Contrastive Pragmatics

302 Pages·1988·24.323 MB·English

by  Wieslaw Oleksy (ed.)

CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS
Pragmatics & Beyond
New Series
Editors:
Jacob L. Mey
(Odense University)
Herman Parret
(Belgian National Science Foundation, Universities of Louvain and Antwerp)
Jef Verschueren
(Belgian National Science Foundation, University of Antwerp
Editorial Address:
Linguistics (GER)
University of Antwerp (UIA)
Universiteitsplein 1
B-2610 Wilrijk
Belgium
Editorial Board:
Norbert Dittmar (Free University of Berlin)
Bruce Fraser (Boston University)
John Heritage (University of California at Los Angeles)
David Holdcroft (University of Leeds)
Catherine Kerbrat-Orecchioni (University of Lyon 2)
Beatriz Lavandera (University of Buenos Aires)
Marina Sbisà (University of Trieste)
Emanuel A. Schegloff (University of California at Los Angeles)
Paul O. Takahara (Kobe University)
Sandra Thompson (University of California at Santa Barbara)
Daniel Vanderveken (University of Quebec at Trois-Rivières)
Teun A. van Dijk (University of Amsterdam)
3
Wieslaw Oleksy (ed.)
Contrastive Pragmatics
CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATICS
edited by
Wieslaw Oleksy
University of Lódz
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1989
TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
8
American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Contrastive pragmatics / edited by Wieslaw Oleksy.
p. cm. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, issn 0922-842X ; v. 3)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1.  Pragmatics. 2. Interlanguage (Language learning). 3. Second language acquisition.
I. Oleksy, Wieslaw. II. Series.
P99.4.P72 C65 1989
401/.41--19 88007613
isbn 978 90 272 5009 4 (eur) / 978 1 55619 050 6 (us) (Hb; alk. paper)
© 1989 – John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
List of contributors xiii
Part I: PRAGMATICS IN CROSS-LANGUAGE STUDIES
The ethnography of English compliment and compliment responses:
A contrastive sketch 3
R. Herbert
On representatives as a class of illocutionary acts 37
R. Kalisz
Towards a typology of contrastive studies 55
T.P. Krzeszowski
Praising and complimenting 73
B. Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk
Interactive ethnolinguistics 101
M.-L. Liebe-Harkort
The impact of the child's world on pairing form and function in Anti­
guan Creole and English 113
S. Shepherd
Part II: PRAGMATICS IN INTERLANGUAGE AND SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION STUDIES
Collocational blends of advanced second language learners: a pre­
liminary analysis 131
H. Dechert and P. Lennon
vi CONTENTS
On describing and analyzing foreign language classroom discourse 169
W. Hüllen and W. Lörscher
Interactive procedures in interlanguage discourse 189
G. Kasper
"Well don't blame me" On the interpretation of pragmatic errors 231
Ph. Riley
Coexisting discourse worlds and the study of pragmatic aspects of
learner's interlanguage 251
M. Wildner-Bassett
Index of terms and authors 277
Acknowledgments
I owe a special word of thanks and appreciation to Hubert Cuyckens, Jef
Verschueren and Kamiel Hammans who have helped me to prepare the
manuscript. I would like to thank the contributors and the John Benjamins
Publishing Company for their patience and cooperation.

Preface
Recent years have seen among linguists of all sorts, a steadily growing
interest in the pragmatic aspects of a broad spectrum of linguistic
phenomena.
In particular a tendency to focus attention on more or less general man­
ifestations of pragmatic phenomena has become noticeable in work in con­
trastive linguistics and second language acquisition.
Although some contrastivists have expressed occasional doubts about
whether pragmatic considerations could provide a new impetus to the tradi­
tionally oriented field of syntactic and semantic contrastive studies, others
have resorted to a very broad (and perhaps vague) understanding of the term
"pragmatic" and tended to append this qualification to any aspect of the
contrastive material which could not be directly accounted for in a syntac­
tic, semantic or phonological analysis,
It would be premature and perhaps unnecessary to attempt to cir­
cumscribe the recent line of linguistic inquiry that has been most often refer­
red to as contrastive pragmatics (cf. Littlewood 1983; Fillmore 1984; Oleksy
1984). Suffice it to say that it was not long ago that many respectable linguists
would think twice before they would embrace anything contrastive. The situ­
ation has changed, however, as more and more specialists in the field of lin­
guistics have abandoned the treatment of pragmatics as a waste-basket of
semantics and undertook the laborious task of explaining the phenomena
involved in the pragmatic aspects of communication.
In the first place, linguistic communication takes place among human
beings. Although there is nothing more trivial that could be observed,
unfortunately this needs to be observed because for decades some of the
best minds in the field have been quite unwilling to incorporate this simple
truth into their theoretical frameworks.
Secondly, and in connection with what has been said above, it is impos­
sible to approach questions of linguistic communication adequately without
paying attention to the socio-cultural, institutional and attitudinal restric-
X PREFACE
tions that verbal interaction imposes upon the language users.
There is, then, a natural need to compare (the technical term is to
contrast) the results of the investigations arrived at on the basis of linguistic
material derived from one group of speakers or individual language/cul­
tures across the various languages and cultures spoken around the world.
The generalizations arrived at by means of abstract theoretical
frameworks as well as the ones worked out on the basis of empirical evi­
dence have to be confronted with the richness of cross-linguistic and cross-
cultural data to allow a degree of generality that could lead to discovering
universal patterns and categories. This alone constitutes a raison d'être for
contrastive pragmatics.
Instead of attempting a definition of what contrastive pragmatics is
(which is not an easy task in view of the fact that linguistic pragmatics is a
rapidly growing and expanding field), the reader is invited to find out for
him/herself about contrastive pragmatics on the basis of the papers included
in this volume.
The papers in this volume deal with a variety of pragmatic issues
involved in cross-language and interlanguage studies as well as second lan­
guage acquisition and cross-cultural studies.
The volume is arranged in two parts.
Part One contains papers dealing with general issues stemming from
contrastive work such as, e.g. the question of tertium comparationis and its
place in the development of contrastive studies (Krzeszowski) as well as the
applicability of generalizations proposed by speech act theorists in contrast­
ing concrete languages (Kalisz) and cultures (Liebe-Harkort).
Liebe-Harkort shows how the use of language is reflected in the cul­
ture of which it is a part and illustrates ways in which cross-cultural confu­
sion results from exchanges between partners who do not share a common
native language and culture.
Herbert presents empirical data concerning the structure and function
of the compliment speech event (compliment + compliment response) in
American and South African English and demonstrates how relative fre­
quencies of the distinguished types are linked to differences in cultural
value profiles.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk discusses similarities and differences
between the act of praising and complimenting in Polish with some refer­
ence to British English and American English data. The inclusion of these
two papers, whose topics partly overlap, makes it possible to compare the