build-up composes the body of the joke, and the punchline structurally closes the joke. The punchline reverses the sense we would expect from the build-up, and forces a previously unexpected sense to our attention” (Norrick 2005: 256).

A representative feature of humorous texts is the resolution of a conflict, which is typically explained in terms of one (or combinations of) three main theoretical approaches to the concept of humour: the incongruity approach, the aggression approach and the release approach. Within linguistic theory the incongruity model is the one which has been most influential, though it has sometimes been combined with or even substituted by the aggression model. In humorous narrative texts, the punchline typically contributes to the resolution by defeating a previously created expectation. The problem-solution pattern has been used by Chiaro in combination with the incongruity model in order to account for the structure of narrative jokes (Chiaro 1992: 48).

While jokes as a genre have been described in numerous studies (for an overview and representative examples, see Attardo 2001 and Norrick 1993, 2005), other forms of humorous discourse have received unequal attention. Attardo argues that most humorous texts indeed consist of a


serious plot with one or more jab lines and/or punchlines (2001, 2005). The author describes jab lines as “[…] freely occurring humour instances” (2005: 226), and are thus distinguished from punchlines in that the latter occur at the end of the narrative and structurally disrupt the narrative, while jab lines do not. In the present article, one of the aspects that are explored is whether the anecdotes are inherently humorous or not.

3. Data, methodology and research questions

The data consists of seventeen anecdotes written by Spanish university students and eleven anecdotes written by American university students and a British lecturer. The Spanish students are in their second, third or fourth year in the degree of English at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. The American students are students of Spanish and/or translation at the University of Hawai’i and the University of New York. The students were assigned the following task, to be carried out in English, without a time limit:

“Write a humorous anecdote you have experienced (about 600 words)” As the sample of anecdotes is small, the method of analysis is

qualitative, though the numbers for each of the categories that are analysed and discussed have been calculated in order to obtain an indication regarding the similarities and differences in the preferences of native and non-native writers. The results, however, are tentative.

The following research questions were set up with regard to two main aspects of the humorous anecdotes, the generic structure and the kind of humour and humorous effect.

Research questions: A. With regard to the structure of the anecdote as a genre: 1. What is the prototypical structure of the written anecdote? 2. What are the main parts of the anecdote? 3. With regard to similarities and differences in the structure: 3.1. Are there any sections which are favoured by the native or non native writers? 3.2. Is there a crisis point? Is there an Opening set up and a Coda? 3.3. Where is the punchline situated in native and non-native anecdotes? 3.4. How are jab lines and punchlines distributed?


B. With regard to the humorous effect and related socio-cultural factors: 1. Is the event described humorous in itself? If it isn’t, what makes it humorous? 2. Is the event perceived as embarrassing? 3. Is the butt of the humour self or other? 4. What kind of humour is expressed?

In section 4 below I propose a model of the prototypical structure of

anecdotes. This model is data-driven, as it is the structure which is observed to be typically present in the collected anecdotes. In the following sections I explain the structure of the anecdotes and discuss the research questions in detail.

4. A model for analysing written humorous anecdotes

Taking as a point of departure Bauman’s (2005) definition of the anecdote as a short humorous narrative which recounts a true event involving real people, and having analysed the sample of anecdotes written by native and non-native writers of English, it can be said that the prototypical humorous anecdote has the following structure, shown in Table 17-2:

! Opening set up: sets the frame for the anecdote with a general

comment. ! Orientation: introduces the setting (when, where, who) and the

background to the anecdote. ! Complication: a series of chronologically ordered events leading

to a crisis point. ! Resolution: The resolution of the conflict created in the

complication, typically including a punchline. ! Coda: An evaluation of the anecdote and of the consequences of

the events.

Table 17-2: Prototypical structure of humorous anecdotes

Of these sections, the orientation, complication and resolution are obligatory, while the opening set up and coda are optional. Following Butt et al. (2000), evaluation is not included as a structural category or section but rather as a part of the functions of some of the categories and of the


text in itself. Following Toolan, evaluation “[…] consists of all the means used to establish and sustain the point, the contextual significance and tellability, or reportability, of a story” (1988: 156). It may be realised in various ways and may appear at any point of the narrative, but typically occurs in the complication “[…] often particularly clustered around the ‘hinge’ or climactic point of the action, just before –and in effect delaying – the resolving action or event.” (1988: 156).

While the categories outlined above follow the structural pattern described, evaluation may be present in one or more sections and by using a variety of linguistic resources which reveal features about the writer’s attitudinal and affective stance and style.

1. Opening set up: The opening set up is a category which may well carry out a similar function to the Labovian abstract, in the sense that it introduces the topic and provides a frame for the narrative, but it is characterised by the presence of evaluative language. This may be so either because the opening set up contains a metalinguistic comment on the difficulties of writing a humorous anecdote, or because it makes reference to the particular event which is told by providing an introductory evaluation.

2. Orientation. It introduces the setting and the background for the anecdotes. The place, the time, the characters, the situation in which the event takes place. It also introduces the background knowledge and frames necessary to understand the problem which arises and how it is resolved, and, consequently, it is crucial in determining how the resolution and punch line are interpreted and received by the reader.

3. The complication consists of a series of connected events which is the nucleus of the story being told. It also sets up the problem which eventually gives rise to the humorous situation. This problem, following Butt et al. (2000) is called crisis point.

4. The resolution consists of the solution of the problem and typically includes the punch line.

5. The coda. In a well developed anecdote we can find rather complex codas which include several parts such as:

- An evaluation of the resolution. - Expression of feelings about the event (crisis and resolution). - A description of whether there was laughter or not, and what was

the response of the other characters in anecdote. - An evaluation of the narrator’s role in story and the consequences

of the event.


- Seeking reader’s empathy (e.g. who does not find funny…?) - An explanation of the resolution and punchline by the

interlocutor or another character. 6. The evaluation, may be spread throughout the anecdote and/or

appear at specific points of the anecdote (typically opening set up, complication and coda). It expresses attitudes and affect (appraisal) towards the events told. Typical markers of attitude are: epistemic verbs and adverbs, expressing opinion, belief, doubt, etc.: I think, maybe, obviously etc; typical markers of affect (regarding the expression of feelings), evaluative adjectives and nouns: good, bad, horrendous, funny, terrible, embarrassing, etc.

With regard to the position of the punchline, it may be argued that the expected position is in the resolution. However, as shown in the sections on the results and discussion below, there is some variation regarding the position of punchlines. This may require a distinction, following Attardo (2001), between punchlines and jablines. In the present article, punchlines are those which typically appear in the resolution and consequently provide a disruption of the narrative event, typically contributing to the resolution by defeating a created expectation. Jab lines, on the other hand, may occur at any point of the narrative and do not disrupt the narrative sequence of events.

A second less frequent pattern of humorous anecdotes was identified in the sample of anecdotes. This pattern has the structure shown in table 17-3. In this pattern there is an orientation or set up introductory section which provides a frame for several shorter anecdotes and is closed by a coda which provides an evaluation on the general topic shared by the mini-anecdotes. Each of the mini-anecdotes may have a complication-resolution structure, but they may be so short as to occupy a couple of sentences only in some cases. This pattern is illustrated in table 17-3:

Orientation-set up Mini-Anecdote1 Mini-Anecdote 2 Mini-Anecdote 3 (Coda)

Table 17-3: Recursive pattern of humorous anecdotes


Below, some examples of the anecdotes collected in the sample are discussed. As some of the anecdotes are rather long, in some cases they have been abbreviated in order to select the most relevant sections. The structural parts of the anecdote which have been described above are indicated after the relevant section in capital letters.

4.1. An example of a non-native anecdote with prototypical structure

This example provides an illustration of a non-native anecdote which has the prototypical narrative pattern. <Fa2001>3

A humorous anecdote is the most difficult thing to write down, because that depends on one’s sense of humour and how is written to find it funny. In my case, the anecdote is not going to be as funny as it is to me. OPENING SET UP ____________________________________________________________

The setting of this “funny” anecdote is Canada, about six years ago, I was sixteen year-old-girl from Spain, enjoying a new period abroad for the first time, as a lot of Spanish students there. […]

As any teenager boy, there was the main character of the anecdote. Feeling powerful as the lion king, because every girl was in love with him (something that I am still wondering why…) and because he was supposed to be funny, etc. […]

3 The anecdotes were classified according to a coding system which included the following information: the writer’s gender (F for female and M for male), the writer’s country of origin (no coding for Spanish writers, “us” for American writers), the year of the degree in English studies in the case of Spanish writers and the number of the anecdote starting from 001. Thus, Fa2001 means Spanish female writer in the second year of the degree in English; Fus001 means female American writer. The year of the degree was only coded in the anecdotes written by non-native writers and not in the anecdotes written by native speakers as it was not considered relevant.


ORIENTATION WITH EVALUATION ____________________________________________________________

So, he with more Spaniards got the bus to home. The bus was busy, and people were behaving as scavenging animals waiting for a piece of food, in this case, for a seat. Then suddenly, a man got up to get out the bus.

So, the super-boy was going fast to get the seat, but then, a little

person, as an elf, jumped and got the set… Oh! Poor Retard! (I thought while I was laughing). COMPLICATION AND jab line 1 ____________________________________________________________

Now, he was a little bit embarrassed because he was the superhero and he did not get the seat, so he said powerfully: “¡Guau! Quién no corre, vuela”, in English is something like: “Wow! People flying instead running”. This was said shouting to be heard by every Spanish speaker on the bus, while they were laughing (because when you are abroad and you think that your mother tongue will not be understood, you feel powerful to be painful with your comments). COMPLICATION AND CRISIS POINT and jab line 2 WITH EVALUATION OF CRISIS POINT ____________________________________________________________

Then, the little Canadian elf, turned her head and said in a perfect Spanish: “Si, haber sido mas rápido idiota”, the possible translation: “Yes, you should have been faster, idiot!” RESOLUTION AND PUNCH LINE ____________________________________________________________

A cold silent embraced the bus, and a red-light face was blinking at the distance (my distance from it). But that silent was broken, by me. I burst out laughing. […]

I remember that I did not get well with him anymore, either with his friends, but it did not matter, he was my funny anecdote for the rest of the summer. The absurd thing about the situation was that I seemed to be the witch of the story, but the real thing was that my inopportune laugh was the general thinking of everybody there; because, who does not find funny a stupid guy who thinks he is the best and he is just a clown and a funny elf “slap” on his face??.


CODA ____________________________________________________________

This anecdote is a good illustration of the most frequent pattern in non-native anecdotes. It contains all the sections of the pattern, including the opening set up. In this introductory section, the writer makes reference to the difficulties of writing a humorous anecdote effectively. The orientation provides the necessary background information to understand the event. Interestingly, in this case it includes both information about the time, place and characters, and also details about the protagonist of the anecdote which evoke very specific cultural knowledge (the teenager who feels he’s the lion king). The complication describes the relevant events in chronological order and contains two jab lines, the second of which coincides with the crisis point. The resolution contains the punchline, which, typically, defeats an expectation created in the complication and orientation. The coda is rather long and contains interesting evaluative language which makes reference to the consequences of the event, the evaluation of the event and address to the reader for empathy. Evaluation is spread throughout the anecdote, though it is worth mentioning that it is present just before and after the crisis point to create suspense.

With regard to socio-cultural aspects of the humour described, it is worth pointing out that the type of humour is what Ross (1998) describes as target humour, that is, humour which is directed at a target which is representative of a specific class. In this case, it is the young male teenager who tends to brag and is overconfident. It thus is an event in which the butt of the humour is other rather than self, and it is not described as embarrassing.

4.2. An example of a prototypical native anecdote

The following anecdote is an illustration of prototypical anecdotes written by a native speaker.

<Fus003> I have had a lot of humorous things happen to me in my 22 years of life, but most of them I am either too embarrassed to tell, or they are not appropriate for a scholastic research project.


OPENING SET UP AND EVALUATION ____________________________________________________________ However, when I was a freshman in high school I had something pretty laughable happen to me. Well first of all, I was on the power lifting team for my high school, and that idea on its own is something to laugh about. Just remembering when I would work out in the weight room with all these huge athletes and I would be lifting my puny little weights thinking that I was really tough, even though I was smallest girl/person in general that was on that team.

Most people have had that horrible dream that they are either in their underwear or naked and they are in high school, well what happened to me was somewhat similar, but not quite as bad. SET UP ____________________________________________________________ So there I was, in the athletic gym after school one day, getting my ‘lift’ on, thinking I was the coolest freshman in high school, especially since the hottest senior boy would pay me the just a little bit of attention everyday in the weight room. I begin my daily workout routine of lifting and what not, doing some arms (no weight, pretty much just the bar) and then I head over to the squat bar. I have always had really strong legs, and squats were always my favorite exercise to do, because I could do the most weight with it. I begin doing my warm-ups of light weight and proceed to keep stacking the weight on the bar and doing more sets of higher weight, until I am stopped in mid motion by what at the time was probably the worst thing that could have happened to a 14 year old girl. COMPLICATION ____________________________________________________________Half way down squatting, my warm up pants decide that they need to split down the crack of my behind and expose the new thong I decided to wear that day that I thought made me feel so much older and mature than 14. So there I am, mortified. Track pants split down the seam of my butt, in a weight room filled with older boys, and a thong hanging out that I should not have been wearing in the first place! COMPLICATION AND CRISIS POINT WITH PUNCHLINE ____________________________________________________________ I was stuck. I didn’t know what to do, or who to silently wave over to help me get me out of that situation and into some new pants that didn’t have a


big hole in the butt. Eventually I did, a nice older girl came and rescued me from my nightmare, and I wasn’t too embarrassed by the entire gym, but I was mortified for weeks. RESOLUTION ____________________________________________________________I never could look at the cute older boy the same again, after I knew he saw my pants split down my crack! So now to this very day, I never wear those kinds of pants when I am doing squats, I stick to the stretchy kind CODA ____________________________________________________________ This anecdote illustrates some of the features which are found in the native anecdotes. It contains an opening set up, in which the topic of the humorous anecdote is commented. The orientation provides relevant background information and the complication leads to a crisis point which coincides with the punchline. As is discussed in section 4 below, there is greater variation in the native anecdotes with regard to the position of the punchline. Thus, while in the non-native anecdotes the punchline tends to appear in the resolution, in the native anecdotes there are several possible positions. Evaluation is spread throughout the anecdote and is also present just before and after the crisis point.

The type of humour is physical, a young woman being exposed in her underwear. Physical humour is one of the most frequent types both in the native and in the non-native anecdotes. With regard to the butt of the humour, it focuses on self, as is the case in most of the native anecdotes, and the situation is felt as embarrassing.

4.3. An example of an anecdote with a non-prototypical pattern

To end this section, a non-prototypical anecdote is reproduced and commented on briefly below. <Fus004> A pie

A pie, this expression has new meaning for me. Thirty-five days ago it signified a tasty fruit filled pastry at times enjoyed with ice cream – most likely vanilla after dinner, but today no longer. Today it describes the type of journey I have completed on June 13, 2007 to Santiago, Spain. A pie or


“by foot” in English is how I chose to do the Camino de Santiago, a walking or bicycle tour of northern Spain. SET UP: OPENING PRE-SEQUENCE WITH PUNCHLINE ____________________________________________________________My journey began in the city of Burgos, 500km later I have found myself smarter, stronger and truly in love with the country. I’ve experienced countless epiphanies during my walk and I write this essay to share them with the world. SET UP WITH EVALUATION ____________________________________________________________FIRST MINI-ANECDOTE

First, I have experienced a true joy in life that I have captured on the Camino, and this is the fact that I enjoy victory. SET UP WITH PUNCHLINE 1 ____________________________________________________________I enjoy beating others in competition, sometimes seemingly small, but still satisfying. I’ve experienced this joy on the Camino while walking from albergue to albergue, walking past the elderly. COMPLICATION AND PUNCHINE 2 I believe a part of human nature is to desire self-development and improvement. On the Camino, after about a week of walking I developed an ability to walk faster than older pilgrims. I enjoyed this ability, At times the pilgrims were about 45 years older than myself but still felt satisfied with my capacity to walk faster than these people. COMPLICATION AND PUNCHLINE ____________________________________________________________ […]

At times I fear the answer to this question but I also anticipate its resolution. In summary, I recommend the Camino to Santiago to anyone. It promotes the preservation of culture and natural resources, like wine and muscle relaxants, because the quest would not be the same without them.


PUNCHLINE 11

The landscapes and attractive Spanish men, specifically Mallorcans, seen during my Camino were truly spectacular and I recognize that these images will impress lasting memories in my mind for a lifetime. PUNCHLINE 12 CODA ____________________________________________________________

This anecdote illustrates clearly the non-prototypical recursive pattern, with an overall frame created by the orientation and the coda, and which contains three shorter anecdotes connected sequentially and thematically. Here I have only reproduced the first mini-anecdote. The structure of this anecdote is completely different from the prototypical patterns which characterise most of the anecdotes. Thus, it contains a great deal of evaluative language, so that the complicating action, that is the actual events, remains almost in the background, and more prominence is given to the experience of the cultural differences which are described. The structure is more similar to a joke structure, with a build up and resolution with punchline, rather than a complicating action with a crisis point and a resolution of a problem. The defeated expectations are cultural assumptions evoked from the build up.

5. Results and discussion

In this section I take up the research questions put forward in section 3 above and discuss the findings in the sample of anecdotes. The first group of questions concerns the structure of the anecdotes and the similarities and differences between the native and the non-native anecdotes. The questions were the following: 1. What is the prototypical structure of the written anecdote? 2. What are the main parts of the anecdote?

Table 17-4 below shows the distribution of the preferred patterns in the anecdotes. Both native writers and Spanish learners show a preference for pattern 1, the prototypical structure. However, while there was only one instance of use of the recursive pattern in the non-native anecdotes, three instances were found in the native writers. These were written by three American students of Asian origin, two female and one male.


Anecdotes Pattern 1 (prototype)

Pattern 2 (recursive anecdotes)

Native English writers

8 3

Non-native Spanish writers

16 1

Table 17-4: Distribution of preferred patterns in anecdotes

Turning now to the similarities and differences in the presence of specific sections in the anecdotes of native and non-native writers, I set the following research questions: 3. With regard to similarities and differences in the structure: 3.1. Are there any sections which are favoured by the native or non native writers? 3.2. Is there a crisis point? Is there an Opening set up and a Coda? 3.3. Where is the punchline situated in native and non-native anecdotes? 3.4. How are jab lines and punchlines distributed?

Some interesting differences in the choice of specific sections can be observed. The analysis shows that the anecdotes written by native writers show a preference for having structures with an opening set up and/or coda. These sections typically carry a great part of the evaluation of the anecdotes written by native writers. These aspects are shown in table 17-5 below.

Anecdotes With Opening set up

With crisis point

Native 6 8 Non-native 3 16

Table 17-5: Choice of specific sections in the anecdotes

Table 17-5 shows the choices of specific sections in the anecdotes. While most anecdotes, written both by native and non-native speakers, contain a crisis point in the complication (8 native anecdotes out of 11 and 16 non-native anecdotes out of 17), native writers show a clear preference for the choice of an opening set up (6 out of 11) while this section is not favoured by non-native writers (3 out of 17). It should be noted that


Spanish writers compensate the lack of the opening set up which typically contains an evaluative overall frame, by inserting evaluation in the orientation and in the complication.

With regard to the presence of a crisis point in the complication, it is interesting to point out that in the case of the native anecdotes, the three which do not contain a crisis point do not have this structural element probably because the structure of the anecdote is not the prototypical pattern. Of these three anecdotes, two present the recursive pattern, in which three or more mini-anecdotes are told in a structure which resembles the joke structure, with complication-resolution patterns in one or two sentences, and one is an example of an anecdote which does not have an obvious problem-solution pattern and thus also lacks crisis point.

With regard to the distribution of the evaluation, native and non-native anecdotes showed a similar preference for having evaluation after the crisis point. However, while native writers show a preference for including evaluation in the opening set up and the coda, non-native writers do not. These choices are shown in table 17-6 below. Anecdotes After

crisis point

Compli -cation

Coda Opening set up

Orientation Opening or Orientation and coda

Native 5 5 6 Non-native

6 3 2 — 4 3

Table 17-6: Distribution of the evaluation in the anecdotes

The total figures in table 17-6 do not correspond to the number of anecdotes, since one anecdote may have evaluation in more than one section, for example after the crisis point and in the coda.

With regard to the position of the punchlines and/or jab lines, there is a clear difference between native and non-native anecdotes. As shown in table 17-7 below, non-native writers typically include the punchline in the resolution (11 out of 17), while in native anecdotes there is a much greater variation. This may indicate that native writers have a preference for having some kind of jab line throughout the text, probably to establish the humorous tone and, in some cases, to create suspense.


Anecdote Resolution Complication Other No punchline

Native 3 2 5 1 Non-native 11 4 --- 2 Table 17-7: Position of the punchline line in the anecdotes

In the native anecdotes, the category other in table 17-7 includes anecdotes which have punchlines in the resolution and coda (1 anecdote), anecdotes with jab lines in the set up (1 anecdote), anecdotes with a jab line in the coda (1 anecdote), anecdotes with jab lines in set up, complication and coda (1 anecdote), and anecdotes with punchlines in joke structure (2 anecdotes).

Regarding the number of punchlines/jab lines in the anecdotes, the results are shown in table 17-8 below: Anecdote One Between 2

and five Over ten No punchline

Native 9 -- 1 1 Non-native 11 4 --- 2 Table 17-8: Number of punchlines/jabl ines in the anecdotes

Table 17-8 shows that both in native and non-native anecdotes there is a preference for the structure with one single punchline. The cases with more than one punchline are typically those which do not have the prototypical structure of anecdotes but, rather, the recursive structure.

Taking into account the question whether laughter was mentioned in the anecdotes, 10 out of 17 non-native anecdotes make reference to laughter, and 5 out of 11 native anecdotes do so.

I turn now to the second group of questions, that is, those regarding the characteristics of the humorous effect and its relation to socio-cultural factors. B. With regard to the humorous effect and related socio-cultural factors: 1. Is the event described humorous in itself? If it isn’t, what makes it humorous? 2. Is it seen as embarrassing? 3. Is the butt of the humour self or other? 4. What kind of humour is expressed?


In relation to the question whether the event described in the anecdote is humorous in itself, 12 out of 17 non-native and 8 out of 11 native anecdotes recount humorous events. In those cases in which the event is not humorous, the characteristics of the event make it humorous on remembering it. The types of events remembered are shown in table 17-9 below. Both native and non native writers make reference to events which describe problems or difficulties shared with friends, and almost scary experiences, such as suffering an accident. However, while non-native writers include embarrassing events with sexual implications and childhood memories, native writers choose unfamiliar situations, some of which have to do with experiences in different countries and cultures from their own.

Regarding the question whether the event is described as embarrassing, 4 non-native writers describe the event as embarrassing and 2 native writers do so too. These results seem to show that embarrassment is not typically associated to a humorous experience; however, what is significant is that all the writers, both native and non-native, who described the event as embarrassing are female. This could indicate that there is a gender-based association between a situation perceived as humorous and the feeling of embarrassment. If not humorous, what makes the anecdote humorous? Non-native:

- Problems, difficulties shared with friends. - Almost scary experience. - Embarassment, sexual implications. - Childhood memories.

Native:

- Problems, difficulties shared with friends. - Almost scary experience. - Unfamiliar situations (giving birth to a goat). - Social and cultural unfamiliarity.

Table 17-9: Type of event in the anecdotes


With regard to the question whether the butt of the humour is self or other, the results are shown in table 17-10 below: Native

female Native male

Non-native female

Non-native male

Self 4 4 6 2 Other 2 -- 4 3 Other with self involved

1 2

Table 17-10: Butt of the humours anecdote

The results in table 17-10 seem to show that while in the native anecdotes there is a clear preference for choosing self as the butt of humour, in the non-native anecdotes this is not so clear. Indeed, the results for the non-native anecdotes seem to indicate that there may be differences in gender, since 6 female writers choose self as butt of the humour, while only 2 males do so.

To end, with regard to the kind of humour which characterises the event, some similarities and differences can be observed between the native and the non-native anecdotes. The results are shown in table 17-11 below

Among the types of humorous event which are favoured by both native and non-native writers, physical humour is the most obvious case, while others include mistaken identity and remembering a difficult event with friends. Differences include the choice of nonsense and absurd and attacking a target by non-native writers, while native writers choose socio-cultural humour and breaking of taboos. What kind of humour? Non-native: Physical 3 Nonsense and absurd 3 Taboo breaching 2 Attacking a target 2 Mistaken assumption 1 Verbal- A child’s questions and explanations 1 Double script-imagination-two worlds 1 Mistaken identity 2 Mistaken address 1 Remembering 2


Native: Physical 5 Socio-cultural 4 Breaking of taboos 1 Mistaken identity 1 Wordplay 1 Remembering difficult event with friends 1 Table 17-11: Kind of humour in the anecdotes

6. Conclusions

In this article I have analysed the structure of humorous anecdotes written by native and Spanish non-native writers of English. I have argued that a prototypical pattern can be identified, which corresponds to a narrative structure which characteristically has a crisis point in the complication which is solved in the resolution by means of a punchline. A second type of pattern, which I have called recursive, has also been identified. In this pattern, several shorter anecdotes are included in a broader frame. Thus, it may be concluded that the structure of the anecdote ranges from a more extended narrative text which focuses on one single event, to a collection of shorter anecdotes which have a structure similar to the joke. With regard to similarities and differences between the anecdotes written by native and non-native writers of English, the following observations can be made. With regard to the structure, while native writers seem to show a preference for a framed structure, that is, a structure with opening set up and/or coda, non-native anecdotes do not. This seems to be connected to the way in which evaluation is distributed throughout the texts, since in the native anecdotes evaluation typically occurs in the opening set up and in the coda, in addition to the complication, while evaluation may appear in all the sections of the non-native anecdotes.

With regard to the type of humour, both native and non-native writers show a preference for writing about events which have to do with physical exposure (nakedness or being in underwear), though there are differences in some of the preferred categories, as non-native writers include nonsense and absurd and attacking a target, while native writers write about unfamiliar experiences and experiences in other cultures. Finally, some indications were found that there could be differences not only between native and non-native anecdotes but also between female and male writers.


Thus, regarding the question whether the butt of the humour was self or other, while most native writers, both female and male, chose self as butt of the humour, in the case of non-native anecdotes less than half chose self. However, in several other anecdotes the butt of the humour was other with self involved in some way. These results, together with the fact that there are non-native anecdotes which focus on attacking a target could indicate that humour has a more prominent aggressive dimension in the Spanish writers than in the native writers of English, though this would have to be explored further. In relation to differences in gender, it is worth mentioning that some of the events were described as being embarrassing, but this occurred only in anecdotes written by females, both native and non-native. This could indicate that the feeling of embarrassment as a response to a humorous situation is acceptable or adequate for a female writer, while it may not be so for a male. However, this would need further research too.

These findings have interesting applications for the development of pragmatic and intercultural awareness. It would be interesting to explore more in detail whether the structure of anecdotes written by Spanish and English speaking writers differs also when the Spanish writers are writing in their own language. The implications for the teaching of writing are that it may be advisable to make Spanish students aware of the fact that anecdotes written by native speakers of English tend to be framed by clear opening and closing sections with metalinguistic comments on the text. It would also be worth comparing more in detail how evaluation is distributed in the anecdotes and what word categories are preferred by native and non-native writers. Finally, a further development of the present research could be to explore whether the focus on self as the butt of the humorous anecdote is a more general trait in humorous narratives written by English speakers, while this does not seem to be so prominent in Spanish writers, and whether the expression of the feeling of embarrassment is indeed restricted to female writers.

References

Attardo, S. Humorous Texts: A Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.

—. “Humour studies and narrative”. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.L. Ryan, 225-226. London: Routledge, 2005.


Bauman, R. “Anecdote”. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.L. Ryan, 22. London: Routledge, 2005.

Butt, D. et al. Using Functional Grammar. An Explorer’s Guide. Macquarie University: National Centre for English Language Teaching and Research, 2000.

Labov, W. “The transformation of experience in narrative syntax”. In Language in the Inner City. Studies in the Black English Vernacular, 354-396. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972.

Norrick, N. Conversational Joking. Humour in Everyday Talk. Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993.

—. “Joke”. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by D. Herman, M. Jahn and M.L. Ryan, 266-267. London: Routledge, 2005.

Chiaro, D. The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play. London: Routledge, 1992.

Romano, M., L. Hidalgo and C. Molina. “Towards a cognitive approach of speaker solidarity”. Paper presented at the V Congreso Internacional Asociación Española Lingüística Cognitiva, AELCO 2006, Universidad de Murcia, 2006.

Ross, A. The Language of Humour. London: Routledge, 1998. Toolan, M. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. London:

Routledge, 1988. —. “Telling stories”. In The Art of English: Everyday Creativity, edited by

J. Maybin and J. Swann, 54-102. London: Routledge, 2006.

PART V:

OTHER METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES ON PRAGMATICS TEACHING

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

IS IT POSSIBLE TO FORMALIZE PRAGMATICS? IMPLICATIONS FOR COMPUTER ASSISTED

LANGUAGE LEARNING

GEMMA BEL-ENGUIX AND M. DOLORES JIMÉNEZ-LÓPEZ

1. Introduction

“Learning a new language means learning new forms of expressions in new contexts of communication” (Pennington 1996: 7). This assertion states clearly that to learn a language is not only to acquire a “grammatical” competence but implies to learn a “pragmatic” competence. The pragmatic competence entails a variety of abilities concerned with the use and interpretation of language in contexts.

Pragmatics has been defined as the study of people’s comprehension and production of linguistic action in context. In the field of language teaching/learning, it is of special interest the area of intercultural pragmatics, this being the “study of non-native speakers’ use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language” (Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993: 3). Pragmatics becomes, therefore, a very important topic in the area of language teaching.

On the other hand, taking into account the role of computers in our everyday life, it is very important to develop computational linguistic methods and tools that can be used in intelligent computer assisted language learning. The interplay between methodologies for teaching languages and techniques coming from the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing can help in the hard problem of teaching/learning pragmatics, having important implications in the fields of intercultural pragmatics and language teaching.

Now, in programming computers to interact with humans in natural language, one of the major difficulties is the problem of providing the

Is It Possible to Formalize Pragmatics?

389

machine with enough knowledge of the world. It is quite hard to give the computer the ability to produce both appropriate utterances and appropriate interpretations of utterances from the communicative point of view. The solution to these problems implies to search for a mechanism able to formalize pragmatics. In this paper, we propose to use a framework developed in the field of computer science in order to get a formalization of pragmatics: membrane systems.

Membrane Systems were introduced in P!un (2000) as a powerful generation device based in the behaviour of cellular membranes. Membrane computing can be included in the area of natural computing. Despite its microbiological inspiration, the model is described as a mathematical and formal computational device. Membrane systems provide a powerful framework for formalizing any kind of interaction, both among agents and among agents and the context. Their flexibility and intuitive functioning makes them very suitable for applications, not only to computer science, but also for computing real life events like interaction between societies. For linguistics, the main advantage of membranes over other generative methods is that membranes can be understood as contexts, providing a suitable framework for the formalization of pragmatics and interaction between different agents or contexts.

Those features of membranes make them a suitable framework to deal with pragmatic issues. The ideas introduced here are still seminal, and a better study is needed in order to demonstrate that such formalism can be useful for description and implementation of pragmatics, but taking into account the advantages of this model over classical models of computing, we are quite convinced that the question posed in the title of this paper can be answered in the affirmative.

2. Language learning and pragmatic competence

Language learning is a multi-level task that integrates elements such as words, syntax, pronunciation and culture. According to Pennington (1996: 7), learning a new language means learning new forms of expressions in new contexts of communication. Therefore, to learn a language is not only to acquire “grammatical” competence, but implies to learn a “pragmatic” competence. The pragmatic competence allows us to use language in concrete situations, to utter relevant arguments and to be considered as competent conversants. Therefore, in order to communicate successfully in a target language, pragmatic competence in L2 must be reasonably well developed.

Chapter Eighteen 390

But what is exactly pragmatic competence? Pragmatic competence entails a variety of abilities concerned with the use and interpretation of language in context. According to Barron (2003: 10), pragmatic competence includes:

1) Knowledge of linguistic resources available in a given language for realising illocutions.

2) Knowledge of the aspects of speech acts. 3) Knowledge of the appropriate contextual use of the particular

languages’ linguistic resources. In Bachman’s model (Bachman 1990: 87), language competence is

subdivided into two components: 1. Organizational competence that comprises knowledge of

linguistic units and the rules of joining them together at the level of sentence (grammatical competence) and discourse (textual competence).

2. Pragmatic competence that subdivides into: a. Illocutionary competence that can be glossed as

“knowledge of communicative action and how to carry it out”.

b. Sociolinguistic competence that comprises the ability to use language appropriately according to context.

According to Kasper (1997: 1), the pragmatic ability in a second or foreign language is part of a non-native speakers communicative competence and therefore has to be located in a model of communicative ability. However, according to this researcher, pragmatic competence cannot be taught:

Competence, whether linguistic or pragmatic, is not teachable. Competence is a type of knowledge that learners possess, develop, acquire, use or lose. The challenge for foreign or second language teaching is whether we can arrange learning opportunities in such a way that they benefit the development of pragmatic competence in L2.

Language teaching has the important task to help students situate L2

communicative practices in their sociocultural context. Learning activities must help students become more effective and successful communicators in L2.

It is clear from what has been said above, that pragmatics is an important topic in language teaching. In this field, it is of special interest the area of intercultural pragmatics, this is, “the study of non-native speakers’ use and acquisition of linguistic action patterns in a second language” (Kasper and Blum-Kulka 1993: 3).


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Intercultural pragmatics emerged from the problems of miscommunication between people coming from different cultures, not necessarily that they speak different languages. They may be speaking the same language but have a lot of differences in terms of their values, social and economic background, presupposed beliefs and attitudes.

Second language learning has paid a lot of attention to intercultural studies, especially in how people who speak different languages communicate. Intercultural pragmatics is concerned with language in use, this is with language as action. It concentrates both on learner’s use and acquisition of pragmatic knowledge and investigates the development of pragmatic competence by non-native speakers.

The topics studied in intercultural pragmatics cover pragmatic transfer differences in pragmatic structure of different speech acts and different strategies used in different cultures.

3. Language learning, computers and context

The important role of computers in our everyday life makes it vital to develop computational linguistic methods and tools to be used in language learning. In fact, in the last years, there has been an explosion of interest in using computers for language teaching and learning, and nowadays the role of computers in language instruction has become a very important issue. Learning to read, write and communicate in a second language via computer has become an essential feature in modern life. It is generally accepted that the benefits of adding a computer component to language instruction are vast.

If we look at language teaching, we see that many teachers have moved away from a cognitive view of communicative teaching to a more social or socio-cognitive view, which placed greater emphasis on language use in authentic social contexts. Healey (1998: 58) states that task-based, project-based and content-based approaches all sought to integrate learners in authentic environments, and also to integrate the various skills of language learning and use. The movement toward communicative teaching with computers has clearly taken place. According to Akhras (2005: 1), contemporary theories of learning stress that learning requires the development of active experiences in authentic contexts. It follows from these theories that learning cannot be separated from activity. An essential part of what is learned is the situation in which learning takes place, which refers to the physical as well as to the social context in which the learner is engaged in the activity. The implication of this view to the design of systems to support learning is that the computational learning environments


must provide interactive situations for the learner in which the conceptual, physical and social aspects of these contexts are addressed in ways that create possibilities for learning. Moreover, in order that an intelligent system can reason about the learning experiences developed in a situation, so that it can adapt the learning opportunities to the particular needs of the learner, the characteristics of the situation as well as the information about the interaction developed in the situation must be modelled and explicitly represented in the system. Therefore, a formalism to represent context of learning interactions and the interactions that happen in this context is needed.

One of the major goals for computer assisted language learning must be to have computers with which L2 students can have true, human-like interactions. However, the technology is far from that point. It is a fact that in programming computers to interact with humans in natural language, one of the major difficulties is to provide the machine with knowledge of the world. It is very difficult to give the computer the ability to produce/recognize appropriate utterances from the communicative point of view. The solution to this problem must be the search for a mechanism able to formalize pragmatics.

Is it possible to formalize pragmatics? We are convinced that the interplay between methodologies and techniques coming from different fields such as natural language processing, formal language theory, language teaching, artificial intelligence and computer science can provide a formalization of pragmatics that is good enough for the implementation of this module in natural language systems.

4. Pragmatics and context

If we want to formalize pragmatics, the first thing we have to do is to try to establish a clear picture of what pragmatics is. Therefore, in this section we will try to offer several definitions that may help in the task of understanding pragmatics.

According to Levinson (1983: 1), pragmatics was initiated in the 1930s by Morris, Carnap and Peirce, for whom syntax addressed the formal relations of signs to one another, semantics the relation of signs to what they denote and pragmatics the relation of signs to their users and interpreters. In this framework, pragmatics is the study of those context-dependent aspects of meaning, which are systematically abstracted away from in the construction of content or logical form. Since Morris's introduction of the trichotomy syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, the latter term has come to be used in two very distinct ways. A definition of


393

pragmatics is by no means easy to provide. Therefore, we shall play with a number of possibilities each of which do little more than sketch a range of possible scopes for the field.

For Morris (1938: 43), “[…] pragmatics concerns the relation of signs to their interpreters”. Stalnaker (1972: 383) distinguished syntax, semantics and pragmatics in the following terms: “syntax studies sentences, semantics studies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed”.

For Kempson (1988: 139), “[…] pragmatics provides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to convey information in context”. While for Fotion (1995: 709), “[…] pragmatics is the study of language which focuses attention on the users and the context of language use rather than on reference, truth or grammar”.

Lycan (1995: 588) establishes that “[…] pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic interpretation”. And for Davies (1996: 124):

The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is, roughly the distinction between the significance conventionally or literally attached to words, and hence to whole sentences, and the further significance that can be worked out, by more general principles, using contextual information. As follows from the different definitions presented above, the task of

finding a generally accepted definition of pragmatics is not easy. However, if there is a common point in any proposed definition of pragmatics, it is the reference to context. Pragmatics has been defined as “those linguistic investigations that need a reference to context aspects”, “the study of language user’s capacity for matching sentences with appropriate contexts”, “the study of the contribution of context to the understanding of language”.

Moreover, if we have a look at the different topics approached in the field of pragmatics, we will see that context is always the common point. For example:

1. Conversational Implicatures are understood as inferences based on either the content of what was said during the conversation or in some specific assumptions of the cooperative nature of verbal interaction. Implicatures depend on context from which they have been extracted; details of what is implied depend on the enunciation context. An expression with a unique meaning can lead to different implicatures in different circumstances (cf. Davis 1998; Gazdar 1979; Grice 1975; Levinson 1983; Levinson 2000).


2. Presuppositions have been restricted to certain pragmatic inferences or assumptions that seem to be incorporated to linguistic expressions and that can be isolated by using specific linguistic proves. They are very sensitive to contextual matters and present a great sensitivity to deep assumptions about the world (cf. Kadmon 2001; Kempson 1975; Levinson 1983).

3. Speech acts can be considered as operations in a context, that is, as mappings from contexts to contexts. Context is understood as a set of propositions that describe beliefs, knowledge and compromises of participants in a speech (cf. Austin 1962; Levinson 1983; Searle 1969; Tsohatzidis 1994).

4. Deixis deals with how languages codify or grammaticalize trends of the context of enunciation or speech events (cf. Fillmore 1997; Jarvell and Klein 1982; Levinson 1983).

From the above it is clear that the relationship between language and context is central in pragmatics. According to Kopytko (2003: 45), “[…] the role and significance of the notion of context for pragmatics and discourse analysis cannot be overestimated. Context is a constitutive concept for these disciplines because without it they simply would not exist”. Therefore, it seems that in order to approach pragmatics we need to consider context. In fact, computational pragmatics might be defined as the computational study of the relation between utterances and context. So, in order to get a computational theory of pragmatics we need to formalize context. Nevertheless, context-dependence is one of the aspects that have been seen as a handicap to formalize questions related to natural language, especially to achieve a computational theory of pragmatics. In programming computers to interact with humans in natural language, one of the major difficulties is the problem of providing the machine with enough knowledge of the world. It is quite hard to give the computer the ability to produce both appropriate utterances and appropriate interpretations of utterances from the communicative point of view. The solution to these problems implies to search for a mechanism able to formalize pragmatics. However, the problem remains unsolved due to the difficulty in finding logical and mathematical models that are really suitable to tackle this issue. What we propose in this paper is to take advantage of an already developed theory in computer science—Membrane Systems (P!un 2000)—to attempt a computational friendly approach of pragmatics. We claim that membranes provide a powerful and flexible framework for formalizing environments and the relationships between them. Before presenting our model and in order to have all the elements we need for the formalization, we need to define the object we


395

want to model, so in what follows we will present some proposed definitions of context.

4.1. Definitions of context

“To make sense of social phenomena involves placing or seeing them in a context” (Lee 1987: 23). This quotation captures the importance of context in human social life. A wide range of activities depends on context and therefore it has been approached from very different points of view. In this paper, we are interested in context from a pragmatic point of view. Our last goal here is to provide a formal model of context with the explicitness, formality and efficiency that are required for the computer implementation of pragmatics.

The notion of context has gained significance, and is more often resorted to not only in disciplines where it has always played a central role such as pragmatics, linguistics or philosophy of language, but also in other research domains such as history, biology, artificial intelligence, psychology, neurosciences, anthropology, economics, aesthetics, sociology, etc. A consequence of its use in so many disciplines is that there are so many different ways of using the term context.

Context appears to be crucial both on theoretical and on applied domains. If its complexity makes context a powerful device, the same complexity and dynamism make context difficult to be defined and to be studied formally. If we are to use context in any domain (linguistics, biology, reasoning, decision-making, problem-solving, learning, etc.), a well-defined and articulated notion of this concept is required.

According to Akman and Bazzanella (2003: 325), this formal definition is required not only to provide for the indeterminacy and implicitness of spoken language in the process of comprehension and production, but also in other domains like computational linguistics, reasoning, decision-making, problem solving, learning…

A general approach to the concept of context is the one provided by Hirst (1997: 283): “[…] the notion of context can be defined only in terms of its effects in a particular situation. Context is something that constraints, one way or another, in at least one situation”.

It is an obvious fact that if we want to say what any utterance in a conversation means, we are forced to look at what is the situation – this is, the context – in which it occurs. Without knowledge of context, the meaning of any utterance would be vague and ambiguous. When people act in a certain way or say a particular thing, they do so in a context. As a result, in all the things that they do or say, there are embedded background


assumptions available only through the context (Edmons and Akman 2002: 233). What we actually say in a conversation is determined by the choice we make from many possible things we could say in a specified context. But, what is context? Which elements must be included within it? This question is not easy to be answered. Although most theories of language comprehension depend on context, few have attempted to fully define and specify features, which characterize it. In fact, if we look at the literature, we will find several definitions of context, each of them including different elements. On the other hand, according to Kopytko (2003: 46), the role and scope of context vary in different approaches to language use. In speech act theory (Austin 1962; Searle 1969) and Gricean pragmatics, the view of context as knowledge dominates, the language user’s knowledge of the world guides the use and interpretation of language. The importance of context grows in interactional sociolinguistics (Gumperz 1982). Notions such as contextualization cues, contextual presuppositions and situated inferences put context at the centre of sociolinguistic investigations. In conversational analysis (Garfinkel 1967; Sacks 1992) the scope of context seems to be the broadest. This is so, because it combines the view of context as knowledge, situation and text. In what follows we collect some definitions from different research areas that will help the reader to build a clear picture of what can be understood by context.

Leech (1993: 13) characterizes context as “[…] any background knowledge assumed to be shared by speaker and hearer and which contributes to hearer's interpretation of what speaker means by a given utterance”. For Gibbs and Mueller (1990: 101), “[…] context has usually been viewed as any and every type of information which is present at a given time in a given situation for a given individual”.

A little bit more specific is Levinson (1983: 22) who considers that context refers to “[…] those features that are culturally and linguistically relevant to the production and interpretation of utterances”.

Decidedly more specific is the explanation given by Wardhaugh (1985: 101):

Context includes not merely the linguistic one, that is, those utterances that precede and follow the utterance in question, but also the surrounding physical context, the previous conversation between the participants, relevant aspects of their life histories, the general rules of behaviour the parties subscribe to, their assumptions about how the various bits and pieces of the world function, and so on.


397

In the same line can be placed Ochs’ explanation. This author includes within context:

Language users' beliefs and assumptions about temporal, spatial and social setting; prior, ongoing and future actions (verbal and non-verbal), and the state of knowledge and attentiveness of those participating in the social interaction in hand. (cited by Levinson 1983: 23).

Mey (1993: 38) presents a broad view of context as knowledge,

situation and co-text and he maintains that: Context is a dynamic, not a static concept: it is to be understood as the continually changing surroundings, in the widest sense, that enable the participants in the communication process to interact, and in which the linguistic expressions of their interaction become intelligible. A very detailed account of context is found in Bunt (1994: 22-23),

where five types of context are considered: 1. Social context. By social context, Bunt means the type of interactive

situation and the roles of participants in that situation, as characterized in terms of their communicative rights and obligations.

2. Cognitive context. The cognitive context comprises the participants' beliefs, intentions, plans and other attitudes, their states of processing relating to perception, production, interpretation, evaluation and their attentional states.

3. Physical context. Physical dimension of context comprises the physical circumstances in which interaction takes place.

4. Semantic context. The semantic context is formed by the underlying task and the task domain (objects, properties and relations relevant to the task).

5. Linguistic context. With the term linguistic context, Bunt refers to properties of the surrounding linguistic material. Linguistic is taken in a very broad sense, including prosodic properties in the case of spoken interaction, and interpunction, use of italics, capital letters, and other layout information in the case of textual interaction

As the above quotations put in evidence, the notion of context is used in many different ways in linguistic literature, ranging from referring to preceding text to referring to goals of underlying task and to physical circumstances in which linguistic interaction takes places. What seems to be common to the various explanations of context is that it is always part of language use and that it must refer to factors relevant to understanding of communicative behaviour. Moreover, context must be understood as a


dynamic phenomenon that may be constructed or regulated by interactants in dialogue and no two contexts or situations can be claimed to be identical.

Taking into account the above general features, how can we formalize context? We propose to use an already developed theory in the area of computer science, the so-called membrane systems, in order to provide a formal model of context that can be used in the implementation of computer systems that may be used in the task of learning/teaching languages.

5. Formalizing pragmatics: membrane systems

Membrane Systems were introduced by P!un (2000) as a powerful generation device based in the behaviour of cellular membranes. Membrane computing can be included in the area of natural computing. Despite its microbiological inspiration, the model is described as a mathematical and formal computational device.

The flexibility and intuitive functioning of the model makes it very suitable for applications, not only to computer science, but also for computing real life events like interaction between societies. For linguistics, the main advantage of membranes over other generative methods is that membranes can be understood as contexts, providing a powerful framework for formalizing any kind of interaction, both among agents and among agents and the context. Membrane systems consist of multisets of objects which are placed in the compartments defined by the membrane structure –a hierarchical arrangement of membranes, all of them placed in a main membrane called the skin membrane— that delimits the system from its environment. Each membrane identifies a region, the space between it and all the directly inner membranes, if any exist. Objects evolve by means of reaction rules also associated with the compartments, and applied in a maximally parallel, nondeterministic manner. Objects can pass through membranes, membranes can change their permeability, dissolve and divide

Figure 18-1 shows the graphical intuitive idea of how a membrane structure is. Membranes are usually represented by the sign [], and they are labelled with a number between 1 and the number n of membranes in the system. Formal definitions and main issues related to the topic can be found in P!un (2000).


399

Figure 18-1: Membrane System

What is important in the model is that rules of any type can be applied in any membrane, and the results can be sent to other membranes, increasing the computational power and efficiency of the model. For linguistics, the main feature and advantage of membranes over the other generative methods is that the membranes can be understood as contexts, providing a suitable framework for the formalization of semantics, pragmatics and interaction between different agents or worlds. The adaptation of membrane systems to natural language gave rise to the definition of Linguistic Membrane System (LMS), introduced by Bel-Enguix and Jiménez-López (2005). Although the formalization is mainly the same, the aim of LMS is not to produce languages, but to model linguistic processes. LMS establishes a general framework for natural language. Thanks to the flexibility of its formalization, LMS can be adapted in order to deal with different aspects of the description and processing of natural languages, from syntax to pragmatics.

This framework provides a powerful tool for formalizing any kind of interaction, both among agents and among agents and environment. One of key ideas of membrane systems is that generation is made by evolution. Therefore, most of evolving systems can be formalized by means of

Skin Membrane

Regions

Elemental Membrane

Nested Membranes

Adjacent Membranes


membrane systems. In natural language processing, membrane systems are suitable for dealing with some fields where contexts are a central part of the theory. Such approach leads to semantics and, especially, pragmatics. In fact, up to now, the most developed applications of membrane systems to natural language issues are semantics and dialogue. What we want to show here is that membrane system can be used as a tool to formalize one of the most important elements in order to deal with pragmatics: context. In what follows we will show how by formalizing different types of interactions between membranes we can establish a basis for a formal theory of context.

The study of the possibilities of relation, interaction, and communication between membranes, as well as the rules that can regulate them is an interesting aspect of dynamic membranes. For linguistics, it is very important what happens with contexts, because they have a strong influence on languages. Many analogies can be made with the connection and the interaction of contexts, in order to get a specific result in the communication. In what follows, we deal with three important aspects of the theory of dynamic membranes: (i) structural relations between membranes; (ii) communication among membranes; (iii) rules for interaction in membranes.

5.1. Structural relations between membranes

We start by examining the possible types of structural relation between membranes in a system. The way the membranes are related is important when they have to interact and also in the configuration of the communication we are going to deal with later. There are three main types of relations: nesting, adjacency, and command.

1. Nesting. Given two membranes M1 , M2 , it is said M2 to be nested in M1 when it is inside M1. The outer membrane M1 is called parent membrane and the inner membrane M2 is called nested membrane. It is denoted by M1 ! M2. Degree of nesting, which is denoted deg(M1 ! M2) refers to the number of membranes between the nested one and the parent one.

2. Adjacency. Two membranes M1, M2 are adjacent if they satisfy the following two properties:

a. They have a common parent membrane. b. They have the same number of parent membranes.

Adjacency is denoted Mn ! Mm. Namely, in a membrane system denoted as [0 [1 [2 ]2 ]1 [3 [4 ]4 ]3 ]0 , M1 ! M3 and M2 ! M4. 3. Command. Given two membranes M1 , M2 , M1 commands M2 iff:


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a. they are not nested, b. both are nested in a membrane Mi, deg(M1 ! Mj ) = 1,

deg(M2 ! Mj) > 1 Command is denoted M1 " M2. In the system [0 [1 [2 ]2 ]1 [3 [4 ]4 ]3 ]0 , M1 " M4 and M3 " M2.

5.2. Communication between membranes

The possibility of communication is a feature of membrane systems, which is connected to possible scenarios in real life. If we understand membranes as languages, it is obvious that some languages are closely connected, there is a strong interaction between them. An example may be Spanish and English in the USA. If membranes are understood as social groups, conditions of marginality may be modelled by means of the non-connection (isolation) between a concrete group and the others. If membranes refer to different agents in a dialogue, then it is easy to find agents, which do not participate, whereas some others keep the attention all the time. These concepts can be approached by means of the description of the types of communication for membranes. In a preliminary approach, three states in communication are established: connection, isolation, inhibition.

1. Connection. Connection is the situation in which communication channels are open, that is, membranes can interact and exchange elements. The main features and notions related to connection are the following:

a. Two membranes are connected when the communication channel between them is open.

b. By definition, the skin membrane is connected with every membrane in the system.

c. A membrane Mn is connected when it is connected with every membrane in the system.

d. A system is called connected when every communication channel is open.

2. Isolation. Isolation refers to the situation where the communication between two membranes is not established, but it is possible. Main features and definitions:

a. Two membranes are isolated when the communication channel between them is closed.

b. Closed communication channels can be open by means of some rules while the system works.


c. A membrane Mn is isolated when the communication with every membrane in the system is closed.

d. A system is called isolated when every communication channel is closed.

3. Inhibition. Inhibition is the state of complete and irreversible isolation, and this has the following main features:

a. Two membranes are inhibited when the communication between them is closed, and there is no rule in the system for opening it.

b. A membrane Mn is inhibited when every communication channel is closed to it, and it cannot be opened.

c. A system is inhibited when every membrane in it is inhibited.

d. In inhibited systems the skin cannot communicate with membranes inside the system and no evolution is possible.

5.3. Operations with membranes

Dynamic Membrane systems have, as a main feature, interaction between membranes and structural variation. Some contexts (membranes) can disappear or be extended, others can merge, or be copied many times. The flexibility of the system requires the definition of some rules regulating such interactions. They are the following:

1. Dissolution. By means of deletion a membrane is dissolved and its elements go to the immediately external membrane. The rule is written as: [[v]m ]n " [ v]n . This refers to the complete identification of a context with another.

2. Deletion. It is the operation by means of which a membrane completely disappears with all its elements. The rule is [[v]n ]m " [ ]m .

3. Merging. By merging, two adjacent membranes join into just one by the rule: [[u]n [v]m ] " [[uv]j ]. This is different from dissolution, because some features of both contexts remain, but some traits of both disappear.

4. Splitting. A membrane is divided into two or more: [[uw]m] " [ [uv]m [uv]n ]. With this, new contexts are created with some common elements.

5. Extraction. It is the operation by means of which a membrane nested in another one is extracted, being both related by direct adjacency in the resulting configuration. It is denoted by [[ [u]n ]m ] " [ [ ]m [u]n ].


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This rule allows to completely extract some features of a context, generating two disjoint sets.

6. Insertion. It is the inverse operation of extraction. By this operation a membrane, which is adjacent to another one, is nested in it with degree 0. It is denoted by [[ ]m [u]n ] " [ [ [u]n ]m ]. By this, a membrane completely assumes part of the context of another.

These rules have been demonstrated as being very powerful for dealing with contexts. They are able to formalize the main operative contextual situations and the change in them. With these operations a new approach to formal calculus by means of membranes can be started that can be a tool for a computational management of pragmatic contexts.

6. Conclusion

If we want to use computers in the area of language teaching/learning we have to implement models of natural language that are able to deal not only with phonetics, syntax, morphology or semantics, but that contain a formal model of pragmatics. The pragmatic competence is a very important part of the language competence, so if we want computer assisted language learning to be useful we need to include in the implementation of natural language models a module for dealing with pragmatics. Pragmatics has been defined as the study of people’s comprehension and production of linguistic action in context and any topic that pragmatics deals with implies context. So, in order to formalize pragmatics we need a formalization of context. In this contribution, we have proposed to use a framework very much developed in the field of computer science in order to get a formalization of context: membrane systems.

A wide range of activities depend on context and therefore it has been approached from very different points of view. Its complexity and dynamism make context difficult to be defined and to be studied formally. At the same time areas such as artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction or natural language processing demand formal models of context. In this paper, although in a very preliminary way, we have tried to introduce a simple and general formal-language definition of context. We hope our definition could be used in any area in which a framework for formalizing interaction among agents and context is required.

To be able to achieve a formalization of context is the first step to provide a computational model of pragmatics. This, for sure, will improve human-computer interaction in natural language and this improvement will have important implications in the fields of computer assisted


language learning, intercultural pragmatics and language teaching, in general.

The ideas introduced here are still seminal. A more in-depth study is needed in order to demonstrate that such formalism can be useful for description and implementation of pragmatics. But, taking into account the advantages of this model over classical models of computing we are quite convinced that a new approach to pragmatics in terms of membrane systems is possible.

Finally, it seems this system is quite easy to implement, due to the simplicity of the formalism and the computational background of the multi-agent theory we use. Achieving a valid and simple computational implementation of this formal framework is the major research line for the future.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

IMPLICATIONS OF DUAL-PROCESS THEORIES TO WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY AND L2 SPEECH PRODUCTION AND ACQUISITION

KYRIA FINARDI

1. Introduction

Cognitive models postulating two processing modes abound in the literature of several areas of social and cognitive psychology and have been supported both by psychological and neuropsychological evidence (Smith and DeCoster 2000; Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). A basic premise of these theories is that people evolved two memory systems with different functions to deal with the complexities of the environment. The associative or memory system records information slowly and incrementally so that the total configuration of our knowledge about the world is kept stable. The rule-based system is responsible for learning new information quickly so that a novel item can be remembered after a single occurrence, storing episodic records of the details of that experience. The product of the associative system is fast whereas the product of the rule-based system is slower since it requires more computation. These two systems will be used differently depending on processing conditions, cognitive capacity and motivation to engage in this type of processing (Smith and DeCoster 2000).

Studies on working memory capacity claim that the capacity to control attention may be one of the most important aspects involved in individual differences in working memory capacity (e.g. Engle 2002). Barrett, Tugate and Engle (2004) claim that individual differences in the ability to control attention may mediate the interplay of controlled and automatic processing referred to by dual-process theories. The most prominent researcher on working memory in Europe, Baddeley (2001: 857) referred to studies of working memory capacity as the ability to control attention as the most

Implications of Dual-process Theories

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fruitful research vein in North America. Working memory capacity, understood as the capacity to control attention, may play an important role in dual processes theories insomuch as it determines the amount of controlled processing that may or may not happen (Barrett, Tugate and Engle 2004). Working memory capacity is believed to constrain the processes involved in many cognitive abilities (for a review, see Miyake and Friedman 1998; Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004) such as L2 speaking (Fortkamp 2000), which is the focus of this paper.

Speaking is a complex cognitive skill (Levelt 1989) which requires automatic and controlled processes for its execution. According to Levelt’s (1989) model of L1 speaking, there are three more or less automatic stages in speech generation. The first stage of speech production (conceptualization) uses controlled processes whereas the two other stages (formulation and articulation) are believed to require automatic processes, at least in L1. L2 speaking is a much more complex skill, among other reasons, because the processes involved in message formulation (more specifically in grammatical encoding) are believed to be controlled in L2 (Fortkamp 2000), thus, requiring more attention for its execution.

Models of L2 production and acquisition based on dual process theories (e.g. Skehan 1998) claim that language production is needed to force the L2 adult learner (who does not have the benefit of the sensitive period of acquisition anymore, if there is one at all) to process language at a syntactic level thus going from syntacticalization to lexicalization of their linguistic repertoire, mirroring the movement that happens in L1 acquisition. According to Skehan’s (1998) account of L2 learning, language acquisition happens in the transfer of linguistic items from one system to another, thus enabling the L2 learner to use both systems depending on processing conditions.

Research on the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 speech production has shown that working memory capacity is related to L2 speech production in terms of fluency, complexity and accuracy of L2 speech (Fortkamp 2000; Finardi and Prebianca 2006; Fontanini et al. 2005). Finardi (2007, 2008) produced evidence that working memory capacity is also related to the retention and acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech. If working memory capacity can be understood as the capacity to control attention or to use controlled processes (from a rule-based system), then it is possible to make the link between dual-process theories and L2 speech production and acquisition inasmuch as this performance is mediated by working memory capacity.

The aim of this paper is to review dual-process theories of the mind and their implications for working memory capacity (Barret, Tugate and

Chapter Nineteen 410

Engle 2004) and L2 speech production and acquisition, bringing these three areas of research together around the main question of how people use and learn to speak and L2. With that aim in mind, this chapter is organized in this order: first it will offer a review of dual processes theories followed by a review of working memory capacity and studies on L2 speech production and acquisition in light of dual-process theories, concluding with possible implications for teaching and learning L2 speaking.

2. Dual-process theories

Dual-process theories of the mind and Information Processing Theories evolved out of the American experimental tradition to account for human learning. Information Processing Theories use the computer as a metaphor against which to compare the human mind. Like the computer, the mind has a limited capacity to process information. How people process information in the context of the limitations imposed by this system is the main question driving research in the area. Information Processing Theory is based on three main assumptions, namely: (i) that thinking is information processing, (ii) that there are four mechanisms responsible for skills acquisition: encoding, strategy construction, automatization and generalization, and (iii) that people are active and autonomous information processors (McLaughlin and Heredia 1996).

Among these four mechanisms responsible for skill developing, the most relevant to dual-process theories is the mechanism of automatization (Anderson 1982), that is, how people become expert performers of a certain skill, thus executing it without or with very little attention. Most skill building theories proposed in this paradigm equate automaticity with learning. Indeed, one of these dual process theories is called Instance Theory of Automatization (Logan 1988). Though dual-process theories abound in different areas of social and cognitive psychology, their basic tenets are stable across models, that is, although there are a few differences among these accumulating models of human learning, the most important characteristics of dual-process theories can be found in all of these models.

Most dual-process models accept that human learning can be explained by the interplay of automatic and controlled processing (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004; Smith and DeCoster 2000). Another undebatable feature of dual-process theories is that automatic processing is qualitatively different from controlled processing. Differences in these models concern the role of attention in automatic processing and the necessary conditions for automatic processing to take place. In what follows, three main


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theories of skill acquisition which were proposed within the dual-process paradigm will be reviewed following a chronological order. After that, one theory of L2 learning, based on dual-process theories will be reviewed.

1977 was a prolific year for Shiffrin and Schneider who published two classic papers on automaticity and the relationship between controlled and automatic processing (Schneider and Shiffrin 1977; Shiffrin and Schneider 1977). The aim of these papers was to propose a two-process theory of human information processing to account for learning or automaticity. These authors used the concepts of attention, automatic detection and controlled search to test their hypotheses in a series of experiments. They claimed that automatic processing was learned in long-term memory and was triggered by appropriate inputs, operating independently of the subject’s control and not requiring attention (from working memory) for its execution. By contrast, controlled processing, according to Shiffrin and Schneider, was a temporary activation of nodes in a sequence that was not learned (not in long-term memory) and was relatively easy to set up, modify and use in new situations. Controlled processing used up attention (from working memory capacity), was serial in nature and could be used to facilitate long-term learning of all kinds, including automatic processing. This theory explained learning as a quantitative change or a process of speeding up in which practice produced faster and more automatic procedures, using less attention for its execution.

Logan’s Instance Theory of Automatization (1988) was similar to Shiffrin and Schneider’s model in many ways, such as with Logan’s proposition that automatic processing was fast, effortless, autonomous, stereotypic, unavailable to conscious awareness, obligatory and uncontrollable. One difference between Logan’s and Shiffrin and Schneider’s models is that the latter considers automatic processing to occur without attention and interprets the acquisition of automaticity as the gradual withdrawal of attention whereas the former claims that attention may not disappear completely in automatic processing. According to Instance Theory, automatization reflects a transition from performance based on an initial algorithm (rule) to performance based on memory retrieval, not necessarily without attention. In Logan’s model, the algorithm races against the fastest instance retrieved from memory and it is bound to lose as practice progresses because at some point, performance will depend on memory entirely, either as a consequence of statistical properties of the race or because of a strategic decision to use memory and abandon the algorithm. Once performance is governed by memory alone it will follow the power law. Another difference between Logan’s model and Shiffrin and Schneider’s is that the former claims that novice performance


is limited by a lack of knowledge rather than by a scarcity of attentional resources such as is the claim of the latter. Logan’s Instance theory equates learning with both quantitative and qualitative changes to the system.

Smith and DeCoster (2000) proposed a dual-process model of information processing in social and cognitive psychology which in many respects resembled previous models. One contribution of this model, however, was the suggestion that automatic processing will be used depending on three conditions, namely: cognitive capacity, motivation and processing conditions. Besides this contribution, the model draws important implications of automatic processing (associative for the authors) for different aspects of human behavior such as categorizing and stereotyping, retrieving well-learned affect and evaluations, attributing judgement, and facilitating repeated judgements. They also offer important implications of rule-based processing (controlled for Shiffrin and Schneider and based on algorithm for Logan) for other types of social and psychological phenomena such as one-shot learning, sharing rules and validity, forming explicit traces, flexibly recombining and constructing counterfactuals, analytic focusing, and providing explanations and justifications. More importantly, perhaps, is their insight that the external world, acting indirectly through the rule-based system, ends up shaping the contents of the more private, intuitive, associative (memory) system, thus importing social influence into every aspect of our minds’ operations. This is a major claim in philosophy and psychology and can be translated into the idea that knowledge can transferred from outside to inside through the operation of this dual-process system.

Based on this view of knowledge building, which may happen from the social to the individual, it is possible to conclude that social knowledge (such as pragmatics) is a key component of individual knowledge and so as to explain human learning there must be theory integration (from different areas such as psychology, linguistics and anthropology) under the umbrella term of dual-process theories. The integrative model proposed by Smith and DeCoster (2000) strongly suggest the importance of language and social influences on individual cognition whereas most information processing theories focused on the individual assuming that cognition was what happened in the individual mind. In that sense, I propose that Smith and DeCoster’s model is more powerful since it can better account for human learning, placing social psychology at the very heart of cognitive sciences.

Before closing this section on dual-process theories I will review one study of dual-process theories applied to language learning before


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discussing one model of L2 acquisition based on dual-process theories. Ullman (2001) claimed that language is formed by a lexicon of memorized words and a grammar composed of rules. He also claimed that the rule-based system uses declarative knowledge (symbols) in an explicit way and in the case of language learning is responsible for learning grammar whereas the memory system uses procedural knowledge in an implicit way to learn the lexicon. He studied the acquisition of the irregular past in English and concluded that regular verbs which followed a rule (+ed) were acquired by the rule-based system whereas irregular verb items (sing-sang) were learned as instances in the memory system. He also claimed that whereas the memory system works through associative binding and is domain-free, the rule-based system works through symbol manipulation and sequences and is task-specific. Moreover, he reviewed neurolinguistic evidence that the two systems are subserved by different neural networks: the memory-based system is subserved by the medial temporal lobe structures while the rule-based system would be subserved by the left-frontal lobes and the basal-ganglia structures.

Skehan (1998), so as to address the criticism that information processing theories received when trying to explain L2 learning as the simple accumulation of linguistic items that became automatic through practice (for example McLaughlin, Rossman and McLeod 1983), brought dual-process theories to the arena of L2 learning. According to Skehan, L2 learning after the critical period of acquisition, is similar to other forms of learning and should be explained by dual-process theories. Skehan reviews evidence that in L1 learning children go from a process of lexicalization to syntacticalization of language before re-lexicalizing language again. According to him, this process of lexicalization and syntacticalization of language will not happen in L2 unless contrived by production which forces the L2 learner to analyze language at a syntactic level. He claims that during language comprehension syntactic analysis can be circumvented since learners can be helped by contextual cues to comprehend messages whereas this is not possible during language production. Thus, so as to force the L2 learner to process language at a syntactic level, moving from lexicalization to syntacticalization and vice-versa, production is needed.

Moreover, Skehan claims that in L2 learning, meaning has priority over form with the consequence that a focus on form will only happen when there are enough attentional resources (from working memory) to process it. Skehan views L2 learning as the transfer of items from the rule-based system to the memory-based system, and vice-versa. This movement is what enables the L2 learner to have linguistic items available


in the two modes, thus being able to use the two systems depending on processing conditions. When people are speaking and the main goal is fluency, L2 learners will draw more on the memory-based system whose products are faster because they do not require internal computation. The advantage of using items from this system is that information from the memory-based system is readily available (from memory) and requires little (or no) attention (from working memory). On the other hand, when the aim is to produce complex or accurate language, learners will draw more on the rule-based system which uses controlled processes (and attention) for its execution.

One pedagogical implication that can be drawn from Skehan’s account of L2 learning is that, if the rule-based system is flexible and open to pedagogical interventions, as claimed by dual-process theories, it is the only system to which the L2 teacher would have access, that is, language teachers would be able to teach only the rule. However, it is possible to think of at least one way to affect the memory-system. Teachers may not have immediate or direct access to the memory-based system with its lexicalized language but they may be able to help learners to draw more on this system during fluency practices through the manipulation of tasks (Skehan 1998). I will return to this issue later on in this article. Having outlined the major characteristics of three general dual-process theories and one dual-process theory applied to L2 learning, I turn now to the discussion of possible implications of dual-process theories to working memory capacity.

3. Implications of dual process theories to working memory capacity

A central tenet of dual-process theories is that behavior (and learning) are the product of the interplay of automatic and controlled processing (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). Researchers who view working memory capacity as the ability to control attention (Engle and colleagues for example) claim that working memory capacity may mediate the interplay of controlled and automatic processes (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). Working memory capacity can be understood as the ability to simultaneously maintain (information active for later recall) and process information, or put differently, the ability to engage in controlled processing in attention-demanding situations, especially when faced with the need to suppress or inhibit interference.

Barret, Tugate and Engle (2004) reviewed different implications of dual-process theories to working memory capacity. According to these


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authors, dual-process theories vary in their emphasis placed on the influence of automatic processing (such as in studies of persistent thought) or on cognitive control and information processing. Automatic processes are stimulus-driven, bottom-up, reflexive and exogenous whereas controlled processes are goal directed, top-down and endogenous. According to these authors, learning and behavior can be understood as the product of the competition between controlled and automatic processes or as the interaction between endogenous and exogenous forms of attention.

Automatic processes are the default process in humans. When attention is captured by a stimulus and activates a representation that is inconsistent with the goal, attention is needed to solve the conflict. In those situations, attention will be applied to maintain or enhance the activation of already activated goal-relevant representations or to suppress the activation of goal-irrelevant representations. This manipulation of representations by the control of attention is what is understood as controlled processing and the source of this attention (working memory capacity) affords a wealth of explanations to human behavior and learning.

Controlled processing arises from the central executive aspect of working memory and happens when attention is applied in a top-down, goal-directed way. Complex mental processes and social behavior, on the other hand, operate automatically, without conscious awareness. It follows from this that when there are enough attentional resources, controlled processes may be used to control or stop inappropriate or undesired behavior, which is automatic. Put differently, people may have more or less capacity to regulate their own behavior, depending on their working memory capacity.

Barret, Tugate and Engle (2004) claim that working memory capacity is related to a host of phenomena in cognitive tasks and review available evidence for its role in the following: activation effects, resisting interference, suppression effects, the use of processing strategies, the construction of mental representations that support new learning, rule-based learning, encoding of new information, establishing coherence between various parts of a text, reading comprehension, language comprehension, listening comprehension, problem solving, reasoning, adapting strategies to changing success rates, vocabulary learning, spelling, following directions, logic learning, taking lecture notes, writing, storytelling, emotional processing and the ability to reason, solve novel problems and adapt to new situations.

In short, from the perspective of dual-process theories, working memory capacity may be seen as the capacity to engage in controlled processing, thereby determining our ability to control our thoughts,


feelings and actions (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). The rule-based system is responsible for modifying knowledge representations online and as such, working memory capacity may be related to the ability to incorporate new or inconsistent information to existing representations, moderating a myriad of phenomena found in our every day life. One example of how this mediation may happen is the way in which we perceive another person. People use categorical information first, later incorporating specific information into their inference. Individuals with small working memory capacities may not be able to incorporate as much specific information as those with more working memory capacity, thus, forming impressions earlier on and being more subject to stereotypic representations of people, whereas those individuals with more working memory capacity may be more able to use controlled processes to adjust their beliefs and thoughts. In other words, working memory capacity may determine the extent to which individuals use more online (controlled) or memory-based (automatic) processing strategies when forming a judgment about a person (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004).

Examples of how working memory capacity may mediate behavior abound and are carefully reviewed in Barret, Tugate and Engle (2004). Some of these examples will be mentioned here and one of them is found in decision monitoring. According to the aforementioned authors, individuals high in working memory capacity should be better able to use symbolically represented rules to monitor and guide their decisions and actions. Working memory capacity may also be associated with the extent to which individuals try to enact controlled processing and it may also be related to the need for cognition. Moreover, because those with less working memory capacity tend to approach complex tasks using more automatic processing, they may be less able to tease apart the properties of the stimulus and their own perception of the stimulus. Working memory capacity may also be related to the level of tolerance of ambiguity which, in turn, is considered a source of self-control. Those individuals with more working memory capacity may use the context to disambiguate the meaning of a sentence or of an affective stimulus.

As rule-based knowledge is used repeatedly, it may be applied associatively (automatically) and may be passively activated by the environment, thus requiring no effort for its execution. That is, people with more working memory capacity will eventually store more information in the associative system as rules become automatized (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). This transition from rule-based to the memory-based system, which is believed to be the essence of learning for dual-process theories (Skehan 1998), may be better achieved by people with more working


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memory capacity who will have more attention to devote to controlled processes which, in turn, will be used to guide feelings, thoughts and actions. Thus, individual differences in working memory capacity may have a lot more to say to cognition than previously assumed and when linked to dual-process theories, the construct of working memory capacity gains more explanation power (Barret, Tugate and Engle 2004). Before addressing the issue of implications of working memory capacity to L2 speech production and acquisition, which is the main focus of this paper, the next section will briefly review some implications of dual-process theories to L2 speech production and acquisition.

4. Implications of dual process theories to speech production and acquisition

Levelt’s (1989) model of L1 speech production envisions speaking as a complex activity executed in three modules that work in tandem to produce speech. The first module is the Conceptualizer and is thought to operate with controlled processes. The second and third modules, the Formulator and Articulator are believed to be highly automatic in L1. Mirroring the discussion in this paper concerning the level of analysis during comprehension and production, it is claimed that grammatical decoding can be bypassed in the course of input comprehension whereas the same does not apply for language production. Message comprehension can be helped by existing knowledge and contextual cues whereas it is believed that during message formulation the speaker cannot bypass syntactic analysis. Because grammatical encoding can not be circumvented during language production, this process is believed to require different processes than speech comprehension.

During message formulation (more specifically during grammatical encoding that happens in the Formulator) the speaker assigns a syntactic form to messages. Because the processes involved in message formulation are automatic in L1, the process of assigning syntactic form during grammatical encoding happens without awareness or control. While in L1 speech production grammatical encoding happens subconsciously and automatically, the same does not hold for L2 learners who have an incomplete and not automatized L2 linguistic knowledge. Therefore, grammatical encoding for L2 learners requires a great deal of controlled processing and attention (Fortkamp 2000) which, in turn, are subserved by working memory. In L1 speech production the controlled processes subserved by working memory would be more required in the Conceptualizer (Levelt 1989) whereas in L2, working memory capacity


would play an even greater role for it would be required not only during the conceptualization of messages but also in the formulation (more specifically the grammatical encoding phase) which is bound to require more attention and control than in L1, and as such, L2 speech is prone to be more affected by working memory capacity (Fortkamp 2000) than L1.

So as to address the criticism that Information Processing Theories received when attempting to equate L2 learning with automaticity (for example, Lightbown 1985), Skehan, in his 1998 book, also taking an information processing approach to language acquisition, brought dual-process theories to the arena of L2 learning, offering a more detailed description of how languages are used and acquired. According to him, before the end of the critical period, language learning is qualitatively different from other types of learning. After that period, however, language learning is constrained by similar processes as other forms of learning and as such should be explained by dual-process theories of cognition.

According to Skehan (1998) second language use/acquisition is different from first language in that in L2, learners have a schematic knowledge (factual, socio-cultural background and discoursal procedural) but a limited systemic knowledge (syntactic, semantic, morphological), thus, relying more on certain strategies (semantic and contextual cues) than others (syntactic) to overcome linguistic limitations during comprehension. In L2 there is an existing knowledge system (L1); the L2 learner has more cognitive abilities and schematic knowledge than the L1 learner.

As previously mentioned, the level of analysis required during language comprehension (semantic) is not as deep as during language production (syntactic) (Skehan 1998; Magiste 1979) and this is important for language learning because depending on the level of analysis undergone by the learner, that is, depending on how much production is required from the learner, language development may or may not go beyond a certain proficiency level (Swain, 1995). In Skehan’s view then, production is essential to force the learner to process linguistic data at a syntactic level, forcing the learner to move from one system (memory-based) to another (rule-based) and vice-versa.

Skehan (1998), drawing on and extending Swain’s (1995) Output Hypothesis, suggests that output plays seven roles in second language acquisition (SLA), namely: 1) it generates better input through feedback that learners elicit; 2) it forces syntactic processing; 3) it allows hypothesis testing; 4) it helps in the automatization of L2 knowledge; 5) it provides learners with opportunities to practice discourse skills; 6) it helps learners


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develop a personal voice by forcing them to move the conversation towards topics that are interesting to them; and 7) it provides auto-input.

While the importance of production for SLA seems to be undebatable, it would seem to play only an indirect, limited causal role in SLA by motivating learners to attend to input. Nevertheless, according to Logan’s (1988) Instance Theory, it may be possible to establish a stronger causal role for production in SLA. Instance Theory suggests that lexicalized units may in part be acquired as a result of storing expressions that were generated by the rule-based system, that is, learners construct strings consciously and then store them as wholes, avoiding the need to assemble them again later (Ellis 2003).

In this view of language acquisition, production can serve as a way for material from the rule-base system to move to the memory-base system and vice-versa. Although Skehan (1998) does not consider the other possibility, namely, that learners may break down formulaic chunks into smaller parts to analyze them, Ellis (2003) reminds us that this may in fact happen. According to this account, language acquisition would proceed from language production, that is, production would serve as a way for material stored in the memory-based system to move to the rule-based system and vice-versa, enabling analysis and synthesis of language. Both analysis (of memorized chunks of language) and synthesis (of language produced originally by rules) are necessary for language development to occur, the former to allow generativity and the latter to enable fluency.

Skehan, reviewing dual-process theories, claims that the rule-based system is flexible, creative, generative and economically organized, prioritizing analyzability. As nothing is for free, these gains are paid for by a heavy processing burden during ongoing language use since rules need complex processes of construction and require more attention during both comprehension and production, thus, it is resource depleting. The exemplar-based system, on the other hand, is less parsimonious and more rigid but faster for it does not require excessive internal computation and analyzability. One natural implication for L2 learners with a limited capacity system is that, drawing more on this system frees up attentional resources which can be allocated to other areas, including the formulation and conceptualization of messages (Levelt 1989; Fortkamp 2000).

How this dual system is used and acquired seems to be different in the case of L1 and L2, both qualitatively and quantitatively. Skehan summarizes his view of L2 production and acquisition claiming that they are governed by the following principles: (i) our cognitive system does not have enough resources to process in an exhaustive manner all the second language input received (Van Patten 1990; Doughty 1991); (ii) meaning


has priority over form, with the result that a focus on form has to be manipulated in some way (Van Patten 1990; Van Patten and Cadierno 1993); (iii) people represent and learn languages in the form of rules or exemplars (Schmidt 1994; Skehan 1992); (iv) learners benefit from some degree of awareness (Schmidt 1994); (v) during natural communication, people produce language from lexicalized, exemplar-based representations unless beneficial processing conditions prevail (Ellis 1987; Skehan 1992; Foster and Skehan 1996).

One reason (besides the inexistence of the critical period for language acquisition) why L2 learning is different from L1 learning is that in L1 acquisition learners go from a process of lexicalization to syntacticalization and then re-lexicalization of their linguistic repertoire in a natural and automatic way whereas in L2 this process would require more control and would not occur without production which is needed to force the learner to process language at a syntactic level. Thus, in L2, production is the means through which learners move from syntacticalization to lexicalization and vice-versa. This claim has important pedagogical implications for it highlights the key role production plays in the language class.

5. Working memory and L2 speech production and acquisition

Research on the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 speech production has produced evidence that working memory capacity may be a good predictor of L2 speech performance (e.g. Fortkamp 2000). Fortkamp (2000) produced evidence that working memory capacity (WMC) was related to L2 speech production in terms of speech rate, mean length of run, accuracy and complexity in monologic tasks and it was at least linearly related to fluency, accuracy and complexity of L2 speech performance. She found a negative correlation between working memory capacity and number of errors in L2 speech production, concluding that WMC was a good predictor of learners’ accuracy of L2 speech. She also claimed that the processes captured by the working memory capacity test, the speaking span test (SST), and the L2 speech performance tests were those involved in the grammatical encoding (Levelt 1989) in the formulator. According to her, L2 speech production is more complex and difficult than L1 speech production because, in the former, the processes involved in the formulation of messages are highly automatic, which is not the case in L2. She concluded that L2 speech production involves more controlled processes than in L1 and thus, uses


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more attentional resources (from working memory) than the latter. The ground seemed to be fertile for more studies scrutinizing the relationship between working memory capacity and L2 speech production.

Mendonça (2003) investigated the relationship between WMC and the retention of L2 vocabulary (one aspect involved in L2 speech production and development) and found that people with a higher WMC overall were better able to learn L2 vocabulary than lower spans. Fontanini et al. (2005) investigated the relationship between WMC and fluent and accurate L2 speech. Their results indicated a significant correlation between WMC and accuracy of L2 speech. The authors explained the lack of correlations between WMC and fluency suggesting the existence of trade-off effects among L2 speech production aspects (such as fluency and accuracy). This suggestion of trade-off effects is, in turn, aligned with dual process theories. If we consider that fluency requires online and automatic processing then we accept that it will draw more on the memory-based system. In the same line, if we agree that complexity and accuracy require more controlled process then we will again agree that they are mediated by the rule-based system and trade-off effects are bound to happen between the two systems depending on processing conditions and goals.

Xhafaj (2006) investigated the relationship between WMC and pauses in L2 speech production showing that higher spans were better able to sustain L2 fluency; Finardi and Prebianca (2006) investigated the relationship between WMC and L2 speech performance in a picture description task finding significant correlations between L2 WMC and fluency (indexed as speech rate) of L2 speech. Weissheimer (2007) investigated whether individuals with more WMC (higher spans) would experience more improvement on WMC scores as a function L2 speech development. Results showed that only lower span individuals improved WMC scores. She then concluded that lower spans had more room for improvement and that WMC could be regarded as a good predictor of L2 speech development. Guara Tavares (2008) investigated the relationship between L2 working memory capacity, planning and L2 speech performance finding significant correlations between participants’ WMC and L2 speech accuracy for the control group (no planning) and L2 fluency for the experimental group (planning). Under planning conditions, working memory capacity significantly correlated with L2 speech fluency and complexity.

Departing from the aforementioned evidence for the relationship between WMC and different aspects of L2 speech production and development, Finardi (2007, 2008) went a step further to propose that WMC was also related to L2 speech acquisition, more specifically to the


acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech. She found strong and statistically significant correlations between WMC and the acquisition test (.743** in 2007 and .688** in 2008), explaining her results in face of dual process theories. She claimed that the syntactic rule had been acquired by the rule-based system which, in turn, requires controlled processes and is mediated by working memory capacity. The correlations she found between working memory capacity and the acquisition of a syntactic rule were all strong and higher than those between WMC and the retention (production) or a syntactic rule (.299* in 2007 and .287* in 2008), suggesting that working memory capacity was even more related to L2 speech acquisition than to L2 speech production. The major contribution of her studies, apart from the evidence that WMC is strongly associated with L2 speech acquisition, was the suggestion that working memory capacity was related to the controlled processes (in the rule-based system) which mediated the acquisition of a syntactic rule in L2 speech.

6. Conclusion

This paper departed from dual-process theories of the mind to review and suggest some implications for working memory capacity and L2 speech production and acquisition. Dual-process theories were reviewed and it was suggested that the rule-based system of dual-process theories is responsible for the controlled processes of working memory capacity and L2 speech production and acquisition. Furthermore, it was suggested that the two systems operate in tandem and are equally important for our survival, though in western societies the rule-based system is usually associated with desired behavior whereas the associative system is usually downgraded because of its automatic nature. What is more relevant to the present discussion and implications for L2 teaching is the suggestion made in this paper that the extent to which controlled or automatic processes will be used will depend on three conditions, namely, working memory capacity, motivation and processing conditions (Smith and DeCoster 2000). Bearing this in mind, it is possible to suggest some pedagogical implications to the teaching of L2, more specifically, to the teaching of L2 speaking.

Recall that in the arena of L2 learning it is hypothesized (e.g. Skehan 1998) that meaning has priority over form with the consequence that so as to focus on form, learners must have enough attentional resources. One way to circumvent this obstacle is to use a diet of tasks in the classroom (Skehan 1998), repeating some of these tasks so that the learner, once having dealt with the meaning in the first encounter with the task (Bygate


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2001a, 2001b; Finardi 2008a), can devote attention to the form in a second encounter. In this way, when approaching the task, the learner can use the rule-based system or the memory-based system to prioritize fluency, accuracy or complexity, though not focusing on all of those aspects in the same task execution.

Another pedagogical implication that can be drawn in this paper regards the use of lexicalized language, the so-called formulas or chunks. As became evident in the review of working memory capacity and L2 speech production, learners with a limited capacity working memory system will not be able to allocate attention to all the aspects involved in L2 speech performance with the consequence that there are bound to have trade-off effects, specially between fluency (the use of lexicalized, memorized language) and accuracy or complexity (produced by the rule-based system) (Skehan 1998). One way to guarantee that learners will focus on all the aspects which are important for L2 speech acquisition is to teach them some memorized chunks of language so that they can devote their attention to more analytical aspects of language such as accuracy and complexity, during fluency practices. Again, if the aim is to improve fluency, the teacher can help students avoid analysis of language during speech, making use of these lexicalized chunks of language.

On the other hand, if the aim is to improve accuracy, complexity or even the use of pragmatics in L2 speech, the teacher may then select tasks in which the meaning can be easily decoded so that the learner still has attentional resources left to analyze other aspects of L2 speech production such as syntax or pragmatics. In that way, with a healthy diet of tasks (Skehan 1998), some more meaning oriented, others more form oriented, such as focused tasks (Ellis 2003), the teacher may help the limited capacity learner to focus on all aspects of L2 speech production, though not at the same time.

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Foster, P. and P. Skehan. “The influence of planning and task type on second language performance”. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 18 (1996): 299-323.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

THE TRANSMISSION MODEL OF EDUCATION: A COGNITIVE APPROACH

GRACIELA NUEZ PLACERES, MARÍA CLARA PETERSEN

AND JUANI GUERRA1

1. Introduction

On May 2007 the Economy and Management Department of the Fundación Universitaria de Las Palmas (FULP) informed that just 6% of students from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) spoke English. The research stated that 93, 7% of students have some English grammatical knowledge but most lack oral competence. The fact is that the educational system provides the necessary information for students to acquire knowledge but it falls short from supplying the ability to use it. This situation is known as Functional Illiteracy. The educational system, for instance, instructs pupils to read but students do not learn to comprehend what they read because they lack effective instruction. The issue at stake comes from the traditional idea that reading is just an isolated activity that takes place in the student’s mind instead of a sequence of cognitive processes. The difficulty may arise from the concept we have concerning cognition and mind. If we take minds as containers and assume that education is the filling of those containers, then we will think that minds work in isolation without being integrated in a complex cognitive processing. However, if we assume that cognition is a social

1 Acknowledgements: Financial support for this paper has been provided by the National Research Project (HUM2005-08221-C02-02/FILO “Poética sociocognitiva”, Ministry of Education, Spain) and by a Research Fellowships (funded by Cabildo de Gran Canaria, Spain).

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activity, then we will understand that minds rarely work in isolation. They work on individual entities and, among others, through interaction, and in a certain physical context either natural or artificial (Salomon 1993).

With this in mind one could understand the Embodied Cognition slogan “mind isn’t in the head” (Anderson 2005: 9) which can help us to expand the concept of cognition as the interaction of mind, body and environment. According to Bateson (1972), knowledge is half in our minds and half in the world since the concept of mind is in itself a kind of abstraction not easily delimited.

So if cognition is not limited to the person’s mind and it can not be seen in an autonomous level, then it must be true that cognition, as well as the linguistic activity it produces, is essentially collective. The social characteristic of cognition demands, for instance, that the educational system trains students to reach comprehension through distributed activities such as reading, questioning and answering. Each of the activities performed in a class section leads to the desired goal which is comprehension. In the area of second language acquisition it could be helpful to remember that “[…] human languages exist only in the form of social activity” (Anderson 2007: 10). If the student receives information, memorizes it and writes it for the exam only, then, there is little evidence that learning took place. The failure of our university students to communicate orally in a simple dialogue situation after ten years of obligatory education reveals the lack of effectiveness of our system. Such failure might reveal that the difficulty we face in our educational system is a conceptual one due to the traditional concept of mind at work. The inefficiency of our educational system may be related to the traditional concept of mind.

Our aim is to approach to a new model of mind which could provide the necessary tools to accomplish an effective teaching system. We will analyze the traditional model of education through the analytic tools provided by cognitive linguistics and propose how cognition should be understood in the educational field. We intend to prove that our educational system is still based on the traditional transmission model of education which is indirectly connected to the communication model provided by Shannon and Weaver (1949).

2. Antecedents

The transmission model, originally called Jug and Mug model by Carl Rogers (1969), makes reference to the archaic view about teaching, in which learning magically occurs when a sender passes a message to a

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receiver. This is a model that is closely related to the transmission model of communication developed by Shannon and Weaver (1949) who were scientists working for the Bell Telephone company. Their vision intended to build a mathematical theory of communication which had basically a technical application. So, if we apply such a model to the education field we would have a distorted understanding of what teaching is since it reduces education to a mere transmission of information devoid of any contextual influences. In Spain the educational system after 1970 was based on the transmission model which was in turn very influenced by behaviourism. Education was then understood as transmission of knowledge and change of conduct. Fortunately, in 1990 with the introduction of the new Spanish educative law called LOGSE, the theoretical paradigm changed. Constructivism replaced behaviourism due to the influence of Piaget´s work (1929) who asserted that “[…] knowledge is acquired by a process of mental construction” (Bereiter 2002: 207). The Spanish educational system has undergone major changes in the theoretical paradigms that support its structure, but what is in fact unclear, is the extent of the change. We intend to prove that the traditional model deeply rooted in the folk vision of mind as a container and communication as transmission of information remains present at the core of people’s cognitive processes and prevents further development in Education. Written as well as oral expressions can reveal the conceptual foundation which lay behind language.

The theoretical framework provided by cognitive linguistics could be helpful to get into a deeper level of education understanding through the language we use in our everyday activities. Such language does reveal our conceptual baggage. We must take into account “[…] to what extent language can influence thought processes” (Reddy 1993 [1979]: 175) and to what extent have we changed the traditional paradigms on teaching so rooted in our language understanding and production. Concepts such as communication and teaching are largely determined by semantic structures of the language itself. For instance, English as well as Spanish language has a preferred framework for conceptualizing communication, the so-called conduit metaphor (Reddy 1993 [1979]: 165). Examples of oral and written expressions will be provided in sections II and V.

3. The conduit metaphor

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) observed that metaphors are present in our everyday language to talk about concepts that are somehow intangible, and

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may be hard to associate directly. Many of the common metaphors are based in preconceptual schemata and are related to our physical experience of the world. We use terms from a familiar field ‘source domain’ to describe an unfamiliar or abstract domain ‘target domain’.

For instance, whenever we refer to the “transmission model” of education the sender-recipient schema comes to mind (Brünner 1987: 110), which is, as well, related to the mathematical communication model of Shannon and Weaver (1949):

Figure 20-1: Shannon and Weaver (1949) communication model.

The transmission model activates a container image schema in our minds by means of which we understand that the sender and the receiver’s minds are containers.

Image schemas are, therefore (pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic) rudimentary tools which allow us to grasp abstract concepts in terms of simple configurations or depictions of the external world. In addition, image schemas are grounded on our bodily and sensorimotor experience. As Lakoff and Johnson (1980) indicate in the light of cognitive science, our understanding of the world is, therefore, embodied. Our own body is a container physically delimited by a contour. We try to devise frontiers for the entities that we perceive outside us. The CONTAINER is an example of an image schema:


Figure 20-2: Container schema

The conception of the mind as a container is present in our basic

understanding about learning and education and this conception is also connected with a conventional metaphor called the conduit metaphor, in which ideas are represented as objects, words as containers, and communication as sending ideas through the words (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The effects of the conduit metaphor can be dealt with in order to develop an effective model of education.

“The conduit metaphor is a real and powerful semantic structure in English, which can influence our thinking, then it follows that common sense about language may be confused” (Reddy 1993(1979): 175). This semantic structure is also present in the Spanish language when we use linguistic expressions such as these “Métetelo en la cabeza”, (Put it in your head), “Esa idea no me entra”, (That idea does not come into me), “No entra en razón”, (He does not get into reason), “No me cabe en la cabeza lo que Marta hizo”, (It does not fit in my head what Martha did).2 Linguistic expressions as these reveal the presence of the conduit metaphor and shed light on the way in which humans structure the world. The conduit metaphor pictures the mind as a container in which ideas, understood as objects, are taken out of a person’s mind and send to a different one during any communication act. With this in mind, it is easy to reduce and understand education as the transmission of ideas. The teacher sends the ideas contained in his/her mind to the student’s minds. 2 Translations are given literally to illustrate the use of image-schemas.

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The difficulty lies in the fact that words do not carry meaning but words guide towards meaning which is then negotiated. In order to see the constant dependence on the conduit metaphor present in the language system and how difficult it would be to avoid its use we found helpful to add this anecdote:

If I speak very carefully, with constant attention, I can do fairly well at avoiding them. But the result is hardly idiomatic English. Instead of walking into a classroom and asking “Did you get anything out of that article?” I have to say, “Were you able to construct anything of interest on the basis of the assigned text?”…Practically speaking if you try to avoid all obvious conduit metaphor expressions you are nearly struck dumb when communication becomes the topic. You can say to your student, “Try to communicate more effectively,” but it will not have nearly the impact of, “You’ve got to learn how to put your thoughts into words.” (Reddy 1993[1979: 177-178])

This example proves that the conduit metaphor is present in our daily

language use and the misleading technical idea of communication affects our vision of what teaching is supposed to be. Communication is neither sending objects that contain something nor pouring a substance into someone’s head. The objects also called signals in Weaver’s model “[…] do not contain anything, but do something” (Reddy 1993 [1979]: 184).

Instruction and communication are activities that require effort. The conduit metaphor can lead us down a “[…] technological and social blind alley” (Reddy 1979: 188) because that technical model of communication “[…] objectifies meaning in a misleading and dehumanizing fashion” (Reddy 1979: 186).

The transmission model of education is very connected to the model designed by Shannon and Weaver due to the presence of the conduit metaphor in our thought processes. This metaphor still affects the vision of instruction in our educational system because the folk theory of mind is unconsciously present in our world understanding. For instance, the sentence “You will find better ideas than that in the library” (Reddy 1993 [1979]: 187) is an expression derived from the conduit metaphor by a chain of metonymies which are misleading because a person stores thoughts and experiences to draw from before reading books. A frame restructuring on human cognition and communication could be the clue to the improvement of education.


4. Possible metonymies found in the jug and mug model

An essential idea within cognitive semantics is the notion of ‘conceptual domain’, which is, in simple words, a ‘package of knowledge’. Communication is an example of conceptual domain, as it incorporates a vast quantity of knowledge such as speaker, channel, language, receiver, signals, message, interferences, purpose, intention, meaning, discourse modes, and so forth. Metonymy combines two domains within the same domain of experience, but in different ways: (1) a subdomain and a matrix domain, which constitute the internal structure of a metonymy3; and (2) a source domain (from where we take a specific word or concept) and a target domain (where we project referential meaning). The internal logic of a metonymy always remains the same (obviously the subdomain is at all times included in a matrix domain); it is the direction of the mapping from source to target that changes4. “Bush attacked Irak” would be an example of a target-in-source metonymy, whereby a particular matrix domain which works as a source domain (Bush) is reduced to refer to the subdomain, which is the target domain (Army). Figure 20-3 illustrates the mapping:

Figure 20-3: Domain reduction

3 The notion of subdomain roughly corresponds to the term ‘part’ while matrix domain is somehow equivalent to ‘whole’. 4 In the figures, an arrow indicates the direction of the mapping.

BUSH

ARMY

Subdomain & Target

MATRIX DOMAIN & SOURCE

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The lexical item ‘Mind’ would be an example of a target-in-source metonymy also, whereby a particular matrix domain which works as a source domain (Person) is reduced to refer to the subdomain, which is the target domain (Mind).

The word ‘Mind’ is, in itself, a kind of abstraction, so the purpose of this mapping operation is to categorise a part of the body which is not as clearly delimited as the person. The use of the previous metonymy allows us to reduce and focus on a part of the body which is not easily defined. When we hear the word ‘Mind’, we rapidly recognise what we are talking about, but we cannot point to it. Furthermore, at the same time, a great amount of knowledge is instantly evoked, and this is mainly information about emotions, thoughts, ideas, consciousness, unconsciousness, and the person’s character. With this in mind we attempt to map the interaction between metaphor and metonymy found in the Jug and Mug model. SOURCE TARGET

Figure 20-4: Metaphor and metonymy interaction

From these mappings it follows that both the teacher and the student’s minds are seen as containers. Using Ruiz de Mendoza’s patterns of interaction between metaphor and metonymy we have found “[…] a

JUG

Teacher

Mind

MUG Student

Mind


metonymic reduction of the correspondence of the metaphoric target” (2002: 67). The person’s mind is reduced to a container. This vision reduces learning to the acquisition of knowledge, although learning is something broader than that. It has to do with the body, the context, the historical background, the people around it and the way in which we handle the knowledge once it is in the container.

5. The student as a tabula rasa

‘Pail’, ‘bucket’, ‘mug’, and ‘Tabula rasa’ are words used to refer to the student and are connected with the traditional idea of education, even though the last expression differs from the former ones. ‘Tabula rasa’ is a Latin linguistic expression used long ago by Aristotle to refer to the mind as a “scraped table or clean slate.” This could be an extreme view of what mind is, but still can be present in our educational environments.

Under this view the teacher plays an extremely important role in the education process, but the student seems to be very passive as in the mug model. This model puts greater emphasis on the activity of instruction. Although it might seem a very negative model of education we would like to emphasize its positive aspect. If the student’s mind is a clean slate or partly scraped table, then the teacher might be considered to be a craftsman: an artisan whose difficult task is scraping and shaping wood. Here we would like to centre on the difficult task of the teacher on the instruction art. The responsibility of teachers is to master such art with proficiency and effectivity.

Both instruction and communication are activities that require great effort and the technical model of communication designed by Shannon and Weaver applied to the teaching practise does not show the necessary effort required in education. Shannon and Weaver’s model has already been criticised by other cognitive researchers such as Sperber and Wilson and some relevance theoreticians, but still they tend to rely on the metaphor of information processing by computer. If we applied to the educational field, it is a model that dehumanizes education because it tends to explain learning as the acquisition of data, and it understands teaching as transmission of data. As shown in prior sections “The mind as a container metaphor is handy for talking about the acquisition of knowledge, but not for talking about what the knowledge is good for once it is in the container” (Bereiter 2002: 21). In more fashionable models, such as constructivism, the mind constructs the objects it contains, but again the container metaphor remains and that is the problem (Bereiter 2002: 20). To get that information in the mind to do anything is the difficult part and

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that is where the teacher’s role becomes extremely important. His/her proficiency in the art of instruction is relevant in order for learning to take place as well as his/her knowledge about real communicative interaction and the social dimensions of language (Mey and Talbot 1989).

Cognitive science and the advances on neuronal research have shown that the mind is neither a tabula rasa nor a machine as a computer might be and communication is not a one-way, linear street. So for the art of instruction the transmission model is not effective to reach knowledge because it can not equate content and meaning. Education goes beyond acquisition and duplication of information.

The teacher should be an expert on a certain subject but also a well trained craftsman on the art of instruction and not just a transmitter. His/her task is not to “deliver the curriculum” to the pupils’ minds but to reach meaning through the creation of the necessary conditions for the curriculum to be used and understood so it becomes relevant. For instance, a teacher can transmit and test students on biological systems but “[…] when practise gets serious does the student use those concepts as a botanist or researcher would do?” (Bereiter 2002: 22). Teaching skills can then be compared to the craftsman mastering of art skills.

6. Towards a new conception of mind: the student as a sponge

[…]A viable theory of mind for 21st century education, it seems to me, must be able to NEGOTIATE effectively between individual learning on the one hand and knowledge conceived of as a product or as a cultural good on the other. Folk theory of mind constrained by its container metaphor simply can’t do the job. (Bereiter 2002: 20)

The folk conception of mind and the educational theories that it

sustains seem to be more related with the 1st generation cognitive linguistics, where mind is understood to be an information processor whose main functions are to encode and decode abstract symbols. The processes are linear and rule-based. Noam Chomsky and the generativist grammarians had a distorted vision of the mind. They described mind as something isolated from the context. Their model could not explain those mental processes that did not deal primarily with symbols as intuition and recognizing someone’s face. Meaning is described as an invariable magnitude that enters and exits the system.

But with the 2nd generation of cognitive linguists the vision changed. The advances on neural research gave a broader vision on the neuronal network model. Mental processes were not linear but interconnected and


multiple. With this vision in mind we would like to add a new term associated to the vision of mind which we took from a common everyday expression in the educational field. We took the expression from the Spanish language: “El alumno es una esponja”, (The student is a sponge), “Aprenden como esponjas”, (They learn as sponges). Figure 20-5 illustrates the mapping: SOURCE TARGET Figure 20-5: Metaphor and metonymy interaction

The term sponge refers to the student as a whole but through a metonymic mapping we can visualize the term to refer to the student’s mind. In the terminology by Ruiz de Mendoza (2002) this interaction pattern would include a metonymic reduction of the metaphoric target. If we compare the sponge and brain definitions given by the Collins´ Dictionary we can find much in common between them.

SPONGE DOMAIN BRAIN DOMAIN Multicellular nervous mass Colonies neuronal networks Porous nervous tissue Complex nervous system Elastic soft

Both terms have much in common and do fit better with the real

concept of what brain is and how it works. Although the dictionary describes the sponge as an animal that lacks brain, we find its shape and qualities illustrate human brains better than a container or tabula rasa. The sponge is opened by a variety of holes which are interconnected. It is ready to absorb or pour out a substance when needed: as occurs to a healthy person’s brain that is ready to integrate new knowledge to other already existing contents, meanings, experiences and even beliefs. For instance, when a teacher presents a formula, such as adding ‘–ed’ to form

Sponge Student

Mind

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past tense, the student connects it with the notions he/she has got on verbs and observes the difference between regular and irregular verbs.

The concept of mind does not end in the individual’s brain. There must be something like a collaborative “knowledge-building mechanism” (Bereiter 2002: 20; Evans 2006) asserts, and situatedness is the basis for access routes to meaning. According to the connectionist view of mind, meaning emerges from the global activation of the cognitive system due to the activity of neuronal networks as the sponge illustrates well. In addition to this, situated cognition states that meaning emerges as well from processes of negotiation and joint construction. The social dimensions of language must be present in learning. Teachers must create the necessary conditions for a second language to be really used. In Gran Canaria for instance, there is as tendency to teach English as a subject/object in itself and not as an instrument for communication to happen. “[…] when language is studied in use, context always comes first, directing the process of meaning construction from the very beginning” (Porto 2007: 169).

There is considerable evidence to suggest that the negotiation of meaning can facilitate the language learning process. From a pedagogical perspective, numerous studies have shown the effect that individual learner, task and context variables can have on promoting opportunities for negotiation (Bitchener 1999). Asking for clarification, rephrasing, and confirming what you have understood are all strategies for the negotiation of meaning in a classroom and also in an everyday situation. Information gap activities such as jigsaw readings or listenings, group story building, spot the difference and communicative crosswords are examples of activities that provide learners the opportunity to develop their communicative competence through negotiation of meaning as they share information. In the context of connectionism, meaning is understood as the “Emergent global state of a system” (Hendriks-Jansen 1996:75), and for the approaches of situated cognition, meaning is something constructed or negotiated during interaction among people (Hendriks-Jansen 1996: xi). Because of the linguistic context (co-text) and the extratextual (social) situation, we activate the pertinent and emergent sense of terms such as mind, education, and meaning. But none of these terms –construction, emergent state of a system, negotiation, although used in written description of educational models– seems to be present in our everyday language about communication. The Idealized Conduit model does. Expressions such as “getting the ideas across”, “conveying meaning”, “transferring information”, “delivering the curriculum” are some


examples. These examples illustrate that the conduit metaphor is present at the core of our cognitive system which is manifested in our language use

In the preamble of the LOGSE we can find sentences such as these: “En la educación se transmiten y ejercitan los valores […]”, (In education values are transmitted and rehearsed). “[…] de la transmisión de conocimientos y saberes que asegura…”, (from the transmittion of knowledge and wisdom that assures) “En esta sociedad del futuro, configurada progresivamente como una sociedad del saber, la educación compartirá con otras instancias sociales la transmisión de información y conocimientos […]”, (education will share with other social institutions the transmission of information and knowledge)

As observed before, the conduit model is present in a variety of scientific models, in the area of language, communication, and technology as with the model provided by Shannon and Weaver, but the most important conceptual error is in the common assumption that language is like a container that carries meaning when it is transmitted, instead of guiding people toward meaning once it has been negotiated and collaboratively built. Reddy stated in his toolmakers paradigm story that “[…] communication demands effort and is hard work” (1993 (1979): 185) because it is an activity that requires negotiation and action.

The concept of mind illustrated as a sponge seems to approach closer to the way it functions .But this model is far from being an adequate proposal because it is still very close to the container image schema previously mentioned. The ‘sponge’ model adds useful elements to expand our understanding of the brain structure but we could fail on thinking that learning is just an autonomous activity. We could supplement the previous models if we change the focus. We propose that he focus should be a social and interactive one.

Cognition is a social activity so we could start thinking of something completely different. For instance, a common teacher-student effort to construct new competences. We could propose a metaphor for teaching based on the conceptualization of effort or construction of new meaning/skill/competence or even teacher-pupil cooperation, centred on dialogue, reflection and active communication. This would be useful if we wanted to overcome the MIND IS A CONTAINER dominant model. The word ‘action’ and ‘effort’ are very close to Reddy’s explanation of the communication process and to the new approach we want to present: The cooperative effort of teachers and students constructing meaning in the educational institution, and also the cooperative effort of the learning community (parents, volunteers, teaching staff and so on). All members of

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the community become active elements in reaching the goal. All are an essential part of the learning process. All learn in the doing.

This collaborative model would allow negotiation and “[…] enlargement of mutual cognitive environments” (Sperber and Wilson 1986: 93) as well as the emergence of new and effective models to apply in that specific context. A renewed vision to do and understand education. All agents feel responsible for what they do, students are guided and helped to use their knowledge in context created artificially in the classroom, teachers activate thinking through dialogue and communication in the classrooms, parents participate in the making of the school, volunteers are invited to participate as well and the community is allowed to get involved in the effort.

In order to do that it is necessary to reflect on the concept of mind and redefine it. Carl Bereiter provides a possible project for further study: “The main components of a new theory of mind and knowledge are available, even though the theory proper is not. These components are the connectionist view of mind and the Popperian view of conceptual artefacts” (Bereiter 2002: 210).

7. The importance of ICMs in the transmission model

As previously commented, the transmission model of education is based on an internal conduit metaphor but that does not mean that it is a simple metaphorical mapping. It is a complex idealized model in which there is a connection of different metonymies and metaphors that are internally related. An Idealized Cognitive Model ICM is “[…] a complex structured whole, a gestalt […]” (Lakoff 1987: 68) that provides a cognitive structure to our knowledge. Its function is to represent reality from a certain perspective and it designates any concept constructed on the basis of what we know about the world (Ruiz de Mendoza 2002). ICM’s are experientially and culturally motivated. They are based on typical and salient experiences, and allow us to organize our knowledge and to categorize our experiences (Martín de León 2004). They follow four kinds of structuring principles: propositional structure (frames), image-schemic structure, metaphoric mappings and metonymic mappings (Lakoff 1987: 68). The conduit metaphor ICM is structured through metaphoric and metonymy mappings. The essential metaphorical parts of the conduit idealized model are the following: -Communication is sending ideas from one person to another -Ideas are objects


-Persons/Minds are containers -Linguistic expressions are containers (Martín de León 2004)

Figure 20-6 illustrates the metaphors found in the transmission model: SOURCE METAPHOR TARGET Communication domain Education domain

Figure 20-6: Transmission model ICM Furthermore within the transmission model ICM there is also interaction between metaphors and metonymies. Within the Target domain of the metaphor we found metonymic reduction of correspondences in line with the terminology by Ruiz de Mendoza (2002) previously presented in figure 20-4. We tried to focus on the idea of mind as a container most of all. The Transmission model of education is very connected with the mathematical communication model of Shannon and Weaver (1949) also called the “informational approach to communication” where the idea of communication as previous metonymic mapping showed, seems to be reduced to the folk believe that the mind is a container and that communication is merely sending and receiving words as objects which are full of meaning. The point is that language does not contain meaning in itself, but it guides toward it. The folk theory of mind as a container proves that language does influence thought processes.

Jug /Sender Mug/Receiver Liquid/Message Air/Channel Pouring/sending

Teacher Student Formula Linguistic signals Transmit

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8. Conclusion

ICMs are culturally motivated and inherited. Synergic cognition plays a vital role in our theories and ideas about the world because we inherit certain patterns of thought which are already conventionalised from our social ancestors (Bernárdez 2007). Throughout history, each social group builds an image or model on different areas, as is the case with the “transmission model” that is connected with the folk theory of mind as a container. Stereotypical views of communication and education are just partial construals of it because communication as education is more than that. We hold a fragmentary and limited vision of what instruction is, but through a collaborative knowledge building we can negotiate to find better approaches to that ancient art. The variety of educational models tends to focus on an aspect which seems more relevant; however, through the application of the tools provided by cognitive linguistics on the transmission model we have observed that there is a tendency to reduce teaching to the transmission of information to the recipient’s container. As metonymic mapping showed, reducing the concept of mind to a container does reduce the concept of what teaching is supposed to be and do. This fact is responsible for an impoverished view of education. It seems reasonable to assume that any expert will have a richer view, but from our language use the folk theory is unconsciously present and affects the different models of education given. Each focuses on a salient aspect but at the core the same view prevails which is to understand the mind as a container and education as a transmission of knowledge. In order to do that, it is necessary to reflect on the concept of mind and redefine it. Carl Bereiter provides a possible project for further study, “[…] the main components of a new theory of mind and knowledge are available, even though the theory proper is not. These components are the connectionist view of mind and the Popperian view of conceptual artefacts.” (Bereiter 2002: 210). If teachers are confronted with their patterns of thought or meaning-construction related to communication, mind and education then it is possible to improve their performance in classrooms. The implication of the previous study for second language teaching in Gran Canaria would be to assist teachers to transcend their culture-bound, common sense perceptions and thoughts patterns toward a closer understanding of human mind, communication and learning through specific training programs. These programs will provide opportunities to practice and promote meaning negotiation and construction among peers, students and the


educative community. We hold this knowledge would increase our effectivity in teaching English as a second language in Gran Canaria.

References

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Bateson, G. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Bernárdez, E. “Synergy in the construction of meaning”. In Language and Meaning, edited by M. Fabiszak, 15-37. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007.

Bereiter, C. Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002.

Bitchener, J. “The negotiation of meaning by advanced ESL learners: the effects of individual learner factors and task type”. In Research Space Auckland, http://hdl.handle.net/2292/1100, 1999.

Brünner, G. “Metaphern für Sprache und Kommunikation in Alltag und Wissensshaft”. Diskussion Deutsch 18/94 (1987): 100-119.

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Faucconnier, G. and M. Turner. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

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Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Lakoff, G. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Lakoff, G. and M. Tuner. More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Martín de León, C. “Metonymic motivation of the CONDUIT Metaphor”. Metaphorik.de 6 (2004): 29-90.

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Porto, M. D. “The role of context in word meaning construction: a case study”. International Journal of English Studies 7/1 (2007): 169-179.

Reddy, M. J. “The conduit metaphor: a case of frame conflict in our language about language”. In Metaphor and Thought, edited by A. Orthony, 164-201. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (1979).

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CONTRIBUTORS Jorge Arús Hita, PhD in English Linguistics (2003), has been teaching English language and linguistics at Universidad Complutense de Madrid since 1997. His publications include articles on contrastive linguistics and EFL teaching in various national and international journals and edited volumes. He is the style supervisor of Atlantis, the journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-North American Studies. Gemma Bel-Enguix has a Ramon y Cajal research position at the Department of Romance Philologies of the Rovira i Virgili University in Tarragona. She has been a pre-doctoral fellow at Leiden University and at UNAM. As a postdoctoral fellow she worked at the Universities of Georgetown and Milan. Her main research topic is the application of natural computing models to linguistic issues. Abdelhadi Bellachhab is currently preparing his PhD dissertation in Linguistics at the University of Nantes. He is mainly interested in meaning construction in verbal interaction in the FSL/FFL class, and his areas of interest are Interlanguage Pragmatics and Intercultural Communication. Recently, he has been particularly interested in cognitive bases underlying linguistic representation. Begoña Bellés-Fortuño holds a PhD in English Philology from the Universitat Jaume I in Castelló. She is an English Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at that University. Her research interests focus on Discourse Analysis and more concretely academic discourse both written and spoken, as well as Contrastive and Corpus Linguistics. She is currently involved in the creation of an academic multimodal corpus, both in English and in Spanish. Ruth Breeze, MA, PhD, is the Director of the Institute of Modern Languages at the University of Navarra, and the Editor of the Journal of Professional and Academic English. She has published widely on academic writing, English for Specific Purposes, and Intercultural Communication.

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Victoria Escandell-Vidal is Professor of Linguistics at UNED. She works on Semantics and Pragmatics. She is the author of several books: Los complementos del nombre (1995), Introducción a la Pragmática (1996/2006), Fundamentos de Semántica composicional (2004), La comunicación (2005), Apuntes de Semántica léxica (2007). She has been visiting scholar at the Universities of Venice, Comahue, Stockholm, Rosario, Utrecht, Lund and Gotemburg. She is member of the editorial board of Revista Española de Lingüística, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada, Pragmalingüística, Onomázein, Spanish in Context and Intercultural Pragmatics. Kyria Finardi is currently at Pittsburgh University finishing her PhD at the Department of Applied Linguistics. Her research interests include human cognition and SLA. She has published articles on task implementation and testing and the relationship between working memory capacity and different aspects of L2 speech production and acquisition. Inmaculada Fortanet-Gómez holds a PhD in English Philology from the Universitat de València. From 2001 she has been a Lecturer at Universitat Jaume I in Castelló, where she teaches English for Specific Purposes for Business Administration students and English language for English Philology, as well as Master degrees, doctoral courses, and teacher training courses. She has published several books aimed at her students. Her research interest centres on academic and professional English, as well as Content and Language Integrated Learning. Juani Guerra is Associate Professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain). She holds a PhD in Modern Languages (University Complutense of Madrid). She presently directs a postgraduate programme on Cognitive Studies of Language, Literature and Translation, a research group on Cognitive Poetics, and a Research Project funded by the Spanish Government on Sociocognitive Poetics. Victoria Guillén-Nieto has been the Head of the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante since 2003. She has been lecturing in Applied Linguistics and English for Specific Purposes for over twenty years. She currently conducts the research project COMINTER-SIMULNEG and co-edits the book Intercultural Business Communication and Simulation and Gaming Methodology (2009).


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Laura Hidalgo Downing is a Senior Lecturer of English Language and Linguistics at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. Her research interests are in the fields of Stylistics, Discourse-pragmatics and Language Teaching. She has written several articles in these fields and is the author of Negation, Text Worlds and Discourse: The Pragmatics of Fiction (Ablex 2000). Alberto Hijazo-Gascón graduated in Hispanic Philology at the Universidad de Zaragoza (2006) and has a Master in Applied Linguistics to Teaching of Spanish as a Foreign Language from Antonio de Nebrija University in Madrid. He is currently a PhD student and his research is focused on Intercultural Pragmatics, Metaphor and Applied Linguistics. M. Dolores Jiménez-López is a Lecturer at the Department of Romance Philologies of the Rovira i Virgili University. She worked two years, as a pre-doctoral fellow, at the Computer and Automation Research Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest. Her post-doctoral training includes a three years stay at Department of Computer Science of the University of Pisa. Application of formal models to natural language analysis is one of her main research topics. Beata Karpi!ska-Musia" is currently teaching Linguistics and Cross-cultural Pragmatics at the University of Gda!sk, Poland. Her research interests focus on Cognitive and Educational Linguistics, Intercultural Pragmatics, Intercultural Awareness and Competence of Foreign Language teachers, Teaching Methodology and Critical Pedagogy. She has already published several papers dealing with these topics. María D. López Maestre, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer in Stylistics and English language and literature at the Department of English Philology at the University of Murcia. She has published widely in international journals and books in the field of Stylistics and Corpus Linguistics, and is the author of several books on English Language Teaching. Her main current areas of research are Critical Discourse Analysis, Intercultural Communication, Intercultural Relations and Stylistics. Carmen Maiz Arévalo obtained her PhD in English Linguistics in 2001, being an English teacher since 1995. Currently, she is Assistant Lecturer at the Universidad Complutense, where she teaches Pragmatics, Semantics and English. Her fields of interest are mainly speech act theory, politeness,

Contributors

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gender and language and Applied Linguistics. She has published several articles on these issues and taken part in numerous conferences. Graciela Nuez Placeres is a PhD candidate at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She is member of the ULPGC Research group Cognitive Poetics coordinated by Juani Guerra. Her research interests are Education, ESL in Spain, Social Cognition, Cognitive Sciences and Idealized Cognitive Models. Manuel Padilla Cruz is a Lecturer in English at the University of Seville. He holds a PhD in English Linguistics and a BA degree in Italian from the University of Seville. His research and publications deal with issues of relevance and politeness theories, Historical, Interlanguage and Cross-cultural Pragmatics. Pedro Pernías-Peco is a Lecturer in the Department of Languages and Computer Systems at the University of Alicante, and teaches Multimedia Techniques and New Technologies Applied to Education. At present he is the joint director of the Virtua Working Group, a team that has implemented the computer version of official Spanish Internet courses for the Instituto Cervantes, and for the Government of the Province of Alberta (Canada). María Clara Petersen is a PhD student at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. She is member of ULPGC Research group Cognitive Poetics coordinated by Juani Guerra. Her research interests are Education, ESL Acquisition and Socio-cognitive Learning Skills. Barbara Pizziconi has been a Lecturer in Japanese Applied Linguistics at SOAS, University of London, since 1996, where she teaches various courses at undergraduate and postgraduate level on Japanese as a Second Language and Language Pedagogy. She has also worked extensively on Linguistic Politeness, a topic on which she has widely published. María Sabaté i Dalmau is a PhD candidate at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She researches on Intercultural Communication and Language Uses and Ideologies in multilingual and migration contexts, within the field of Linguistic Anthropology. She has completed her postgraduate education in Linguistic Anthropology at the University of Toronto. She has been a Junior Lecturer at the UAB and has published her research internationally.


449

Bryant Smith is a PhD student at Louisiana State University. His academic interests are primarily in the fields of Pragmatics, Second Language Acquisition, and Applied Linguistics. As a learner and teacher of Spanish, he is interested in the acquisition of all aspects of language, from grammatical and lexical to pragmatic. He is also interested in Bilingualism and Spanish in the United States. Chelo Vargas-Sierra is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante. She has mainly done research in Linguistics, Terminology and specialized Translation. Her recent publications include “El léxico especializado y las ontologías” (2007) and “Diseño de un corpus especializado con fines terminográficos: El Corpus de la Piedra Natural” (2006). Marisol Velasco Sacristán is a Lecturer at the University of Valladolid, where she teaches Applied Linguistics, particularly ESP. Her main research interests include Cognitive Linguistics and Pragmatics. Her papers in these areas have appeared in major international and national journals. Albin Wagener holds a PhD in Language Sciences from the Université Catholique de l’Ouest, France, where he is currently teaching Linguistics, Pragmatics, Research Methodology and Intercultural Communication. His research interests range from Intercultural Communication, Pragmatics and Linguistics through to Systemics and Conflict Studies in human interactions. He has already published several papers. Judith Williams-Jellyman is an Associate Lecturer in the Department of English Studies at the University of Alicante and free-lance translator. Her main research interests are in the field of Translation and English for Specific Purposes.

EDITORS The editors are members of the Research Group “Intercultural Pragmatic Studies (English-Spanish): Pragmatic and Discourse Aspects” (P.A.I. HUM 640), have co-edited Current Trends in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (Research Group “Intercultural Pragmatic Studies”, 2004) and Studies in Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), and organised three editions of the “International Symposium on Intercultural, Cognitive and Social Pragmatics” (E.P.I.C.S. I, II and III). Reyes Gómez Morón is a Lecturer at the Department of Philology and Translation (Pablo de Olavide University, Seville). She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Seville. She currently co-ordinates the research group. Her research interests and publications focus on pragmatics and teaching both English and Spanish as second languages, sociopragmatics (politeness theory), cross-cultural pragmatics, and discourse analysis. Manuel Padilla Cruz is currently a Lecturer at the Department of English Language (University of Seville). He holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Seville. His research interests and publications deal mainly with cognitive and social pragmatics (relevance theory and politeness theory, respectively). He has also made research in historical, interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics. Lucía Fernández Amaya is a Lecturer at the Department of Philology and Translation (Pablo de Olavide University, Seville). She holds a PhD in English Linguistics from the University of Seville. Her research interests and publications focus on pragmatics and translation, sociopragmatics (politeness theory), interlanguage and cross-cultural pragmatics, discourse analysis and teaching pragmatics to ESL learners. María de la O Hernández López is a Lecturer at the Department of Philology and Translation (Pablo de Olavide University, Seville). She holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of London and is about to finish her PhD dissertation in Cross-cultural Pragmatics. Her research interests and publications focus on pragmatics, intercultural communication and international negotiation in institutional settings.

INDEX Academic writing xxix, 305-306, 309, 314, 317-319, 445 Accidental irrelevance xx, 98, 101-102 Accusations 146, 158-159 Acquisition v, vii, xvi, xviii, xx, xxxii-xxxiii, xxxv-xxxvii, 15-18,

22-25, 33-34, 50-51, 110-115, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125-128, 141, 143-144, 160-163, 165- 166, 176, 178-179, 217, 223, 250, 351, 357, 388, 390-391, 404, 409-411, 413, 417-426, 428, 435-436, 446, 448-449

Ambiguity vi, xxv, 221-222, 224, 244, 249, 416 Anecdote vii, xi, xxx-xxxi, 362-385, 432 Apologies xxi, xxxvi, 88, 105-106, 117-120, 126-127, 129-130,

136-138, 145, 152, 154, 157, 163-164, 176, 178 Argumentative positioning xxv, 228, 248 Assertive function 146 Attitudes xxiv, 1, 30, 60-62, 65-66, 71, 81, 84, 177, 199, 202-

205, 209, 217, 337, 340-341, 343, 370, 391, 397 Automatic Process xxxiii, 19, 26, 408-412, 414-416, 421-422 Automatization 410-411, 418, 425 Beam 273-274 Behabitives 146 Behaviour xi, xv, xvii, xxii, xxv, xxxii, xxxix, 1-5, 7, 9, 11-15,

17, 19-21, 28-32, 35, 37, 65, 87-89, 91, 96-98, 103-104, 106, 127, 129-130, 142, 144, 148, 150, 152-154, 156, 158-159, 222, 226, 228, 230-231, 237-250, 255-257, 259-268, 270, 272-276, 323-324, 340-342, 345-352, 356-357, 389, 396-398

Brain xxxv, 3-10, 12-15, 17-24, 31-38, 269, 437-439, 443 Bridging strategy 312-314 British English 143, 149, 151-152, 180, 333 Business vii, xvii, xxix-xxx, xxxv, xxxvii-xl, xlii, 2, 38, 67, 83,

141-142, 164, 252, 281, 283, 297, 300, 321-327, 329-339, 346-347, 350-351, 354-355, 357-360, 446

Business pragmatics 141-142, 164 CARS model 307, 312 Catalan complaint speech act set 144 Cautious optimism xx, 88, 93, 97-98, 100-101, 104 Centrality claim 308, 312, 315-317 Code xii, xxvi, 125, 184-185, 196, 200, 205, 220, 244, 255,

264, 267-268, 270-274, 276, 291, 301, 349

Index 452

Cognitive effects 91, 93-94, 96, 98-99, 101 Cognitive effort 91, 94-96, 98, 102, 265, 267 Cognitive linguistics xviii, xxxiv, xxxvi, 50-51, 58-60, 64, 214, 428-429,

436, 442-443, 449 Cognitive Pragmatics xvi, 34 Cognitive system xxxii-xxxiii, 32, 34, 36-37, 419, 438-439 Common European Framework of Reference (CEF) xxi, xxiii, xxxvi, 128, 130,

139, 181, 195, 203-204, 219 Communication strategies xiv, xx, 52, 116, 119, 122, 124, 321, 351-352 Communicative style vi, xxv, 222-227, 229-231, 233, 235, 237, 239, 241,

243, 245, 247, 249-251, 253, 339, 347, 358 Complaint strategy 144, 156 Compliment Responses vi, xxii-xxiii, 106, 165, 168, 170, 175, 177-180, 356 Computer Assisted Language Learning vii, xxxi, 388, 392, 403 Computer simulation vii, xxix-xxx, 337-338, 350, 355 Conceptual metaphor v, xviii-xix, 43, 53, 56, 60-69, 71, 73-75, 77, 79-81,

83-85 Conceptualization v, xviii, xxv, xxxvii, 42-43, 45, 47, 49-51, 53, 55, 57-

59, 117, 231, 239-240, 246, 248, 409, 418-419, 439 Context xiii, xiv-xv, xx-xxi, xxviii, xxxii-xxxiii, xxxv, 13-15,

28, 30, 32, 52, 55, 61, 67-68, 74, 78, 81, 87-88, 92-93, 95, 97, 99, 101-102, 104, 106, 111, 114, 116-117, 129-130, 138, 142-143, 145,150, 162, 180, 182, 199, 202, 206, 214, 218, 223, 227-228, 230, 236, 240, 244, 247-249, 251, 255-256, 258-259, 261, 264-270, 273-275, 281, 283-284, 287-288, 291-292, 311, 313, 318, 321, 323, 342-349, 352, 355-356, 388-400, 402-407, 410, 416, 428, 435-436, 438, 440, 444, 446, 448

Contextual parameters 144, 161 Contrastive Linguistics xxiii, 182, 184, 190, 193, 194, 283, 285, 299, 445 Controlled Processing xxxii, 409, 411, 414-417, 420, 422 Corpus Linguistics xviii, xxvii, 60, 64, 66, 284, 296, 299, 445-446 Correspondence vii, xxix, xxxviii-xxxix, xlii, 42, 53-54, 65, 69, 130,

131, 166, 283, 288, 294, 296, 321, 324-325, 329, 330-335, 435, 441

Critical Discourse Analysis xviii, 60, 64, 82, 85-86, 447 CDA 64-66 Critical pedagogy 204-206, 219, 447 Cross-cultural xvii-xviii, xxix, xxxvi, xli, 2, 29, 35, 42, 51, 104-105,

108, 110, 126, 142, 144-147, 152, 163, 177, 179, 199, 202, 206, 208-210, 212-213, 217-218, 220, 227, 249, 253-254, 285, 296, 324, 331, 357-361, 364, 425, 450

Cross-cultural communication 163, 179, 199, 208, 360 Cross-cultural misunderstanding 142 Cultural interference 144, 162 Cultural metarepresentation 95-98, 100-102

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning 453

Cultural values xviii, 15-17, 25, 60, 62, 65, 145, 156, 162, 217, 220, 223, 241, 244, 339, 348, 350, 363-365

Culture xi, xiv, xx-xxiii, xxv-xxvi, xxviii, xxxi, 1-3, 15-17, 19, 20, 23, 29-31, 43, 49, 55, 57-58, 61, 66-67, 70-72, 76-77, 79, 85, 87-88, 97, 107, 109, 117, 136, 138, 152, 156, 160-164, 176, 179, 180, 196, 199, 200-207, 211-212, 215-216, 220-222, 226-228, 244-245, 248, 251-253, 256, 258, 260-263, 266, 272, 275-276, 305-360, 364, 376, 381, 383, 389, 391, 442

Disagreement xxvi, 186, 236, 242-243, 255-277, 325, 328 Disapproval 146, 148, 156, 237 Disciplinary culture 306-318 Discourse community xxviii, 282, 306-319 Discourse Completion Task 150 DCT 150, 160, 167, 168 Downgraders 148 Dual-process theories 408-424 EFL 445 Emotions xvii, 2, 5-39, 57, 61, 80, 348 , 434, Epistemic 139, 182-195, 206-209, 243, 318, 370 ESL xxxiv, xxxvii, 104, 162, 196, 252, 281, 285, 298,

321-358, 448 ESP xli, 321-336, 445 Evasiveness 226-228, 235, 244, 248 Expectations xviii, xix, xxiv-xxv, xxxi, 29, 52, 91, 98, 101, 132,

238-241, 247-249 Face-threatening act (FTA) 186, 323, 324 Facework (face) 229, 253 Fluctuation 194, 271-276 Fluency xxxiii, 51, 53, 113, 120, 123, 409, 414, 419-424 Foreign language xii, xxi, xxiii, xxiv, xxxvi, xxxix, xl, 1-2, 16, 23, 27,

58, 107, 111-126, 128, 137, 141, 149, 161, 164, 166-180, 181, 198, 199-220, 253, 333, 334, 360, 361, 390, 425, 447

Frames xxv, xxx, 92, 206, 223, 230, 238-239, 245, 248-249, 313, 319, 369, 440

French xxi, xxvi, 111-127, 149, 150, 259-277, 340 Genre xxvii, xxix-xxx, xxxv, xli, 43, 56, 195, 225-226, 281-

304, 317, 320-336, 357, 361, 363, 366 Globalisation xxi, 142, 219, 281, 358 Graphic adventure 350-355 Heart 225, 412 Hindsight xxvi, 270-275 Homeostasy 260, 274 Humour xi, xxxi, 364, 366-385 Ideology xviii, 60-71, 81-86, 228, 241, 248, 250

Index 454

Idiom 50, 184, 188, 191-192, 335, 432 IL complaints xxii, 142-160 Illocutionary Force Indicating Device (IFID) 117-118, 145 Immigrants xxvi, 60-62, 69-80, 84, 142-143, 163, 258 Immigration xviii-xix, 60-84 Implicature 97, 100, 102, 393 Indirectness vi, 158, 178, 226, 228, 229, 357 Inertia vi, ix, xxvi, 264, 266-268, 270-272, 275 Information Processing Theory 410 Insults 73, 146, 332 Interaction x, xv, xvii, xx-xi, xxv-xxvi, xxxii, xxxiv, 1-3, 6-10,

14, 21, 23-26, 28, 36, 38, 88-89, 93-97, 101, 103, 115-116, 119-124, 126, 137, 141, 151, 179, 200, 203-204, 222-224, 227, 229, 238, 241, 248-249, 255-257, 260-261, 264-268, 270-274, 317, 325, 339, 340-343, 346-349, 351-352, 354, 358, 389, 392, 397-405, 415, 428, 434, 436-438, 441, 445, 449

Intercultural x, xvi-xx, xxii, xxiv-xxi, xxix-xxxii, xxxv, xli, 2-3, 15, 25, 27, 29-31, 35, 37-38, 60-62, 73, 81, 141-143, 161, 175, 198-199, 202-203, 205-219, 222, 227-228, 244, 255-259, 262, 264, 266-270, 272-276, 336, 338-359, 362-363, 365, 384, 388, 390-391, 404, 450

Intercultural awareness xxiv, 198, 209-216, 222, 351, 363, 384 Intercultural communication x, xvi, xviii-xix, xxii, xxv, xxix-xxx, 2, 29-31, 37,

141, 143, 206, 208, 219, 256, 270, 275, 338-356, 450 Intercultural pragmatic competence xxiv-xxv, 199, 202, 205-6, 209, 216, 218 Interlanguage xxi-xxii, 87, 105, 115-116, 122-124, 127, 141, 143,

145, 162-165, 450 Japanese vi, xxv-xxvii, 107-108, 145, 149, 165, 180, 221-236,

241-254, 258-274, 333-336, 356, 360, 448 Japanese language 221-229, 245-253 Japanese people xxv, 221-222, 226, 228, 246 L2 Speech Acquisition 421-423 L2 speech production xxxii-xxxiii, 409-410, 417, 420-426, 446 Language xxiv, xxxvi, 34, 50, 58, 82-85, 104, 124, 126, 202,

208, 227, 249, 356, 448 Language for business 338 Language Learning xvii, xxiv, xxxi, xxxix, 3, 22-23, 31, 50, 52-53, 57,

214, 246, 388, 391, 404, 412, 418, 438 Language teaching xxxii, xxxiv, 26, 50, 141, 166, 170, 202, 205, 209,

228, 285, 388, 390-492, 403-404, 442 Letters xxix, 189, 322-331, 371, 397 Lexicalization xxxiii, 409, 413, 420, Limited capacity working memory 423 Linguistic competence xxiv, 53, 120, 122, 128-131, 144, 211, 222 Linguistic pragmatics 203, 205-206, 208, 216-217, 338-339


Loop 267, 270 Membrane Systems xxxii, 389, 394, 398 Memory-Based System xxxii, 413-416, 419, 421, 423 Metaphors for lust 50 Metarepresentation 91, 94-103 Metonymy 49-53, 433-440 Miscommunication xxii, 143-146, 324, 345, 348, 391 Misunderstanding xix-xxii, xxvi, 2, 25-30, 54, 88, 92-104, 128, 142-

143, 255 Mitigation 71, 147-148, 229, 348 Modality xxiii, 69, 148, 153, 181-183, 194, 319 Morality 241, 245, 248-249 Moves xiv-xv, xix, 156, 305-317 Multilingual societies xxi, 141 Naïve optimism 93-94 Normative behaviour 245 Norms xxii, 15-16, 24-21, 90, 93, 142, 203, 217, 224, 228,

231, 244-246, 272, 294, 301-302, 316, 345, 347 Optimal convergence 143, 160 Optimal relevance 95 Per group 152, 158 Per situation 143, 150-55 Phatic utterances xix-xx, 88-107 Politeness xiv-xv, xxii, xxix, 90, 95-97- 99, 100-102, 130, 138,

141-143, 147, 153, 156-157, 160-161, 177, 181, 186, 198, 229-230, 257, 259-260, 272-273, 321-326, 328-331, 349-350, 356.

Political communication xxviii, 305-308, 311, 314-317 Power (dominance) xiv, xix, xxii, 1, 45, 63, 90, 96, 101, 119, 120, 137,

143, 150, 152, 156, 167, 170-173, 185, 200, 206, 229, 272, 324, 342-344, 346, 348-349, 352

Pragmalinguistic non-target-like performances 143 Pragmatic competence xx-xxv, 110-113, 122-123, 128, 141-144, 160, 166,

176-177, 182-183, 186, 199, 202-203, 205-207, 209-211, 216-218, 385, 390-391, 403

Pragmatic failure xix, xxi, 87-89, 92-93, 97-99, 103, 130, 136, 198, 217, 247

Pragmatic functions 119 Pragmatic transfer xxiv, 26, 144, 154, 178, 391 Promise xxi, 66, 117, 123, 129-138, 186, 310-311 Redundancy 260, 265-267, 269 Relevance xix, xx, 12, 65, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 101-104, 113-

114, 162, 211, 223, 239, 255-256, 305-309, 314-317 Relevance Theory 88, 255

Index 456

Representation xxxi, 14-19, 24-25, 27-31, 61-62, 65, 68, 73-74, 76, 80-81, 102, 113-115, 120-122, 222, 225-226, 230, 415-416, 420

Reprimands 146 Requests xiv, 88, 136, 142, 156-157, 178, 185-190 Research article introductions xxviii, 306-307, 311, 315 Rhetoric 306, 315 Rule-Based System xxxii-xxxiii, 408, 412-414, 416, 419, 421-423 Schemata xiv, 182, 255, 257, 262-265, 269-270, 272-273, 275,

318, 430 Second language acquisition (SLA) xviii, xxiii, 141, 162, 165, 176, 418, 428 Self xxxi, 274, 368, 373, 375, 380, 382, 384 Semantics of Argumentative Probabilities 114, 121 Skills xiii, xviii, 3, 12-13, 18, 23, 25, 28, 30, 51, 54, 56,

181, 194, 199, 202-209, 211-212, 214-217, 272, 347, 355, 391, 410, 418, 436

Social anthropology 338-339, 355 Social cognition xvii, 2-3, 6-7, 9, 11-15, 17-19, 21-24, 26-27, 30-31,

246 Social distance (SD) 90, 101, 115, 119-120, 143, 150, 156, 324-325 Social indexing 322-323 Social sciences xxviii, 115, 290, 295-296, 306, 311 Sociocultural xii-xv, xviii, xxxi, xxxiv, 80, 87-88, 91, 112, 145,

176, 206, 220, 241, 256, 257, 262, 266-268, 270-271, 273, 323, 365, 382, 390

Speech act (SA) xiii-xvi, xx-xxiv, 88, 91, 112-113, 115-116, 128-131, 136-138, 142-148, 160, 165-166, 170, 176-178, 182, 186-187, 198, 205, 255, 322, 390-391, 394, 396

Speech act theory xx, 322, 396 Stereotype xxv, 20, 62, 70, 81, 115, 121, 161, 210, 213, 221-

222, 226-228, 250, 259, 262-263 Stereotyping xxii, xxvi, 142-144, 203, 246, 345, 412 Strategic competence xii-xiv, xx, 51-53, 57-58, 112, 116, 123 Strategy xx, 24-25, 51, 53-55, 87, 89, 92-94, 97-98, 100-101,

104, 117-120, 138, 144, 151-152, 154, 156-157, 159-160, 166-171, 173, 175-176, 186, 229, 312-314, 322, 330, 338, 352, 356, 420

Syntacticalization xxxiii, 409, 413, 420 Systemic xxvi, 244, 256, 260-261, 265, 270-274, 363-364, 418 Teacher training xxiv, 198, 207, 216, 295 Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) 129 Theatre 135, 276 Translation Studies 194 Universality xiv, 324 Upgraders 148 Vagueness xxv, 222, 227-228, 244


Wisdom 182, 199, 201-202, 439 Working memory capacity xxxii-xxxiii, 408-411, 414-418, 421-423

Pragmatics Applied to Language Teaching and Learning

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