Advancing the Research Agenda of Interlanguage Pragmatics: The Role of Learner Corpora
This chapter provides a critical assessment of the study of pragmatics within Second Language Acquisition research and argues for a broadening of the scope of inquiry in Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP). Traditionally, ILP has been heavily influenced by and
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Pragmatics in Second Language Acquisition Research: A Critical Assessment Interlanguage Pragmatics and Its Scope of Inquiry
Broadly defined, pragmatics as a discipline can be conceived of as “the study of language from the point of view of the users, especially of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on the other participants in an act of communication” (Crystal 2003: 364). Leech (1983: 10f.) distinguishes between two components of general pragmatics. First, he defines socio-pragmatics as “the sociological interface of pragmatics” that focuses on the conditions of language use which derive from the social situation, i.e. the social setting of language use, including variables such as cultural context, social status or social distance of speakers. Second, pragmalinguistics is “the more linguistic end of pragmatics”, considering the particular linguistic resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions, i.e. the range of structural resources from which speakers can choose when using language in a specific communicative situation, e.g. speech act verbs, imperatives, politeness markers, pragmatic markers etc. The study of pragmatics as a field of inquiry within Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research is usually referred to as Interlanguage Pragmatics (ILP). ILP is commonly defined as “the study of nonnative speakers’ comprehension, production, and acquisition of linguistic action in L2” (Kasper 2010: 141). While this suggests a relatively broad range of research topics as in pragmatics in general, ILP to date
M. Callies (*) English-Speaking Cultures, University of Bremen, FB 10, Bibliothekstr.1, GW2, Bremen 28359, Germany e-mail: [email protected] J. Romero-Trillo (ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013: New Domains and Methodologies, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 1, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_2, © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013
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has operated on a fairly narrow understanding of what constitutes linguistic action in L2. One of the main reasons for this is that traditionally, ILP has been heavily influenced by and largely modeled on cross-cultural pragmatics, adopting its research topics, theories and methodologies (Kasper 2010: 141). Thus, it has predominantly been concerned with politeness phenomena by investigating foreign/ second language (L2) learners’ comprehension and production of a variety of speech act types such as requests, apologies, refusals, complaints, compliments and compliment responses, and the use of internal and external modification to these speech acts. The findings of these investigations have subsequently been compared with native speaker performance. In their review of research methods in ILP, Kasper and Dahl (1991) define the field “in a narrow sense, referring to nonnative speakers’ (NNSs’) comprehension and production of speech acts, and how their L2-related speech act knowled
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