Abstract
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 largely modeled on cross-cultural pragmatics, adopting its theories, research topics and methodology. This, however, has led to a comparatively narrow research focus and sociopragmatic bias in which the dominant area of investigation has been the speech act. The present chapter argues that pragmatic knowledge in a foreign/second language (L2) clearly includes more than the sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic abilities for understanding and performing speech acts and proposes a more encompassing definition of L2 pragmatic knowledge. In doing so, the study highlights the crucial role of learner corpora in the expansion of the narrow research agenda of ILP. Learner corpora – systematic collections of authentic, continuous and contextualized language use (spoken or written) by L2 learners stored in electronic format – can help overcome several problems and limitations posed by the dominance of data elicitation techniques in ILP to date. More recently, spoken learner corpora have been used to study features of what has been called the grammar of conversation. This chapter makes a contribution to this line of research and focuses on the pragmalinguistic component of L2 pragmatic knowledge by examining information organization in discourse and the use of lexico-grammatical means of information highlighting to convey intensification and contrast. It reports on two case studies that investigate emphatic do and demonstrative clefts in the spoken production of French and German learners of English. The results reveal differences between native speakers and learners, but also between the two learner groups that are explained in terms of cross-linguistic influence and language proficiency. The findings also show significant individual differences across the two learner corpora, which has important implications for learner corpus analysis and compilation.
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Notes
- 1.
Bardovi-Harlig refers to the Handbooks of Pragmatics series published with DeGruyter Mouton. In the general preface to the series, the editors state that all the handbooks in the series share the same wide understanding of pragmatics as the scientific study of all aspects of linguistic behaviour.
- 2.
The two terms are frequently used interchangeably in the literature.
- 3.
LoCastro (2011: 331) sees this as another reason for the dominance of speech act research in ILP.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
See e.g. the titles of the recent/upcoming publications by Felder et al. (2011) and Aijmer and Rühlemann (forthcoming).
- 7.
See e.g. the papers in Romero-Trillo (2008) and the studies on the list of publications based on the LINDSEI provided by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics in Louvain-al-Neuve, Belgium, at http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl-lindsei-biblio.html.
- 8.
Deppermann (2011) provides a recent overview of the role and relevance of pragmatics for grammar, in particular as to the structuring and packaging of information and the framing of discursive action by means of grammatical constructions such as clefts.
- 9.
To retrieve instances of emphatic do I ran a search for the forms do, does and did followed by an infinitive, excluding instances of grammatically conditioned inversion after negatives as in Not only did they…, Even slower did …, and elliptical sentence forms, e.g. Yes we do or They never did so. For demonstrative clefts the search involved all instances of that and this followed by a form of be (‘s, is, was) and a wh-word (what, when, why, where, how).
- 10.
In the LOCNEC and the LINDSEI, turns marked with <A> </A> indicate the interviewers’ turns, while turns marked with <B> </B> mark the interviewees’ turns. The transcription guidelines for the LINDSEI can be retrieved from the following webpage: http://www.uclouvain.be/en-307849.html. Unfortunately, some of the transcription conventions used for the LOCNEC have not been updated to follow those of the LINDSEI. For example, overlapping speech in the LOCNEC is still indicated by means of square brackets instead of the explicit tag <overlap />.
- 11.
Demonstrative clefts are given in bold print.
- 12.
The discourse segment(s) that the demonstrative that refers to are underlined.
- 13.
One may add here that another feature that adds to their formulaicity is that in contrast to other types of clefts, demonstrative clefts are not reversible (Biber et al. 1999: 961).
- 14.
This function is in line with Weinert’s (1995) analysis of demonstrative clefts introduced by this as forward-pointing and attention marking devices. It is usually demonstrative clefts with cataphoric deixis that can be said to have a projecting function. In general, the development of cleft constructions in spoken English is strongly related to their discourse-pragmatic functions (see e.g. Callies 2012a for a study of the pragmaticalization of wh-clefts). For example, wh-clefts have been analysed as projector constructions that foreshadow upcoming discourse (e.g. Hopper and Thompson 2008) in which the wh-clause opens a projection span that draws the recipient’s attention to the following highlighted constituent.
- 15.
It is not possible to go into detail here, but see Callies, Zaytseva & Present-Thomas (2013) for further discussion as to the operationalization and assessment of (advanced) proficiency in LCR.
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Callies, M. (2013). Advancing the Research Agenda of Interlanguage Pragmatics: The Role of Learner Corpora. In: Romero-Trillo, J. (eds) Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013. Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6250-3_2
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