Summary: Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests And Apologies

Read the summary and the most important questions on Cross-cultural Pragmatics: Requests and apologies

• 1 Introduction

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• Why were requests and apologies investigated?

  They both constitute face-threatening acts, but affect the participants' face wants in markedly different ways.

• What has theoretical work on requests shown?

  1. the complexity of the relationship between form, meaning, and pragmatic prerequisites involved
  2. the high social stakes involved for both interlocutors in choice of linguistic option
     

• What do requests call for?

  mitigation, compensating for their impositive effect on the hearer.

• What do apologies call for?

  They tend to be aggravated, as they themselves count as remedial work and thus are inherently hearer-supportive.

• What is the general goal of the CCSARP investigation?

  To establish patterns of requests and apology realizations under different social constraints across a number of languages and cultures, including both native and nonnative varieties.

• What are the goals of the project?

  1. to investigate the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of given speech acts across different languages
  2. to investigate the effect of social variables on the realization patterns of given speech acts within specific speech communities
  3. to investigate the similarities and differences in the realization patterns of given speech acts between native and nonnative speakers of a given language
     

• 2 Method

• 2.1 Instrument: the discourse-completion test (DCT)

• What is one major concern of sociolinguistic research?

  The manner in which data are to be collected. Ideally, all data should come from natural conditions.

• What is the Observer's Paradox?

  Our goal is then to observe the way that people use language when they are not being observed.

• Which theoretical advantages do elicited data have?

  • speakers' sociolinguistic adaptations to very specific situations
  • more stereotyped responses
  • hypothesis-testing of interlanguage phenomena needs identifiable, appropriate contexts that allow us to focus on specific areas of language use
    

• What is a discourse-completion test (DCT)?

  It was originally developed for comparing the speech act realization of native and nonnative Hebrew speakers. The test consists of scripted dialogues that represent socially differentiated situations. Each dialogue is preceded by a short description of the situation, specifying the setting, and the social distance between the participants and their status relative to each other, followed by an incomplete dialogue. Respondents were asked to complete the dialogue, thereby providing the speech act aimed at.