out of water.
1.3 Conclusion
In this introductory chapter, we have outlined some central ideas of semantics. Our treatment is by no means comprehensive, as there are many more theories and approaches to semantics that we might have covered. Our purpose here has been to provide the novice reader with a general understanding of the kind of issues that semantics deals with; for example, the question of “how do words convey meaning?” or the extensional and intensional approaches to semantics. Moreover, we considered how these issues are related to some more specific subjects, such as the idea of context, modularity, and grammaticalization, that can help us define pragmatics. As we have seen, some of the basic definitions of pragmatics assume knowledge of such concepts as “truth function” and thus would be almost impossible to understand without the information provided in this chapter. With the next chapter, on the contrary, we turn to more concrete issues that directly concern the interplay between language teaching and pragmatics.
Notes
1 1. Of course, many other aspects of the situation have to be just right for the transaction to go off successfully: first, and obviously, the word “donut” appears in the middle of a sentence, and the words and the syntax of the sentence will be a significant part of overall the exchange. Furthermore, the man and the employee must speak the same language, the shop must not be out of merchandise, the man and the employee must share a desire for the transaction to be successful, for reasons that are probably very different, etc. As we said, we are ignoring all these aspects for the time being. They will be considered in other chapters of the book.
2 2. Usually, a person, but animals can produce signs as well: the field of zoo-semiotics deals precisely with signs produced by animals and insects: the bee dance is a famous example of communication by insects.
3 3. Other terms used are also “entailment” and “implication.”
4 4. Note that the verb is an a bare infinitive form, because its tense and mood are not part of the proposition. We will examine this in more detail in Chapter 7.
5 5. From a different, nonlinguistic, perspective one could describe the situation, for example, as a commercial transaction or as a social event governed by practices of social engagement. The utterance or speech act then becomes more or less irrelevant. These perspectives are not antagonistic to the linguistic one. They merely reflect different interests or areas of research. From a linguistic perspective, the context is what comes “with the text” (con-text) as should be obvious even just from the etymology of the term.
6 6. The T/V pronouns stand for Latin tu and vos as the general term for all pronouns that show the opposition between singular/plural second person and familiarity/lack thereof. See Brown and Gilman (1960) and Section 7.2.3 for further discussion.
2 The Language Teaching and Pragmatics Interface
Let’s start with an example. Imagine you are an English speaker who is learning Japanese. You will be introduced fairly quickly to the idea of honorific language. This includes the use of specific titles and parts of speech such as pronouns that vary systematically depending on the relationship between the interlocutors and particularly differences in social rank and social distance, such as the T/V pronouns we saw in the previous chapter. Of course, English has words that do similar work such as sir or ma’am, but the extent of the grammatical differences is far more intricate in the Japanese system. In this case, although the underlying “job of work” from a perspective of pragmatics is the same, that is, to mark the social distance between interlocutors, the way in which it is realized by the two languages is quite different. Cross-cultural or inter-cultural1 pragmatics addresses these differences, and L2 pragmatics focuses on how they are learned in second-language contexts.
The concept of distance between speakers is both literal and metaphorical in the sense that it can be both physical and social. Within speech communities, because this distance has to be regularly covered successfully, we have developed linguistic conventions that signal our intentions effectively. As L2 learners, we must relearn these conventions. This sounds fairly straightforward, but it is perhaps not quite as easy to bridge these differences as it might seem.
Returning to our Japanese example, Minegishi Cook (2001) reports a study in which 120 American learners of Japanese (JFL) were asked to judge three job applicants for the role of an English-Japanese bilingual clerk in a clothing store. The students were explicitly told that a critical requirement was the ability to speak polite Japanese, that is, to use honorific language as opposed to plain forms. Of the three applicants, Applicant A, who was most qualified in all other respects, used the most pragmatically inappropriate language by using plain language forms and additional negative pragmatic features. Despite this, the JFL students overwhelmingly chose Applicant A (97 out of 120) and appeared to be unaware of the negative impact of the applicant’s language choices. The Japanese instructors were “unanimously surprised” by their students’ choice as “it was obvious that Applicant A’s speech style was definitely impolite for applying for a job” (p. 96), and the students had been repeatedly exposed to the correct pragmatic forms as part of their instruction.
So why were these crucial pragmatic features not salient to the learners? One possibility is that the overall language proficiency of the L2 learners was such that they were focused solely on the grammatical presentation of the referential information, and they were unable to process additional information (see, e.g., Ishida, 2007). Another possibility is that they perceived the interaction through their “L1 lens” in which other aspects of the applicant’s presentation such as their perceived enthusiasm would be more salient from a US perspective than the grammatical markers. Yet another possibility is that despite the instructors’ best efforts, this kind of linguistic knowledge is undervalued in typical classroom curricula and becomes part of the “secret rules” of an L2 (Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003).The investigation of these questions regarding the development of L2 pragmatic skills falls under the area of Interlanguage Pragmatics. Just as the study of interlanguage tells us about the development of learners’ grammatical systems, interlanguage pragmatics focuses on the developmental patterns found in all aspects of the acquisition of pragmatics by L2 learners. In the remainder of this chapter, we introduce some of the questions that have been at the heart of the study of interlanguage pragmatics and that we will return to throughout the book.
2.1 Are There Universals in Pragmatics That Students Can Bring to Their L2?
The answer is clearly yes in the sense that certain speech acts (apologizing, suggesting, requesting, etc.) are used universally across speech communities (see Section 5.1.4). However, they are often different in both form (pragmalinguistics) and situational use (sociopragmatics) across cultures. Pragmalinguistic knowledge refers to the linguistic resources needed to express the pragmatic message, that is, how something is grammatically encoded. For instance, a request in English may be phrased as an imperative, for example, Give me that pen, or by using a modal, for example, Could you pass me that pen? Choices made by L1 speakers will depend on the particular context and relationship between interlocutors. One is more likely to use a bare imperative with an intimate, child, or spouse for example; and more likely to use the modal with a stranger or with someone of a perceived higher status. A second-language learner may not possess the pragmalinguistic resources to make all the correct distinctions. In a study of Americans learning German, for example, Wildner-Bassett (1994) found that learners overgeneralized the use of very specific lexical fillers in conversations (und so ‘and so’ and und so weiter ‘and so on’) as they were most familiar with and most comfortable with these forms. We will consider pragmatic markers in more detail in Section
